The federal government disappeared overnight, no address, no warning, just silence. The websites went dark, the hotlines rang nonstop, and the states were left to their own devices.

The first reports came in fragments. Emergency alerts, leaked National Guard memos, and videos of highways clogged with traffic. They said the southern states had dried up. Crops failed, reservoirs followed, and then everything else.

I didn’t wait to see if the reports were true. I knew there wasn’t enough farmland to sustain all of us. I grabbed my rifle and joined the Guard units moving south. Illinois acted before Washington could return. The northern governors met and drew new lines on old maps. They called it the Northern Republic of America. What mattered wasn’t the name, but the land. There wasn’t enough of it.

At three degrees of warming, only a narrow band still produced food without irrigation. South of us, the aquifers were collapsing. North of us, the growing season was short and unreliable. The math was simple: if everyone crossed the line, no one ate.

We moved south along state highways toward where the fields thinned from green to dust. The Guard briefed us in schools and empty warehouses. Units from Missouri and Arkansas were pushing north not to conquer, but to survive. Soldiers escorting their own families.

We made contact with them along Iowa’s former southern border, the 40th Parallel, a line that had meant nothing before the crisis. I began to doubt myself. Their cause was the same as ours. The flags on their sleeves mirrored the one on my hat. We were all Americans, but it was either them or us.

I shouldered my rifle and fired a warning into the dirt. The echoes that followed still haunt me.

After that, no one talked about secession. We talked about soil maps, crop yields, and how far the line could move without collapsing the next harvest. The border shifted each season, redrawn by drought and yield projections instead of politics.

Refugees kept coming, whether or not the Guard advanced. Some slipped through. Some waited. Some tried to farm land that could no longer support them and failed quietly.

At three degrees, collapse didn’t arrive all at once. It narrowed. Each year, there was less room, fewer options, and more people on the wrong side of the line.

We held it, barely, as our home shriveled away.

I collaborated with AI by providing the core narrative voice and the specific premise of a localized collapse at the 40th Parallel. The AI acted as a worldbuilder of the story, developing the setting and the plot. I myself gave the story a little more emotional depth. AI also developed an outcome of a 3° C warming scenario, such as hydrological failure and shifting agricultural zones.