THE CANADIAN

He's lean and tan, facts he attributes to his gardening habit.

Why, I ask him, would he bother gardening when he's got access to a rep?

He smiles sheepishly. "It's not that I think it's really gonna be necessary. But… we don't know for a fact that we'll always have reps. And maybe knowing how to farm will come in handy one day."

I gape at him. "You're… a doomsday prepper?"

"No," he says. "Nothing like that. It's just... you never know when you might lose what you've got."

It was the biggest mistake of my life.

My wife and I had planned a trip to New York. Just a quick vacation, to reward ourselves. She'd just recovered from the birth of our little boy, and he was barely old enough to travel.

We booked a hotel in Manhattan, and at the absolute last minute I got this email from my boss. There was this huge, important meeting that he really needed me for. And of course it was on the same day that we'd booked our train tickets. I didn't want to waste more money than we had to, so I convinced my wife to go on ahead of me. I'd catch up with her the following morning.

That was the plan, at least. The Americans locked down the border the very next day.

I was pissed off, obviously. So was my wife. But I wasn't freaking out yet. Back then, there was no reason to believe the shutdown would be permanent. The authorities at the time were blaming the border shutdown on some vague "terror threat." The U.S. President was being uncharacteristically mum about it. Even when asked directly by reporters, she refused to answer basic questions about the justification for it. I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

By the second or third day, I was starting to get pretty antsy. My wife was ready to cut my balls off. Our vacation was totally ruined. But as days went by, anger started to be replaced with fear. By the end of that first week, we both started to really worry.

I went to the border in person and begged the guards to let me through. Showed the agents a picture of my wife and son. They wouldn't budge, and I broke down crying, right there in front of everyone else in line. I've never felt so weak, so… impotent as I did that day.

The second week, my wife started to take a more stoic and practical approach to the matter. She wasn't even mad at me anymore. She just wanted both of us to stay safe while we waited for the borders to re-open. As painful as it was, we both started to settle into the new rhythm of things. She called up an old college friend who lived in Missouri, and who luckily had a spare bedroom my wife could crash in with the baby.

I started going back in to work. And we did video calls every night. Every time I saw my son's face on my phone, my heart broke a little more. I was missing a good chunk of the first month of his life.

And it all felt like my fault, because I'd stayed behind for that stupid fucking meeting.

I started getting into trouble at work. I was alternating between depression and rage, sometimes unresponsive on calls with clients, often rude to the people around me. And at one point, when my boss asked me to stay late for another meeting, I told him to go fuck himself. That almost lost me my job, until one of my coworkers explained my situation to management.

They agreed to let me work from home, so I could have more time to do calls with my wife. That was a lifesaver. I needed the money to keep up with our mortgage payments, and I was wiring cash to my wife whenever she needed it, too.

The thing with Kobek happened at the end of the third week, and I saw it live. I'd been sitting at home mostly watching American news channels, hoping like hell that somebody would come on at any moment and announce the reopening of the border. I was mesmerized by what I saw, but like most people, I didn't put everything together right away. For one, it seemed too hard to believe—that a machine like that could be real. But it also wasn't obvious to me that the border closure was due to the reps.

That all changed the next day, when the U.S. President came out and announced the new "zero tolerance" policy for border crossings. She said that the reps were dangerous, and that the first priority of the American government was to stop any more of them from entering the country or allowing any to spread to America's neighbors. The border would need to stay locked down until the "threat" was contained.

News started getting out about how reps could be used to create other working reps. Then the markets began their free-fall, and almost everybody was suddenly able to put the pieces together. The border lockdown had always been about the reps. These things could spread like a virus. So the government was rolling out the full pandemic playbook to put a stop to their spread. In the hours after the Kobek thing, the internet was totally awash in videos of reps. People showing how to use them, how to distribute more. But that only lasted for a couple of days. I think May 30th was the date when they severed the connection. The "Great American Firewall" went up, and all web traffic between the U.S. and other countries was suddenly cut off. And I was finally, completely cut off from my family.

Everyone was panicking, of course. I was on the verge of losing it. I spent a few hours just coming to grips with the fact that I couldn't hear my wife's voice anymore. Then I got the idea to go to my dad's house and try to use his old HAM radio. I cranked that thing up and started scouring through random channels, asking if anybody knew anyone in Missouri.

Some guys connected me to some local enthusiasts down there, and they promised to pass on a message to my wife, if they could find her.

That was the last thing I ever heard through the HAM, because the U.S. government started blasting noise through every single frequency, effectively blocking the full spectrum of communication.

That same week, word started getting around about the "drone wall" going up on the American side of the border. Reports from journalists came in that if you got close to the American side, you could hear them buzzing around. Thousands of them. So many that the only possible explanation was that the government was pumping them out using reps. Allegedly, drawing too close would prompt the drones to emit a pre-recorded warning message: "UNAUTHORIZED CROSSINGS WILL BE PUNISHED WITH LETHAL FORCE."

