The Story So Far …
In the middle of a trial over Praxis Engineering & Construction’s responsibility for defects in a new hospital project, Chairman of the Board John Praxis suffered a massive heart attack. Sometime later, the lead attorney for the plaintiff suffered a stroke. Both were candidates for innovative stem cell therapies: he got a new heart with muscle and nerve tissue grown on an armature of synthetic collagen; her brain was seeded with new nerve cells that replaced those killed by the aneurysm. While each patient recovered slowly, they met in the rooftop garden of the medical center and developed a personal relationship.
John and Antigone returned to a world on the edge of collapse. The country’s inflation had gone into overdrive, and when the Chinese, Japanese, and other holders of U.S. debt refused to buy any more and sold their assets, when the oil-producing countries refused the falling dollar as payment, and when international bankers forced restrictions on U.S. growth in return for monetary support, the country started to fall apart. In the midst of the crisis, John and Antigone adopted new, healthier lifestyles—his through jogging, hers through Okinawan karate—and trid to remain hopeful in navigating their respective organizations—his construction company, her law firm—through the collapsing economy. They also renewed their personal contact outside the hospital when John retained Antigone as his personal attorney.
As the country fell apart, John’s sons Leonard and Richard chafed under his renewed leadership and considered his every move to save the company as the desperation of a sick old man. Yet between his own and his daughter Callie’s shares, John retained a controlling interest in PE&C. Richard as chief financial officer with access to the accounting system formulated a plot that would make Callie seem to have embezzled massive amounts from the company. This nullified her support and enabled the boys to remove John from the company. At the last step, John brought in Antigone as Callie’s defense counsel, and she negotiated a settlement that preserved John’s and Callie’s fortunes as the company collapsed. Soon after, Antigone’s law firm was also forced out of business.
While John’s wife Adele succumbed to alcohol-related illness and eventually slipped away, his grandson Brandon was pulled into the U.S. Army through his ROTC commission. After an abortive foray to block the distribution of an arms cache in Arizona, Brandon was sent for combat training in California and then joined the federal government’s attack on the secessionist capital, Kansas City. The Second Civil War was well under way.
John spent the nine years of the Second Civil War in San Francisco, where he worked as buyer in a plumbing supply company and helped out as the neighborhood handyman. The fortune he rescued from the family construction business had been invested in a national program that sold public property to private individuals—in his case, the Stanislaus National Forest—in order to raise needed revenue. Antigone was trapped on the other side of the border during a visit to her sister Helen in Oklahoma. She passed the Oklahoma bar and set up a practice inside the new Federated Republic. Callie Praxis went to Europe, married an Italian count with shady business connections, and raised her daughter Rafaella, who was eight at the end of the war. When Callie’s husband died in suspicious circumstances, her fortune was held hostage by his wicked Uncle Matteo. Brandon Praxis saw many battles and become a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. Leonard Praxis and his wife retreated to a cabin high in the Sierra Nevada, where they died in a military strike into Northern California. Richard Praxis and his family moved to Texas, where he worked for a computer company developing software that brought about the economic collapse of the old United States.
Callie returned to San Francisco and discovered that John was now suffering from a hormone imbalance, the treatment of which the underfunded California Medical Service had ruled as “age inappropriate.” With an armistice and peace pending, she took him to the Mayo Clinic inside the Federated Republic for his second round of stem cell therapy. Antigone discovered she has kidney disease and the best place for her treatment was also the Mayo Clinic. There John and Antigone were reunited and renewed their romance.
Once cured, they returned to San Francisco with Callie to restart the engineering business and rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Unknown to John and Antigone, however, Callie was using seed money from her husband’s mafia connections to fund their projects. Brandon was demobilized and came to the new company to serve as their ruthlessly effective head of security. Their success also attracted Richard Praxis, who had new software that would accelerate the rebuilding programs and also grant him cyber access to their engineering business. At the same time, Uncle Matteo sent ex-policewoman Mariene Kunstler to represent his interests in the business, and she immediately spun her own web of control over Praxis Engineering’s projects and clients, as well as running her own side businesses. Mariene was introduced to Richard’s new software and instantly intuited something wrong about it. She promised to keep her mouth shut so long as he agreed to share information with her.
With the war over, the State of California attempted to reclaim its interest in the Stanislaus National Forest by charging John with negligence and damaging public property. Antigone stepped in and defended his title under the National Assets Distribution Act. He will take complete possession of the land in thirty years—if he lives so long.
John and Antigone agreed to have a child through in vitro techniques, and he had a silver pendant made that encoded their combined genomes. On a romantic visit to the Loire Valley, he gave her the heart-shaped pendant in the garden of the Château de Chenonceau, sealing their love.