May 12, 2440, 2:00 p.m.
The van came in from the highway just before two.
Ellis saw it from one of the food points scattered through the works. There were enough people on the site now that nobody had tried to build a single lunch area. Food went where the crews were. Tables under shade, insulated boxes, coolers, bread, fruit, hot pans, drinks, whatever could be carried out without pulling hundreds of people away from their jobs.
Dan was beside him finishing something wrapped in flatbread when the van stopped.
Dave Roxas climbed out.
Ellis immediately distrusted the situation.
Dave had been around Matt, the Homestead and the Freehold far too long to accidentally deliver trouble.
The side door opened.
Reporters began getting out.
Ellis counted twelve.
Two Marmaduke media staffers came after them.
Dave said something to one of the staffers, got back into the van and shut the door.
Ellis stared at him.
Dave looked directly back through the windshield.
Then drove away.
Fast.
Motherfucker.
Dan watched the van disappear.
“Roxas?”
“Yep.”
“He planned that.”
“Yep.”
For a moment both men wore identical expressions.
Then professionalism dropped over them.
One of the media staffers walked up.
“Ellis. Dan. Sorry. This is the first field stop.”
Dan smiled.
“Of course it is.”
Ellis smiled too.
“Happy to help.”
The staffer was smart enough not to answer.
The reporters were already sorting themselves out.
Some watched the T-12s moving timber.
A couple were looking toward the spring-fed pond, where Carl and half a dozen boys were trying to teach several V’ren girls how to fish.
Others looked north toward Leta 2.
Two came directly toward Ellis and Dan.
The first was the Wall Street Journal reporter.
She opened her notebook.
“You’re planning fifteen sitios.”
Dan nodded.
“Eventually.”
“Each nine square kilometers.”
“Yes.”
“Publicly, Marmaduke has said Leta is for about forty-five thousand people.”
“Yes.”
“So why build fifteen?”
Dan took another bite before answering.
“Because it’s cheaper.”
She waited.
Dan pointed toward the works.
“The printers are here. The people are here. The power is here. Once we start running roads, utilities and foundations, stopping halfway and coming back later is more work than finishing what we already planned.”
“Even if buildings sit empty?”
“For a while.”
Ellis said, “Wonder Foam is wonderful.”
She turned to him.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the part of this that used to make people afraid of overbuilding doesn’t cost much anymore.”
“Structures.”
“Most of them.”
Dan nodded toward Leta 1.
“You don’t tear everything down, send the machines away, then bring them back five years later because somebody decided empty buildings looked inefficient.”
The reporter wrote for several seconds.
“So this is not evidence that the forty-five-thousand figure is false.”
“No,” Dan said. “It’s evidence that doing it once is easier than doing it twice.”
That answer pleased her.
A Reuters correspondent had joined them.
Older. Quiet. He had spent more time looking at the ground than at the shuttles.
“Where is Leta 2 from here?”
Ellis pointed north.
“About five hundred meters north of Leta 1.”
“And higher?”
“Depends where you stand. Eight meters or so above Leta 1. Five to twenty above the marsh.”
The reporter looked west.
“The marsh is between the site and the highway?”
“Yeah. Just north of the creek.”
He checked his map.
“The creek crosses under the highway?”
“Then bends southwest,” Ellis said. “Joins the other drainage going toward the river.”
“So Leta 2 has no direct highway access.”
“No.”
“That explains the bridges.”
“Part of it.”
“How many?”
“Two vehicle bridges between Leta 1 and Leta 2. Walking bridge later.”
“And Leta 6?”
“North of Leta 2. That one will eventually give us another bridge connection and highway access.”
The Reuters reporter looked back at the marsh.
“This has stayed wet through April?”
Ellis nodded.
Treat Vost walked up carrying a tablet and half a sandwich.
She had been onsite six days.
He offered her a ride back to town for a neural-interface session, her fifth, his first and only two days later.
The couch last night confirmed the arrangement that started on that drive.
None of that belonged in the answer she gave the reporter.
He asked, “Does the marsh affect Leta 2 foundation design?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“More deep anchors.”
“Major problem?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Treat looked toward the site.
“Because we know it’s there.”
