The UCAS

The United Canadian and American States. What was left of the United States merged with what was left of Canada on Union Day in 2045, and it holds the northeast, the Great Lakes and a good deal of what used to be Canada. It has a president, a congress, a currency, a census and a functioning tax authority.

It is also the reason we're like this. In 2050 the UCAS legislated California loose rather than pay to hold it, which set off the month that took San Diego, San Francisco and the north, and which ended seven years later with this city being disowned in turn.

Nobody up there thinks about that any more. It was a line item.

The crew is never going. What matters about the Union is not the place, it's the paper.

Canon reference: United Canadian and American States on the Sixth World Wiki, for the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

What the crew knows

• A UCAS SIN is the good one. It is the most widely accepted identity on the continent, the one every border and every corporate lobby is built to read, and therefore the most expensive thing on the fake market by a wide margin. A good UCAS SIN costs more than a vehicle. A bad one is worse than nothing, because it fails against a real database rather than a shrug.
• UCAS paper carries where ours doesn't. Californian instruments are permanent and unmaintainable; UCAS instruments are current, renewable and checkable, which is exactly why they're worth forging and exactly why forging them is hard.
• Most of the corporations answer there, on paper. The Corporate Court sits above all of them, but the charters, the registered offices and the counterparties are largely UCAS filings. When a contract in this city has a jurisdiction clause, that clause usually names somewhere two thousand miles from here.
• It is a real country and that is the strange part. Elections happen, the post arrives, the census counts people. Anybody who has only lived here finds the idea of a government that answers correspondence faintly implausible.
• Seattle is a UCAS enclave inside Salish-Shidhe territory, which is the arrangement everybody cites when they explain the Treaty of Denver. It has a governor and a police contract, both of which sound like science fiction from here.

Getting in

You don't, practically. Two thousand miles, several borders, and every leg of it wants a name on a manifest — which is the whole problem for people who don't have one.

If something has to move between here and there, it moves as freight through the port and somebody else's paperwork, or it doesn't move.