Flashback

The motionless line of giant wind turbines ran along the entire visible span of the Continental Divide, from Wyoming in the north to beyond Pikes Peak a hundred and sixty miles south. The abandoned turbine-towers looked to Nick Bottom like nothing so much as a dilapidated, unpainted picket fence with each rusted picket post rising almost four hundred feet into the Colorado sky. A picket fence or—perhaps—a cage.

Growing up, Nick had loved looking at the high peaks and the snowcapped skyline of these peaks but in the past decades he’d learned to avoid looking west. Some scientist had estimated that the “greening” of the nation’s power system with wind turbines killed more than four billion migrating and night-flying birds a year. Nick always imagined huge heaps of bird carcasses at the base of these flaked and rusting turbines… back when they still worked.

The turbines had never generated enough power to earn their maintenance and upkeep, and the visible network of power cables laid across the snowfields and hard-rock face of the high peaks reminded Nick of the varicose veins on the mottled legs of a dying old man. The former EU had abandoned most of its uneconomical wind turbines just as the U.S., under its visionary new administrations, was pouring the last of its fortune into “green” technologies. The People’s Republic of Boulder now bought its actual power from one of the standardized-for-manufacture HTGC (high-temperature gas-cooled) reactors on the plains west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the city-republic’s official stance was that it still relied only on “green” power.

Nick wouldn’t have gone to the People’s Republic this afternoon to keep his appointment with Keigo interview subject Derek Dean if he’d had a choice. Given that choice, Nick would have gone back to his Cherry Creek cubie and spent hours flashing on conversations with Dara around the time of the first Oz interview six years ago. Perhaps he’d missed something she’d said at the time that would explain…

He didn’t have a choice.

Sato was driving and insisting on keeping the appointment. More than that, Sato had Nick’s next stash of flash in the backseat of the car and wasn’t going to release it to Nick until after the goddamned useless interview.

So Nick sat dumbly, not conversing with Sato, numbed by what Danny Oz had said about Dara being there during the Keigo interview, and stared at the approaching white metal cage bars of the once-proud Continental Divide.

The line of cars at the customs entrance for those heading northwest along Highway 36 to the People’s Republic was at least forty-five minutes long.

“You have your physical passport, Bottom-san?” asked Sato.

Nick nodded.

Sato swung the armored Honda into the empty far-left diplomatic lane, produced two black NIC Cards and their old hardcopy passports that the PRoB still demanded, and they were waved through the rest of the inspection gates in half a minute.

Everyone in Colorado enjoyed a love-hate, love-love, or pure hate-hate relationship with what was now the People’s Republic of Boulder. Nick’s father had held strong opinions on the place.

According to the grumblings of Nick’s state patrolman dad, in the 1960s the town of Boulder and its university had been one of the national loci for drugs, sex, outdoor sports, and total rejection of authority (assuming one’s parents kept paying one’s tuition and bills). Nick’s father liked to tell his son that these midcontinent refugees from the Summer of Love grew up, grew old—still with their graying ponytails, which Nick’s dad had called dork knobs—and passed laws.

Two decades before Nick was born, the salt-and-pepper-dork-knobbed Boulder city council passed draconian laws on the city’s growth, thus almost immediately doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling housing prices and driving any true middle class out of the city. Within fifteen years, according to State Trooper Bottom, Boulder was a comfortable and self-satisfied mixture of dork-knobbed trust-fund babies and louse-infected street people.

During the 1980s the city again deliberated deeply and—with the support of the anti-Reagan, anti-defense populace—passed resolutions declaring Boulder a “nuclear-free zone.” The upshot of that effort, Nick’s father had explained, was that in all the decades since then, not a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine had tied up in Boulder.

In the 1990s, the same city council—the men’s long dork knobs and the women’s short, severe Phys Ed–instructor haircuts grew grayer but the faces remained largely the same according to Nick’s father—labored for months before deciding that there would and could be no more “pets” in Boulder, Colorado. Dogs and cats were to be entrusted to human “guardians.” The changes in licensing paperwork alone cost a fortune. In old dollars.