That was all she gave him.
She had already spent a week dealing with it. First, from an aerial engineering report, then on the ground. Ellis could see no reason she should deliver a weather lecture to a man who had apparently read the same numbers she had.
The Journal reporter stepped closer.
“How much more expensive does that make Leta 2?”
Treat looked at her.
“Compared to Leta 1?”
“Yes.”
“More expensive.”
“Enough to reconsider the site?”
“No.”
“Because of Wonder Foam?”
“Because the whole system is cheap enough that a harder foundation does not make the site uneconomic.”
Dan looked at Ellis.
Ellis gave him the smallest nod.
That was the story.
Not that Matt was secretly building for half a million people.
Not that the aliens had some mysterious urban plan.
It was that construction economics had changed enough that people could build ahead without being punished for it.
Behind them one of the younger reporters called out.
“Mr. Littleton?”
Dan turned.
She pointed toward the pond.
“Are those V’ren children?”
“The green ones.”
“And your son is teaching them to fish?”
“Carl thinks he is.”
“Was this organized by the Trust?”
“No.”
“By the school?”
“No.”
“By the settlement?”
“By Carl, he’s eight.”
The reporter blinked.
“So it just happened?”
Dan looked at Ellis.
Ellis looked at Dan.
“Welcome to Missouri,” Dan said.
The Reuters correspondent had already turned back to his notes.
Good man.
He had found the bigger story.
Ellis glanced down the road where Dave had vanished.
Motherfucker.
Dave had known exactly what he was doing.
The Wall Street Journal
Wonder Foam Makes Overbuilding Cheap Enough to Make Sense
LETA DISTRICT, Missouri, May 12, 2440
Matthew Marmaduke’s plans for Leta appear oversized at first glance.
The Freehold is planning fifteen nine-square-kilometer sitios around a settlement publicly described as serving roughly 45,000 people.
Construction officials say the explanation is not a hidden population forecast.
It is cost.
Once printers, workers, fusion power, civil equipment and utility crews are onsite, completing infrastructure and structural capacity is cheaper than stopping and rebuilding the entire construction operation later.
“Wonder Foam is wonderful,” local farmer Ellis Chakrobarty said.
The V’ren structural material can be produced in enormous quantities at prices that make conventional calculations about speculative construction increasingly obsolete.
Dan Littleton, one of the site construction coordinators, said the practical question is no longer whether every building has an immediate occupant.
It is whether stopping now would save enough money to justify returning later.
At Leta, the answer is frequently no.
Civil engineer Treat Vost said even the more difficult foundations required at Leta 2 do not threaten the economics of the site.
The result is a settlement being built for tomorrow because, for perhaps the first time in modern urban construction, tomorrow’s empty capacity is cheap.
- @UrbanCapital: This is the first Leta article that gets the actual economic change. If the shell is nearly free, vacancy is not the same financial poison it used to be.
- @BuiltEnvironment: Land carrying cost also collapses when the same person already owns the entire development footprint.
- @UrbanCapital: Exactly. Land, structure, power and financing all behave differently here. You cannot use twentieth-century overbuilding models.
- @REITAnalyst: The remaining expensive pieces become labor, interfaces, fittings, infrastructure and maintenance.
- @BuiltEnvironment: Which also explains why they are printing structure faster than they are finishing interiors.
- @BuiltEnvironment: Land carrying cost also collapses when the same person already owns the entire development footprint.
- @FreeholdWatch: “Wonder Foam is wonderful” is going to become an annoying slogan, but unfortunately Chakrobarty is right.
- @MaterialsDesk: It is annoying because it compresses a very serious industrial disruption into five words.
- @FreeholdWatch: Which is probably why everyone will remember it.
- @OzarkBuilder: Builders have spent centuries paying dearly for the box. If the box is suddenly cheap, everything changes.
- @MaterialsDesk: Especially decisions about when to build the box.
- @MaterialsDesk: It is annoying because it compresses a very serious industrial disruption into five words.
Reuters
Carroll County of 211 Begins Building for Tens of Thousands
CARROLL COUNTY, Missouri, May 12, 2440
Before May 5, Carroll County had 211 residents.
