There have been changes that no one would have expected, over the course of the last seven years in America. It hasn't so much been the destruction of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution as many would have foretold, in the scare movements and witch hunts of the fifties; it's been subtler than that.

The terrorists are coming - therefore it is American to carry a gun. Always.

There are those who tout the effectiveness of the threat as a way to heal a society damaged by its past, its faithlessness to the Natives, its enslavement of Africans, its denigration of women, everything it's done. America was not a society healing but a society breaking apart, when the towers fell and Washington DC vanished in a mushroom cloud no one had believed possible.

But now crime is very low. Equality and peace are at hand, and no one wants to discuss the reason for this.

Dissenters are taken away. Sometimes literally, sometimes by the government, sometimes by other citizens, but there is no room in the new America for dissent.

There are other repercussions. Curfews, wiretapping, unified record-keeping are all features of life in America. Blood testing is performed on all citizens so that there is a genetic record of their identity. Trials are obsolescent now, when your DNA will hang you or set you free. Lawyers do not matter; blood is all. Privacy is gone.

Most tellingly, the only reason no one has started microchipping the population in large numbers is because it would not defend against external threats. How do you find a blank spot in the middle of New York City, when eight million humans press close around it, and you don't know that there's a hole there?

If it weren't for the mutants, the draft would already have been restored; as it is, the fact that no one is willing to take prisoners means that there are relatively few support staff needed in the military.

There is a flattening of the income spread in America, as more money goes to taxes. The only thing that the former Democratic party would have admired Wainwright for was his willingness to tax to fund his war. He made no bones that this war would reinspire America's economy; he took the money he needed.

But the Democrats are gone. So are the Republicans.

All that's left are the people, and they want their government to give them safety. They want not another dead American, ever.

But they will accept land for bodies, if the trade is biased in the survivors' favour. America is an empire in fact as well as name now.

It's another beautiful day in the land of the free.

We encourage players to create the details of their world as they need to; the relevant facts are that America is gone far beyond anyone's worst nightmares into a totalitarian police state with safety of its citizens as its single aim, and because of that goal Wainwright and his cabinet and the rest of the new government, in their new Capitol in Denver, have the near-total support of the citizens, who are unused to bloodshed and wish never to see it again. Curfews, unjust imprisonments, vigilantes, and far more, are all features of America circa the Machines of Destiny era.