The former is doing significant work. The United States of America still exists as a concept, as a name on the organization Sam works for, as the political framework that Bridget spent her presidency trying to hold together. What it does not exist as is a country in any functional sense — the Stranding dissolved the infrastructure that makes nations legible as nations, the roads and communications and shared reality that allow a political entity to operate. Bridget governed the memory of a country.

What she built instead of a country was Bridges — the organization, the mission, the attempt to reconnect what the Stranding severed. The former President becomes the founding mother of a different kind of state, one organized not around territory but around the strand, the connection, the delivery made across impossible distance. Sam is her son and her porter and the continuation of an argument she did not live to finish.