Its inhabited footprint consisted largely of 20 farms, including the Chakrobarty farm, and a cluster of trailers occupied by several dozen school-age children and their families.
Two trailers served as the local grade school. Older students were bussed to Marshall.
One week later, the county is preparing the second major site for Leta, a settlement eventually expected to contain tens of thousands of residents.
The land is already held inside the Marmaduke Freehold. Much of it had previously been owned by Amazon and entered Marmaduke control in the Day One acquisition.
Local farmer Ellis Chakrobarty said his younger children will attend the new Carroll County school district being created as Leta develops.
For the county’s original residents, the transformation is not incremental growth.
It is a population change measured in orders of magnitude.
- @ReutersData: Carroll County going from 211 residents to even the first 45,000 planned for Leta is a demographic change of more than 200 times the pre-arrival population.
- @CountyStats: And that is before counting students or later sites.
- @ReutersData: Correct. The baseline is so small that almost any phase of Leta overwhelms it statistically.
- @MarshallTeacher: The school comparison is just as dramatic. Two grade-school trailers and buses to Marshall versus a full new district.
- @CountyStats: Education may feel the population shock before most other county institutions do.
- @CountyStats: And that is before counting students or later sites.
- @MissouriHistory: The weirdest thing is that the county was not empty. It had families, farms, children and a functioning tiny school arrangement. It was just very small.
- @RuralArchive: Which makes Leta more interesting than building on vacant land. There is already a local society there.
- @MissouriHistory: And some of those families are helping build what replaces the old scale.
- @MarshallLocal: Ellis sending his own kids into the new district matters.
- @RuralArchive: Yes. He is not treating Leta as somebody else’s colony.
- @RuralArchive: Which makes Leta more interesting than building on vacant land. There is already a local society there.
Engineering Record
Leta 2 Will Depend on Bridges, Not the Highway
Leta 2 will have no direct highway entrance.
The second nine-square-kilometer sitio lies roughly 500 meters north of Leta 1 and rises between 5 and 20 meters above the marshy ground separating parts of the site from the road.
A creek passes beneath the highway near the southern side of that wet ground, then turns southwest and joins other drainage flowing toward the river.
Engineers are preparing two vehicle bridges between Leta 1 and Leta 2, with a separate walking-path bridge to follow.
Leta 6, planned north of Leta 2, will eventually provide another bridge connection and direct highway access.
Leta 2 also requires more deep anchor pilings than Leta 1.
Civil engineer Treat Vost described the condition as an engineering constraint rather than a threat to the project.
“We know it’s there,” she said.
That may be the defining advantage of building Leta from scratch.
The difficult ground does not have to be worked around after a town already exists.
The town can be designed around it from the beginning.
- @BridgeEngineer: Two vehicle bridges make much more sense once you realize Leta 2 has no direct road entrance from the highway.
- @CivilWorksMidwest: And Leta 6 later gives the northern side another route, so Leta 2 is not permanently dependent on Leta 1.
- @BridgeEngineer: Right. Temporary network dependence, not permanent isolation.
- @TransportPlanner: The walking bridge being separate is also sensible if foot traffic gets heavy.
- @CivilWorksMidwest: Especially once the residential population actually arrives.
- @CivilWorksMidwest: And Leta 6 later gives the northern side another route, so Leta 2 is not permanently dependent on Leta 1.
- @HydrologyNerd: The creek geometry matters. Under the highway, southwest turn, then into the river drainage network. The marsh is not random wet ground.
- @GroundWorks: Which is why “it stayed wet in a dry month” is useful observation, not the whole diagnosis.
- @HydrologyNerd: Exactly. It tells you to respect the water, not that you have solved it.
- @PileCrew: And if the sitio is 5 to 20 meters above the marsh, you solve access and foundations separately.
- @GroundWorks: Which appears to be what they are doing.
- @GroundWorks: Which is why “it stayed wet in a dry month” is useful observation, not the whole diagnosis.
Midwest Farm Report
Leta Supervisor Leaves Tomorrow for a Harvest Already in Motion
Ellis Chakrobarty will hand day-to-day control of the Leta clearing operation to civil engineer Treat Vost on May 13.
The reason is 800 acres of winter wheat.
