So he’d embraced the situation and started his own business, hiring on some friends as employees. Together they’d built the best network of stringers in North Texas. His boys fed him video, contacts, and news updates, and he sold what he could to the big foreign media conglomerates. In a couple more months he’d have enough saved up that he could fuck off, fly to Europe and apply for a refugee visa.

My odds are pretty good, as long as the war doesn’t end too soon.

The technical rolled to a creaky stop in front of a checkpoint that had clearly been erected within the last few days. It was just a collapsible electronic gate and two sandbag emplacements on either side of the battered highway. A street sign nearby announced that they were on the edge of Richardson, formerly a suburb of Dallas and currently a forward position of the People’s Protection Army, a local anarchist militia. Manny could see the PPA’s red/black triangle emblem stitched onto the jackets of the soldiers guarding the checkpoint.

One of the PPA men walked up to the window and started chatting with Phillip, the driver. Phil and Manny’s cousin Alejandro were both with the Citizen’s Front, a more-or-less apolitical militia from the suburbs of Austin. Both militias co-existed under the broad umbrella of the Secular Defense Forces. The SDF had been organized by the ­Canadian government, to lump all of North Texas’s palatable militant groups into a single package that could be conveniently armed.

While the first guard talked with Phillip, his partner did a circuit around the back of the truck. The man was big, bulging with muscles so sculpted and prominent they had to be vat-grown, and he moved with the twitchy un-grace of a man who’d replaced his nervous system with circuitry. His weapon was a very old, very battered AR-15 with an M243 grenade launcher below the barrel. The latter was old U.S. military gear. The former had been someone’s toy before the Revolution gave America’s half-billion civilian guns a new raison d’etre.

The man moved back to the barricades when he’d finished his lap. Reggie looked up at Manny and asked, “Was he, erm…was he ‘chromed’?”

Manny smiled. That was always one of the first questions, when any foreign journo saw a trooper with a large enough build, skin with an off-shade, or who just moved a little too fast to seem completely “right.” Anything beyond basic aesthetic and medical modifications were banned in civilized countries, like the U.K.

The real chrome, the implants that would let a man lift a tank or take a rocket to the belly, that shit was locked up tight. Few national militaries even used the stuff these days. Not after the Revolution.