Alvin and the others had been back from Russia for about a week...
The so-called "bad news" was something Alvin had already considered inevitable.
In the southern states of the United States, along with several Midwestern states, incidents of Mutants attacking Ordinary People had occurred one after another.
It started when several Mutants in Texas occupied a department store...
Under the banner of fighting discrimination, they killed more than ninety people inside the store, then were shot full of holes by furious Texas Rangers.
Next, large-scale riots began breaking out in the southern states of the United States, almost like an uprising, accompanied by a great many attacks by Mutants.
Some of those attacks were real, and some were fake...
But none of that mattered. How could the relatively conservative states of the United States, which hadn't even fully resolved racial discrimination, possibly handle the Mutant problem properly?
Over the past few days, the number of Ordinary People wounded and killed had begun to climb sharply, and the fighting was slowly taking shape.
Hundreds of thousands of Mutants had joined together. They faced off against the military and protested. Some Mutants had even been put forward as candidates, hoping to join Congress and become members.
Those people weren't actually taking the wrong approach. Far too many civil rights activists in the United States had become part of the "ruling" class.
And they had indeed won reasonable rights for the groups they represented...
But those Mutants had overlooked one thing: a revolution begun with the blood of Ordinary People would never win their sympathy.
It didn't matter how beautifully they put it. Ordinary People had started to see Mutants as a threat.
As soon as South Carolina swiftly passed the discriminatory Mutant Residency Act, requiring Mutants to register their identities and