The CAS

The Confederation of American States. Thirteen states from Virginia down through Texas left the UCAS on 10 November 2048, three years after Union Day, and nobody fired a shot over it. The convention that arranged it had been sitting in Atlanta since 2046, so by the time there was a vote the arguing was finished. The treaty afterwards cut Missouri and Virginia in half and split Denver down the middle, which is still how Denver works.

It is a federal republic that does not much believe in the federal half. Authority sits with the states. The government in Atlanta collects, files, negotiates with the corporations on everyone's behalf and stays out of Houston's business, and the practical result is thirteen legislatures, thirteen revenue authorities and thirteen registries of persons, none of which answers another one in under a week.

That last count is the whole of what the CAS means in Los Angeles. A UCAS SIN is one database and one standard, and it costs what a vehicle costs for exactly that reason. A CAS SIN gets checked against whichever of thirteen registries issued it, each with its own standards and none in a hurry, and thirteen slow registries that don't talk to each other is what the people who sell identities here build their trade on.

The south of it has been a shooting border since 2049, when Mexico came over the Rio Grande and took San Antonio and half of Austin. Texas left the Confederation over the refusal to send troops after them, spent a year failing to retake its own cities alone, and came home. Nothing has moved since. There are people in this city who grew up on the wrong side of that line and can tell you which street it runs down.

The secession took a third of the UCAS with it, and two years later the Union legislated California loose as well.

What the crew knows#

• A CAS SIN is issued by a state and not by the CAS. Georgia paper gets checked against Georgia, in Atlanta, by a clerk with a queue in front of them. That makes it cheaper than UCAS paper by a wide margin, and it makes it fail differently: not a red light at the reader, but a confirmation request that comes back in four days. Whether that is any help to you depends on whether you intended to still be standing there on Thursday.
• It reads at the Pueblo counter. Pueblo and the CAS trade, have treaties, and move a great deal of freight between them, so the officer at Ontario has seen a Texas card before and has a form for it. Showing up with one is not the same as showing up with nothing, and it is the closest thing to a friendly document anybody without a Pueblo shareholding is going to hold.
• Lone Star is a CAS company, registered and taxed in Texas. Nothing about what they did here in 2057 has ever been a matter for a CAS court, because nothing they did here happened there.
• Texas is where the launches are. Ares runs its space business out of Houston and puts things into orbit off the Florida coast, and a surprising amount of what moves through the port is on its way to one of those two places.
• The army is the biggest on the continent and about a generation behind. Six divisions and two Marine expeditionary forces, all of it equipment the UCAS and Mexico have already replaced. Their submarines are the exception and are the best anybody has, and they matter in the Gulf rather than here.
• The government has paid a bounty for years on anybody caught animating the dead. Nobody in Los Angeles has ever met a person who collected one.
• Don't call a CAS citizen a Confederate. They are Confederationists, or CASers, or just Americans; Confederate names a different war, and they will correct you.

Getting in#

Eight hundred miles east to where Pueblo stops and Texas starts, then another six hundred to anywhere anybody lives. That makes it the nearest foreign country a person can actually reach from here, at fourteen hundred miles.

It is reachable at all because the one border in the way is a friendly one. Pueblo clears you or it doesn't, and if it does, the crossing at the far end is a formality between trading partners. The difficulty is Pueblo's border, same as it is for everything else that leaves this city.

There is no CAS office in Los Angeles, and there can't be, because there is no city government for anybody to be accredited to. The nearest consulate is in Phoenix, on Pueblo ground, and it does not discuss identity documents with people who walk in.

Canon reference: Confederation of American States