This one will probably be a for-the-short-story-collection special. I’m not sure how much conflict is going to be involved. Although I guess I could add some. Perhaps… a murder? No, not quite right for the setting. Must ponder.
Georgetown, 2806 AD
(formerly Washington, DC)Enoch Whitman thought that the cherry blossoms, at least, lived up to their legendary status. They seemed to be everywhere in what the Virginians called ‘Georgetown’ and the President of the Second Republic stubbornly called ‘Washington’ (at least in his head); on the Mall, along the Potomac, in the subtly-cultivated wilds of the Dupont Elfdan, everywhere. And not just cherry trees, either. The whole city was ablaze in blossoms; if Baltimore was ‘City of Ravens’ in the often idiosyncratic slang of the Kingdom of Virginia, then Georgetown was ‘City of Flowers.’
President Whitman suspected that his coach from the railway(!) station was being kept at a deliberately slow pace, in order to give Her Majesty’s court a chance to make last-minute preparations for his unexpected visit of state. If that was true, Whitman decided that he didn’t mind. It was a beautiful spring day, and traveling through Washington like this was a dream shared by both him and every one of his predecessors in office since the fall of the First Republic. He thought he should savor the sensation, because once he reached the Royal Court things would likely stop being so free and easy. Whitman couldn’t quite make himself believe that Queen Damiana XVII was happy about his unprecedented visit.
Though, to be fair: the Virginians were doing their best to make him feel welcome, or at least not unwelcome. They had given Whitman every courtesy in his trip, starting with his arrival at the Wilmington border and continuing all the way down south (including on an actual train!) to the capital. And the populace seemed happy enough to see him. There was a small crowd at every town, apparently honestly eager to see the first President of the Second Republic (of the United States, dammit!, he muttered in his mind) to visit Virginia in seven hundred years.