Sometimes I imagine a distant future where whole regions of the United States, ravaged by climate change and unchecked pollution, are inhabited solely by a handful of cyborg-people aged a hundred and up, kept in stasis in purified-air boxes and roused into consciousness by their machine parts once every even-numbered year, just long enough to mark a ballot for the congressional representatives the Constitution guarantees them. And there will still be opinion pieces in the newspapers praising the founders’ keen insight in designing a system of self-government that has served us so well, and for
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