On the Wilderness Continent

The Continent hungers to be realized. Each day adds a new increment to the frontier,” I said, “and behind that expansion is the flux of towns darkening into cities to be threaded along newly spun highways. We will put up the mountains. We will lay out the prairie. We will cut rivers to join the lakes.” This year’s externs had arrived, and I gave them my orientation talk.

Seated about the displaybank before me, they flipped through intro folders. Clean frames of pure color, these were an electric, metal blue—the color of the company. We were just a bank when they had selected the color, back before the opportunity came to erect the Continent. I informed the externs that a more ambitious development has never been planned: all-new country, elevated and secured from downstairs, with a growing complement of landforms, clean waters, ecologies, wilderness. From what I’ve always understood, too, the Continent is still in the earliest phases of its construction. Two, maybe three, lifetimes may go by before substantial completion can be declared. But the Continent is too far along now and too valuable to be abandoned.

Faces above the displaybank followed me around the room.

“We are alive at a crucial moment in the course of this project,” I continued. “It’s a voyage of generations. Our company has leveraged itself many times over to carry the design even this far.” Mine was a message they had heard their whole lives. If not at home, then on the wireless; if not discussed in classrooms, then rumored in dormitories. They must understand that our work at the Activities Estimate, their work now, contributes significantly toward the Continent’s fulfillment, one day at a time. But who at age twenty will readily consider the scale of time required to complete our project?

Twelve came fresh from the regional academy. The thirteenth was older, retraining after a tour in the field. He was maybe Vivian’s age, so not quite old at all. He wore his hair wilderness length and had shaped a blond beard to reach from his smile to the open collar of a dark plaid shirt. They listened in earnest. Solid authority is celebrated up here. Often our externs are the children of subscribers who took out financing to move here, so they’re required to work for the company in some capacity, like civil service. Some are new employees of the company who officially reside downstairs. You don’t hear stories about pioneer grandparents who came up when the parts that are supposed to be Michigan and Illinois opened. The beautiful youth who grow up on the Continent, if they work for the company at all, become soil technicians or aquarists and rise to regional VP commissioners or principal scientists. Our own young men and women will sit at displaybanks like this one and wield vast sums of data to reconcile the Continent to its investors and the world.

“The work we do offers the only measure by which the Continent can be evaluated,” I said, cueing Joost. “Without our work, the company gropes blindly.” The Activities Estimate rose across the displaybank. Before each extern, case documents served up like a meal. I backed away as Joost and Erin Vesey came forward to take over from me. Eight weeks out of the year we had externs in the bureau, and it fell on Joost to coordinate them. He assigned their portfolios. The externs dealt only with the smaller, better towns, some still in their first generation. Less than six-thousand, seven-thousand subscribers. These consisted of new buildings with hot water and good, efficient equipment. A few even had historical downtowns. Modest but novel entrepreneurs flourished. Retail was lively with small local businesses and one or two major international brands from downstairs. Entertainment came in different formats. Meaning happy people. Meaning no incidents. Easy work for externs. Of course the happiness of these towns was no less essential to the sustainability of the Continent.