Prolog Wichita Kansas November 2037 Tuesday

            The good news was that the advance detail report said that the city and the university campus were quiet, exceptionally so considering that by contrast the rest of the Midwest was a mess. St. Louis had been under martial law for three months. Chicago had just quieted down after gangs of young hoodlums rioted four days earlier when the local pro soccer team lost the national championship to Houston. Kansas City was in the fifth week of a sanitation workers’ strike that had left it smelling like fermenting human waste. 

Yes, Wichita was peaceful. Expectant about the visit from their favorite daughter, yet peaceful. There were the usual protestors with their hastily drawn and sometimes clever signs highlighting a number of causes; their number was small and self-restrained. Radical, but not violent. At least for the moment.

            The President’s entourage deplaned and climbed into three sleek new black hydrogen-fueled limos that had come out onto the tarmac to greet them. The first car was filled completely with Secret Service agents, the second with some staff and press. President Remington and her Chief of Staff were in the third, along with Nash.

They had done this many times. The President liked to travel around the country and meet her constituents face to face. She was also a world traveler who often flew in late to conferences and diplomatic meetings on the Presidential scramjet long after her entourage had lumbered in on Air Force One. She was popular overseas in spite of the fact that the US was not. But now she was home, really home.