Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. … Sun Tzu, Art of War - Dennis E. Taylor

Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.

In 2036, the USA elected an over-the-top, unapologetic fundamentalist president named Andrew Handel. Yes, that Handel. During his term, he tried to ban election of non-Christians to any public post, and tried to remove the constitutional separation between church and state. He was nominated, supported, and elected based on his religious views, rather than on his political or fiscal expertise. And of course, he appointed persons of similar persuasion to every post he could manage, in some cases blatantly ignoring laws and procedures. He and his cronies rammed through far-right policies with no thought for consequences. In a number of cases, when challenged on the results, he declared that God would not allow their just cause to fail. He eventually brought the USA to its knees in an economic collapse that made the 2008 recession look like a picnic in the park.

About half of the global population was currently living in New Zealand, Madagascar, and, strangely, Florianópolis, Brazil.