The year is 2087. We have slowed and then gradually reversed climate change. The two main political parties in the US are the center-right Democrats and the left-wing Green-Progressives, but ranked choice voting has allowed for breakaway parties to flourish and have an impact.

There is both a UBI and a minimum wage and either one of them is enough on its own to put someone above the poverty line, which is a legal artifact maintained by economists to give a baseline for those and other benefits; no one is below it.

Every day, in small conclaves of fearful believers, the Followers of Q tell each other: "sleep well, for tomorrow begins the 10 Days of Darkness. Watch the water. Trust the plan. Patriots in control."

What they think will happen tomorrow is Donald Trump Jr will return.

Donald Trump Jr will return with a stack of indictments that were signed by his father's administration and begin dismantling and overturning this whole society where everyone has housing and healthcare and high-speed transit.

"We had to let them think they've won," they say. "Because it's all illegal, under the Constitution. By making us act as though we're part of a society, they've instituted a form of slavery. And every single member of Congress, every bureaucrat, every public servant is guilty."

Every day they dutifully sign into the website where they gather, which is hosted on a server on a boat in international waters and is now simply called "Get Child Porn Here", and they go to this site and read cryptic "intel drops" about how the Trumps are fighting pedophiles.

Nobody ever notices or remembers all the times the 10 days of darkness didn't happen. They always believe the 10 days are starting tomorrow, except for sometimes when there's a power outage or signal drop or something and they briefly wonder, "Have they started? Is this it?"

But the 10 days of darkness never start, and the Q cultists never notice it. They believe that all of history, every major facet of public or private life, for longer than they've been alive has been "a movie" that is being engineered to distract the powers that be...

...and eventually, at the climax, wake the rest of the people up, and at that point, the Great Awakening, the world will change and the old order will be destroyed and everyone can get on with their lives.

Their parents spent their whole lives waiting for this day, waiting for the 10 days of darkness, telling each other to "trust the plan" because "patriots" were "in control". Their grandparents were among the first to discover this pasttime.

Neither they nor their parents nor their own children have ever had a real life, have ever just *lived* their lives, because life as it exists in this neverending Before Time isn't real, it's "a movie".

Every once in a while someone wonders if something ought to be done about those children who are indoctrinated into this way of unlife, but the values of a liberal and pluralistic society make it hard. Mostly they're all okay, anyway. People are taken care of.

The parents and the children both have everything they need and most of the things they could want, aside from the ones that make no sense, like vengeance for a series of grievances their grandparents imagined back when they had very little and not enough.

The parents teach their children the warning signs of Socialism, which are conveniently easy to demonstrate because they're everywhere, and they tell their children this means that soon there will be camps and they'll be separated and taken away.

They don't know if the camps will come at the start of the 10 Days of Darkness, or if the 10 Days will be kicked off by the camps, or what, just that both things are going to happen and they're going to happen soon, because all the signs are there, as the signs have always been.

The children, growing up in a world where the Signs of Socialism aren't just forming but have always been fully formed, will grow up to teach their own children -- or those who don't grow out of these beliefs and go on to live their own lives will do so-- a strange new version.

In the new version of QAnon, the "Great Awakening" becomes a personal struggle, and all the big flashpoint events become internal mental ones. It becomes about finding your own Inner Trump to fight off the negative impulses that oppress your thoughts.

"Everybody must go through 10 Days of Darkness," they tell their children. "It might not be 10 literal days. It might be 10 days that each feel like 10 days. But every soul must pass through them on the way to its own Great Awakening."

And so by a hundred years after that, QAnon is simply a breakaway Christian sect with a focus on dubious versions of psychotherapy and strange rituals like "locking up hilarity" whose original purposes are completely forgotten.

Even after the last connection to historical real-life politics has been dropped, they *still* meet each other on child porn servers, which are becoming shorter-lived and harder to find as society gets better at rooting such ills out.

And so the armed struggle that so many of their ancestors predicted was imminent and would always be imminent eventually comes to pass when the last enclave of orthodox QAnons takes up arms to protect the last known server they can use, an image board called 1024Sama.

As this small band of self-described Freedom Fighters are incapacitated by the government forces, they turn to each other and reassure themselves, "Get some popcorn, this is all a movie." and "Patriots in control." and "Trust the plan."

And that is how QAnon as we know it might die, a few hundred years from now, after centuries of failing to accomplish anything, change anything, or predict anything.