One reporter from a small town south of Calgary put out a story about how some teenagers had gone missing near the border. The interest in the piece was so intense that this reporter decided he would try to turn it sort of into a bigger thing. He knew he was onto something big. So he geared himself up with a livestreaming camera setup and announced that he was gonna try to follow the trail that the missing teenagers had taken. He walked all the way up to the border, with hundreds of people watching him online.

A couple kilometers from the official boundary, he got swarmed by these drones. At first they were just squawking orders to retreat, but when he took a couple steps over the line, they actually started firing off warning shots around him. This guy had balls. He just kept walking, pushing further and further in, and although the warnings from the drones got more and more urgent, they allowed him to get about 50 meters into American territory. But suddenly a bunch of them surged in behind him and started firing.

Nobody knows what happened after that, because his livestream went dark.

Well, as you can imagine, this caused quite the sensation in Canada. American drones just gunned down a Canadian journalist, just for crossing the border. People could hardly believe it. A few days after that story got out, a few rogue hosers tricked out a truck with armor plating and tried to make a mad dash over the border. For all anybody could tell, they too got shot up by the drones.

Around this time, I started getting involved in some sort of radical online message boards. The people in these communities were sort of theorycrafting how you might break through to the other side of the border, if it was possible. One poster said he had an open line of communication with some militia types on the American side of the border, and that these guys claimed that the drones were supported by a relatively vulnerable network of wireless charging stations.

he claim was that if you could coordinate with people on the other side of the border, you could get them to go and shut down the charging stations. And then maybe you could temporarily open up a sort of hole in the defenses that people could slip through.

I'm usually not a real radical kind of guy, but all I could think about was seeing my wife and son again. I started thinking: maybe somebody could pull it off?

I sent a private message to the poster who claimed he could communicate with Americans. I explained my situation. And I asked whether he thought some guys on the other side might really be down to try it.

He wound up giving a phone call and kind of checking me out to make sure I was legit. I passed his tests, and he connected me with some pretty serious guys. Canadian militia types. Real rough characters. They told me that they were already planning on doing a raid on the border. Their goal was to connect with somebody on the American side who could give them replicator parts. But, they said, they were moved by my situation, and if I was down to risk the journey, they'd try to offer me safe passage when they did their raid on the border.

That all sounds pretty dangerous.

No, I know. It was insane. But I wasn't exactly running at 100%, in terms of my mental health, having been separated from my wife for about a month and half at this point.

Plus, despite all the obvious success the Americans had with securing the border, rumors were leaking through that they were losing the fight to keep the reps from spreading within their border. Other wild rumors were spreading too, about riots in the streets, murders, all sorts of horrific stories.

So I was becoming convinced of a couple things: First, that the borders weren't going to open any time soon, if ever; and second: My family's lives were in danger.

With those two things in mind, I made up my mind that I was willing to risk almost anything to get over that border and see them again.

Tell me about the day of the raid.

There were probably between twenty-five and thirty guys on our side of the border.

My group's leader, who seemed to be in pretty regular contact with his American counterparts, said there were over fifty guys on the other side.

The plan was pretty simple. We'd wait until they took down the wireless charging stations, and presumably they'd draw a bunch of drone attention to themselves, creating an opening in the barrier nearest those stations. I was supposed to ride in the back of one of these armored humvees with a big mounted machine gun on top. We had half a dozen of those, filled up with guys armed to the teeth.

The guys running the mounted guns were wearing these intense, metal, Iron Man-looking suits. They said the drones we'd be going up against were supposed to be relatively frail, individually—just one good bullet would take them out, according to some of the guys who'd witnessed earlier skirmishes along the border. But the problem was of course the sheer quantity of them.

Our plan wasn't to win a fight against them. We just needed to blast all the way through to a rendezvous point a few kilometers south of the drone charging station. At that point, I was going to get out and trade places with a couple of Americans carrying a rep.

At first, things went pretty much according to plan. We were all waiting in the woods a few hundred meters from the border, and right at the scheduled time, our guys with eyes on the border started yelling that the drones seemed to be falling back. We figured our allies on the American side must have successfully taken out the charging station and drawn their attention.

So we went for it, gunning across fields and low-lying streams.

I was slamming around in the back of this Humvee, just hanging on for dear life.

Almost as soon as our Humvees crossed the border, we must have triggered some sort of alarm, because the drones started flowing back in behind us. The sound of the buzzing was just incredible. So loud you couldn't hear your own voice if you shouted.

Our mounted machine gunner started firing. And they started firing back.

At first, it seemed like our defenses were going to work. Our driver was still plowing forward, and our gunner kept on thumping out round after round. Through the reinforced windows, I could see two other of our humvees in front of us, and their gunners were blasting away too.

