By the time Calum Haskell was born, the 2030s were already commonly referred to as the terrible thirties, or the dirty decade. Nobody who was living in the thirties called it that at the time. Two things happened for that span of ten years to gain its own special moniker: the decade ended and things got better.

Calum’s father, Gabe, came of age during the thirties. He was 18 years old when the first populo-nationalist president was elected. Gabe, like many working class young men of his age, had no interest in  politics, but when the president launched the first fraud war, Gabe answered the call and did his duty for god and country.

A lot changed in the course of and in response to the dirty decade. Gabe was 14 years old when he received his first government identification number. It was a nine-digit number issued by a government agency called the Social Security Administration. Back then there were only three branches of government, and the SSA was an independent agency.

Compare that to Calum, who, when Gabe brings him home from the hospital, will already have a 1,024 character alpha-numeric private account key issued by the Federal Reserve Bank and a tax liability of $10,832 on the books which establishes Calum as the newest citizen of the United States of America, with all the rights and entitlements that attend.

After Calum is home, Gabe will set up another account for his son. It will be a crypto-currency account that marks Calum’s entry into the informal economy (also known as the “criminal economy”, depending on your politics). When Gabe sends out Calum’s birthday announcement, there will be two public keys included in the announcement for gifts. The first for the official Fed account, which of course subjects gifts to partial withholding for taxes (like all incoming deposits). And the second will be for the crypto-account, which of course is not subject to withholding (or surveillance, for that matter). Gabe expects that most of his friends and informal business associates will give to the crypto-account, whereas extended family and formal co-workers will give to the Fed account.

Things certainly have come a long ways since the old days, and Gabe thanks god that his son has come into the world at a good time.

Adrian, Calum’s mother, is conflicted on how good these times are to bring a child into the world. Certainly economically it is a good time. Calum’s basic material needs are secure, including excellent health care and education well into the foreseeable future, which is a marked contrast to the outlook of a child born to a not-rich family in the thirties. If Calum had been born just a few years earlier, his early development years would have been dominated by pervasive stress and anxiety as his parents struggled to obtain healthcare for the family and a good quality education for their child.

But Adrian also feels resentment for the compromises that were made to obtain economic stability, because Adrian and Gabe live in one of the few remaining  PregoReg states.

In the early thirties, while Gabe was fighting in the Fraud Wars, Adrian was  active in the Feminist Underground,  organizing a secret network to help not-rich women in pro-life states obtain safe abortion services .  In the beginning it was about helping women to travel and pay for services in pro-choice states, but with development the SA-635 abortion drug cocktail, a safe abortion at any stage of pregnancy became cheap, easy, and private. When pro-life states banned SA-635, the Feminist Underground evolved into a sophisticated drug smuggling operation. Pro-life states responded by declaring a war on drugs, but when that proved ineffective, some states  adopted pregnancy registration (PregoReg) laws.

PregoReg laws require women to register their pregnancies with the state or face criminal prosecution. Any state official, or any medical doctor who receives state funding, who has knowledge of an unregistered pregnancy and fails to report it can be criminally prosecuted. PregoReg laws also require a death certificate for every pregnancy that fails to reach full term. Pregnancy registrations remain private until a public birth or death certificate is filed. If a certificate is not filed in a timely manner, the state opens an abortion investigation.

Adrian was sickened on the day she registered her pregnancy with Calum. It violated her deepest value as a woman and a human being to subject her body to the surveillance and control of the state and the society that it represented. But beneath her humiliation she found a burning ember of anger that, like a nuclear core, powered her will to resist and continue the fight for fundamental, physical, biological, human sovereignty.

That ember was burning bright on the day she filed Calum’s birth certificate, because she knew that propagandists would be exploiting the birth as righteousness evidence that PregoReg saves lives. But she also knew that the crypto-currency account opened for Calum by his father will be funneling funds for the Feminist Underground and helping other women assert their personal, physical, sovereign rights.