Flashback

Also in the 1990s, about the time that Nick Bottom was in third grade, the investigation of the murder of a six-year-old child named JonBenét Ramsey in her home on Christmas Day was so botched by the police, district attorney, and other authorities that almost every city official who came in contact with the case lost his or her job. Nick’s father had been fascinated with the almost total ineptitude of the JonBenét Ramsey investigation. It showed, he’d later told his teenage son, that this Boulder metro area of almost two hundred thousand people definitely had not been ready for prime time. When the case was accidentally solved by an independent investigator more than twenty-five years later—after almost all the principals, family members, and suspects were dead—the answer to the mystery was as clear and obvious as it had been on the day the body was found.

Nick was sorry that his father hadn’t lived long enough to hear the solution. He thought that his old man would have appreciated the irony.

Into the twenty-first century, the Boulder city council could never restrain itself from taking sides on issues that had nothing to do with a medium-sized city: coming out in support of Nicaraguan Marxist rebels, officially opposing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, refusing to support state laws restricting marijuana and other drug use, harboring illegal Mexican immigrants as political refugees (although there was no place in the city for low-paid immigrants to live, so after the very public “harboring” they were always quietly ejected from the city limits), and finally going on record to say that the city of Boulder would not “collaborate” with any Republican president of the United States.

Of course, Nick knew that his father’s view of Boulder—even before it had declared itself an independent republic shortly after Texas did—wasn’t fair. Despite the graying dork knobs (who were mostly dead now anyway), Boulder had once been a thriving science center. The University of Colorado at Boulder, CU, had boasted an excellent science department and was one of the few universities in the world where students actually controlled orbital satellites. (That disappeared when America’s predominance in spaceflight and satellite technology was surpassed by the Japanese, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Saudis, the New Caliphate, and Brazilians.) A beautiful 1960 modernist glass-and-sandstone structure designed by I. M. Pei up near the Flatirons—the only building allowed in the greenbelt—had been built to house NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, pronounced “En-car.”

The revelations of hoaxes and totally false data sets in Anthropogenic Global Warming studies, confessed to by scores of scientists only after hundreds of billions of dollars and euros had gone down that rat hole, followed by more scandals that led to the collapse of the Global Carbon Trading Networks and that collapse’s contribution to the Day It All Hit The Fan, had finally resulted in NCAR’s budget being reduced by 85 percent. Their new headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, were much more modest.

And there had been the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, which for decades had brought scientists with international reputations to the city. Both the NCAR building high in the greenbelt and the Bureau of Standards complex of buildings were now leased by the Naropa Institute and its Rinpoche School of Disembodied Transpersonal Wisdom.

The Old Man missed the best of it, thought Nick as they approached the city near the foothills. For it had been since die-ought-if, the Day It All Hit The Fan, that the People’s Republic of Boulder had truly come into its own.

The fences and minefields and armed patrols and custom gates ran along the highest ridge three miles to the southeast of Boulder. As one descended into the valley beyond that last high ridge, the beauty of the city and its surroundings became more obvious. The hardwoods in the city were beginning to change color and the foothills along the giant sandstone slabs called the Flatirons were thick with green pines. The high peaks and damned wind turbines disappeared as one dropped lower toward the town. The air was cleaner and more clear than it had been in a hundred and fifty years.