The drones' bullets were pinging off the side of our vehicle, but the hailstorm started to let up as our guys took out more and more of the drones. Dozens of them were slamming into the ground around us.

Suddenly, something big came streaking in right in front of us and slammed straight into the Humvee at the front of the pack. It totally decimated the vehicle. Massive explosion. I remember thinking, "Whoa, that looked just like a missile strike in a video game." Within seconds, the second strike hit another of the Humvees, and my brain finally caught up to what was happening. It WAS a missile strike.

Our driver swerved and actually dodged the next strike. A hundred meters ahead, there was a trail cutting straight through some thick woods, so he headed for that.

We were only moments away from reaching it when the final missile strike hit, landing right behind our Humvee. I blacked out right as the blast picked up the back of the vehicle and launched us into a flip.

I woke up just a moment later.

The Humvee was upside down, and guys were struggling out of their harnesses and climbing out, guns in hand. For a moment, everything was quiet. But then we heard the buzzing of the drones drawing closer.

I realized this was going to be our last stand against the drones.

I started to reach for a gun so I could join the other guys in the fight, but one of them pushed me back down and told me to hang tight. He said, "You didn't join this carnival to die with us."

Then he went out with the others and started firing into the approaching swarm.

I basically just cowered in the vehicle while they all got slaughtered.

How the hell did you get out of there?

Well, I didn't think I would, to be frank. But I realized that the drones couldn't get inside the vehicle, so I didn't have any choice but to wait in there and pray for a miracle. And for whatever reason, after about five minutes of waiting, a miracle came. All of a sudden, the drones left. Not like they just drifted away, but like they were really in a hurry to get somewhere else.

I almost didn't believe it at first, but the buzzing noise was clearly gone.

So after another few minutes of cautious deliberation, I decided to climb out of the truck and make a run for the woods.

I'd probably only been running for 30 seconds or so when I heard vehicles racing down the road where our Humvee had been hit.

I took a big risk and turned around to look, and all I could see were flashing blue and red lights. That was all I needed to know.

I turned around, put my head down, and kept running deeper into the forest. I knew I needed to get as far away as possible, because those guys were absolutely going to be looking for me.

Sure enough, they must have realized that a survivor had left the truck, because about ten minutes later, I started hearing the buzzing noise of the drones returning. They were doing a sweep over the trees, looking for me.

The noise got closer, and for the second time I was almost ready to give up hope, but at the very last second I spotted my salvation.

At first it looked like just a little outcropping of rock. But when I ducked under it, I realized that there was a hole that I could slip into.

I dropped to my hands and knees and shimmied through that hole. And after a few seconds of crawling, I felt the space open up around me.

It was dark, so I flipped on my phone's flashlight. And was just blown away by my surroundings. I was inside a massive cave. There was enough room for me to stand up and stretch without touching the ceiling. In the corner of the cave, there was a little pool of water. I went and shined my light on it, and it looked crystal clear—must've been connected to some kind of freshwater spring system or something.

My decision was basically made for me, at that point. I realized that the only way I was going to avoid getting arrested was by hiding out in there.

I had no supplies, because this whole trip was supposed to be quick. Just a quick drive over the border and a rendezvous with folks on the other side. So that cave was a life-saver.

I spent the next few days laying low in there, most of the time in total darkness, because I wanted to save my phone's battery.

I was scared about drinking the water at first, but it tasted so sweet, and I was willing to risk it, given that the alternative was getting drilled full of holes by drones.

After three days, hunger started to get the best of me. So I snuck out of the cave and started walking south. A few hours later, I came upon a highway and decided to just risk it by hitchhiking. Not too long after, an old Native American guy came along in a pickup truck and picked me up.

When I told him I was trying to get to Missouri, he kind of laughed. He said, "Why don't you come cool your heels with us for a while." He knew I was a border crosser, and that I probably had a lot of heat on me.

I told him I'd be grateful if he was willing to take me in. I ended up spending almost a full week at Fort Peck Indian Reservation, making friends with the locals. They explained to me that federal policy was to strictly avoid any interference with their personal affairs, even when it came to doing stuff with replicators. The feds knew they had reps, but felt that they couldn't do anything about it. So it was the perfect place to hide out.

After that week was up, I felt it was probably safe to move on. My new friends escorted me in a small caravan all the way to Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They called in a few favors on my behalf, and got a couple of those guys to agree to take me the rest of the way to Missouri. By the end of that day, I'd successfully reunited with my family.

You're certainly one of the only people to successfully make the border crossing. Are you nervous that the government will want to deal with you at some point?

No, not really. I think the government knows that I illegally crossed from Canada, but they haven't bothered me. And besides, what would be the point of worrying? If it happens, it happens. I guess it would be a sort of "doomsday" for me. But not all doomsdays can be prepped for.