The Chakrobarty farm is not opening the local harvest. Wheat combines have already been working for several days as fields across the area reach maturity. Over roughly the next ten days, crews expect to cut about 250,000 acres of wheat.
The local pool includes around 200 qualified combine operators, ranging from farmers in their twenties to operators in their seventies.
Chakrobarty and his 25-year-old son Russell are two of them.
Five combine operators are scheduled to work the Chakrobarty acreage. On its relatively flat ground, they expect to finish the 800 acres in a single day before the machines and operators move on to other farms.
That movement is normal for this harvest.
The operators are not primarily a corps of hired professional drivers. Most are farmers who already know the equipment because they have spent years running it on their own ground. Had they owned the wheat they were cutting, they would normally have spent the day in the machine without drawing a separate wage. Their return would have come from the crop.
This year, Matthew Marmaduke owns approximately 90 percent of the wheat being harvested through the local system, so that labor is being paid separately.
Combine operators receive 400 fiat for the day. Operators assigned to other specialized harvest machinery generally receive 300 to 350 fiat for the day.
Those are day rates, not hourly wages.
If Chakrobarty’s wheat comes off in ten hours, the combine operators, grain-truck drivers and other machine crews tied directly to that job may finish in about ten hours. If weather, breakdowns or field conditions stretch the work beyond fifteen hours, they stay with the assigned job until it is done.
Other harvest workers are paid the local minimum wage of 25 fiat an hour and generally work eight-hour shifts. Food and drinks are provided in addition to wages.
That distinction has made harvest staffing a mixture of old farm practice and paid labor.
The farmer in the combine may work from the beginning of the field until the last pass. The people preparing food, moving supplies, cleaning, loading or handling other hourly work rotate through more conventional shifts.
At the Chakrobarty farm, Randi, 19, and Mahata, 16, are each pulling eight-hour days helping turn the farmhouse into a food and supply point for the harvest operation.
They do not need to remain there for every hour the combines run.
The food does.
So meals, drinks and supplies are being organized to continue through the longer machine day even as individual hourly workers rotate out.
Marmaduke’s ownership also changes what happens after the grain leaves the field.
Rather than requiring each farm to market a relatively small share independently, Marmaduke will manage sale of the crop, either locally or through Memphis, then distribute proceeds proportionally when the wheat is sold.
For the farmers involved, that leaves two immediate jobs.
Get the crop out while it is ready.
Keep the machines moving.
For Chakrobarty, that means stepping away from a construction project involving hundreds of people, spending a day in a combine, and then returning to Leta while much of the harvest operation moves on without him.
Vost has already spent nearly a week working the Leta site and will take over the clearing operation without stopping it.
The surrounding agricultural system will do much the same.
Over the next ten days, roughly a quarter-million acres of wheat will move through a labor pool in which the people sitting in many of the machines are the same farmers who would have been there anyway.
The difference this year is that somebody else owns most of the crop.
And he is paying them for the day.
@AgCountry: The 200 combine operators make more sense once you realize most of them are farmers, not a standing force of hired combine drivers.
@CombineHand: Exactly. These are people who would already be sitting in a machine all day if the wheat belonged to them.
@AgCountry: The 400 fiat is compensation for doing owner-labor on somebody else’s crop, not an hourly wage calculation.
@FarmEconomics: The day-rate structure is very old-school agriculture dressed in new money. You take the machine assignment, and you finish the job.
@GrainRunner: Ten hours or fifteen, the grain cart and trucks stay with the combines.
@FarmEconomics: Which is why comparing 300 or 400 fiat directly to an eight-hour hourly wage misses how the work is organized.
@RuralMissouri: Randi and Mahata doing eight-hour shifts while the combines may run fourteen makes much more sense than having everyone on the farm working the machine schedule.
@KitchenCommand: Food service needs continuous coverage. Individual teenagers do not.
@RuralMissouri: Exactly. Rotate the people, not the sandwiches.
@HarvestTracker: Five combines on 800 flat acres for one day, then everybody moves. That is a regional harvest system, not five operators becoming Ellis’s crew for the week.
@WheatCountry: The field is the assignment.
@HarvestTracker: And once that field is done, the scarce operators go wherever the next ripe wheat is waiting.
