This morning they’d risen early and crossed into Wyoming. He’d visited the state only once, a camping trip with Natalie in the Grand Tetons a dozen years before. It had been late summer then, the mountains carpeted in green. He remembered making love in the morning while coffee boiled on the campfire and birds sang in the trees.
Here, though, on the eastern edge of the state, the landscape was low and blasted, thorny underbrush and dry rock. It didn’t look like a place where people could live. The towns were tiny things clutching the highway.
Until they came to Gillette. It had once been a quiet place, twenty thousand people, mostly working in the energy industry. Then Erik Epstein had revealed that the massive portion of the state he’d quietly been buying would be combined into one vast new “commune,” a place he’d named New Canaan Holdfast, a home for people like him. Twist Territory, people had called it, and laughed at the idea of anyone trying to live there. Laughed, that was, until the full weight of his $300 billion came into play, and in a matter of months the world changed completely.
Gillette was the end point of a road into New Canaan. Along with two even smaller towns—Shoshoni on the west and Rawlins off I-80 to the south—it was one of the only ways to enter the Holdfast. Epstein had constructed broad highways, four lanes in each direction, that ran into the center of a wasteland, a rough-edged slash through some of the least desirable land of the United States. He’d bought the land for dollars an acre, bought it through holding companies and at auction, bought it around existing villages of twenty people, bought sprawling cattle ranches and mineral rights for ranges of oil and natural gas that lay too deep or were too sparse to have been tapped. The result was a patchwork of stony desert, largely contiguous land that had been barely touched in all of human history.
And with that move, the previously inconsequential towns of Gillette, Shoshoni, and Rawlins became nationally recognized as the gateways into New Canaan. Massive truck stops had sprung up, and housing for the thousands of construction workers who built the initial stages of the Holdfast. Restaurants and movie theaters and shopping malls swiftly followed. Finally came tourist hotels and trinket shops and storefront museums and all the rest.
As a kid, Cooper had loved science-fiction movies, especially the ones from the seventies, all gaudy colors and neon and people in jumpsuits. There was something so kitschily appealing about them, the world transformed into a metropolis two hundred stories high. But now, as they waited in a sea of trucks twenty minutes past Gillette, it occurred to him that the future hadn’t turned out like that at all. The barren landscape and blinding sun looked more like the past. A cowboy western.
“How long does it take to clear the checkpoint?”
“From here?” Shannon was at the wheel; she craned her neck sideways to see around the 18-wheeler in front of them. “Probably fifteen minutes.”
“Efficient.”
“Has to be. The entrance is basically a massive delivery depot.”
“Yeah, I know.” Like any DAR agent, he’d had numerous briefings on the Holdfast. While culturally it resembled Israel shortly after the Second World War, NCH faced a unique set of circumstances. Because it was American soil, it had to abide by US law. But $300 billion made for all manner of exceptions. Epstein’s lawyers and lobbyists had cobbled together a hundred loopholes, resulting in the Holdfast being declared a separate county, with its own municipal code. And because the entire NCH was privately held corporate land, access could be controlled. “All the inbound trucks drop off their loads here, and then they’re distributed via an internal shipping network. Makes for a lot of jobs.”
“Jobs the Holdfast has plenty of. Unemployment is zero. And not only research—trucking, construction, mining, infrastructure, the works.”
“Sure. Got to have something for the normals to do.”
She laughed. “Not just normals. Plenty of gifted move here to be part of something, but a tier-five calculator or a tier-three musician aren’t exactly leading the charge in biomedical research.”