A.V.

A.V. is the novel’s year-counting system for the post-catastrophe era, placing legal enactments, remembered upheaval, and later historical scholarship on a shared timeline. The evidence anchors that chronology at 17 A.V., 92 A.V., and 1003 A.V.; the spread between them makes the system more than a date label, connecting the first generation’s attempt to establish order with later generations’ accounts of what was lost and endured.

Dating the post-catastrophe world

The clearest early date appears with a law governing murder: it is stated to have been enacted and ratified in 17 A.V. The document calls this year “the Year of Our Waiting,” giving the dating system a second, culturally charged name. A.V. therefore marks years after the catastrophe while the accompanying phrase frames the era as one defined by waiting. In the same legal record, Devin Danforth Chou is identified with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, situating the enactment within an institutional effort to establish rules in the altered world.

A separate passage is dated 92 A.V. and located in the San Jacinto Mountains, California Republic. It places A.V. within the later geography and political vocabulary of the narrative: the calendar continues to organize life decades after the law of 17 A.V., in a setting identified by both its mountain region and republic. The passage includes a Shakespearean sleep invocation, but the date and location are the firm evidence for how the chronology functions here: it timestamps material from a later phase of the post-catastrophe world.

Memory across generations

The far-future reference, 1003 A.V., dates a scholarly presentation at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period, held at the University of New South Wales in the Indo-Australian Republic. Its document is presented as an excerpt from Ida Jaxon’s journal, “The Book of Auntie.” A.V. thus persists not only as a way to date events within the transformed world but also as a framework for academic history and the preservation of personal testimony.

In that excerpt, Ida recalls being eight years old when her mother sent her away with a suitcase packed the previous night. She remembers frightened crowds gathered at fences, soldiers and dogs trying to keep people calm, and shots fired into the air. The memory gives the far-later date a human counterpoint: centuries of elapsed chronology separate the conference from the childhood scene, yet the old event remains legible through a witness’s account. Her repeated recollection that her mother was sending her away forever makes personal separation part of the history that A.V. measures, rather than allowing the calendar to stand as an impersonal sequence of years.

Chronology as historical structure

The three dates establish distinct temporal distances without supplying a complete calendar conversion or an explanation of the initials. At 17 A.V., a legal order is formally ratified; at 92 A.V., a passage belongs to the world of the California Republic; at 1003 A.V., Ida Jaxon’s journal is presented at an international scholarly conference. These points show the dating system spanning immediate social reconstruction, later life within the new political order, and retrospective study long after the remembered upheaval.

That range also shapes the novel’s account of history. The law preserves an official act of governance, while Ida’s journal preserves a child’s experience of forced departure; the later conference encloses the latter within an institution devoted to studying the quarantine period. A.V. makes these records comparable in time, but not identical in perspective. Its significance lies in the coexistence of public chronology and intimate memory: the same system that dates a founding rule can also date the distant scholarly setting in which a survivor’s recollection is transmitted.