@JoshWatson: Everyone should keep in mind Matt helped plant a lot of that wheat, planted a lot of the corn that just went in, and with everything planted since the V’ren arrived, will probably be back in somebody’s machine again this fall. #FreeHoldFarmer
@PamLittleton: I am still surprised he did not go straight out to the Hart farm this morning. Janie, Ray and Aaron are doing better, and Aaron came home this morning. They all thank everyone who came out.
@JoshWatson: Good. Tell Ray he still owes half the county for showing up before breakfast.
@GrainMarketWatch: Marmaduke owning 90 percent of the crop may matter more financially than who is driving the combines.
@CommodityDesk: He can aggregate the wheat, choose between local buyers and Memphis, and sell on a scale individual farmers cannot.
@GrainMarketWatch: Then distribute the proceeds proportionally instead of making every farm solve the same marketing problem separately.
@FarmLabor2440: The 20-to-75 operator age range does not surprise me at all.
@QuestEvans: Apparently none of you have sat your 75-year-old ass in a combine for fifteen hours and then climbed out pretending your spine still belongs to you.
@ConnorLittleton: Harvest at 25 was five times harder on me than at 20. At 50 it is a hundred times harder than 25. You are not filling me with hope about another seventeen years, Sir.
@OldIronNewBattery: The reason older operators stay valuable is experience. Machines got easier. Harvest did not.
@YoungOperator22: And half of what I know came from somebody over sixty telling me not to do the stupid thing they once did.
@OldIronNewBattery: Some lessons deserve oral tradition because the repair bill was too embarrassing to write down.
@LetaWatcher: Ellis leaving several hundred people at Leta to run wheat for one day no longer sounds bizarre once Treat is already integrated into the operation.
@RussellChakrobarty: She has been a master’s-level civil engineer for more than a decade. I have learned a lot talking with her, and I have only had my bachelor’s for four years.
@CivilWorks: So this is an operational handoff between experienced people, not the farmer disappearing and hoping somebody figures it out.
@FreeholdNumbers: Quarter-million acres in ten days is still the number that jumps out.
@RegionalPlanner: Because Leta is not happening instead of the regional economy. It is happening on top of it.
@MissouriFarmer: First contact, new city, alien technology, whatever. When the wheat is ready, you cut wheat.
Columbia Ledger
A Five-Acre Pond Becomes Leta’s First Unofficial Playground
The most visible sign that Leta is becoming a community may be outside the construction squares.
A spring-fed pond of roughly five acres has become a gathering place for children staying near the works.
Its overflow feeds the creek running between the first two Leta sitios before that water joins the broader drainage toward the river.
On Tuesday afternoon, eight-year-old Carl Littleton and roughly half a dozen other boys were teaching several V’ren girls to fish.
Nobody had organized the activity.
Carl had been told to go play.
His older brother Seth, 14, has found different work around the site, helping newcomers identify local snakes and useful plants while gathering wild foods and searching for Osage orange suitable for bowmaking.
Their mother Erica is one of the site medicos. Their father Dan works in construction.
The Littletons are now seriously discussing whether to leave Marshall and move permanently to Leta.
For their children, that decision may already feel less consequential than it does to their parents.
They have begun treating Leta as home.
- @MarshallParent: Carl being told to “go play” and responding by founding a fishing school feels correct.
- @RiverKid: Did anyone establish whether the V’ren girls caught anything?
- @MarshallParent: This is the only follow-up question that matters.
- @EricaL: They caught enough that Carl will be unbearable tonight.
- @RiverKid: Then the program is officially successful.
- @RiverKid: Did anyone establish whether the V’ren girls caught anything?
- @LetaWatcher: The Littletons considering a permanent move is more important than the cute fishing story.
- @ColumbiaLocal: Agreed. Families choosing to stay is when a worksite becomes a town.
- @LetaWatcher: Especially when every member of the family already has a role there.
- @SethLittleton: I have not found enough Osage orange yet.
- @ColumbiaLocal: Apparently the relocation referendum remains open pending bow supply.
- @ColumbiaLocal: Agreed. Families choosing to stay is when a worksite becomes a town.
