Nobody planned the floating colonies. They accrued — the way barnacles accrue on a hull, the way stories accrue around a truth. The first was just a barge that stopped moving in 2189. Then another barge lashed itself alongside. Then a platform. Then a houseboat. Then something that had once been a Ringo cargo hauler with its engine pulled and its hold converted into apartments. Within five years there was a neighborhood on the water, and nobody on shore could say exactly when it had become one.

There are now at least fourteen documented floating colonies on Lake Michigan, ranging from clusters of thirty or forty vessels to the largest — a sprawling archipelago of connected platforms called Freeport that supports an estimated 8,000 residents and has its own desalination system, power grid (solar and wind, pointedly not Ouroboros), and a form of direct democracy that would make a corponation lawyer break out in hives. The colonies sit in international water — or what passes for international water when national borders are a memory — and this ambiguity is the point. They are not in GLMZ. They are not subject to corponation sovereignty. They are not in anyone's tier system. They are, in the most literal sense, off the grid.

Each colony is its own culture. Freeport is the cosmopolitan hub — traders, refugees, people who left the Shelf and couldn't afford the Corridor east, people who chose the water over the wasteland. It has bars, a clinic, two schools, and a radio station that broadcasts music you cannot hear on any GLMZ feed. The Kettle — a tight cluster of converted fishing vessels near the Wisconsin shoreline — is a religious commune of tech-abstainers who communicate by flag signal and have not used a BCI in two generations. Iron Ring, anchored over the deep water east of Milwaukee, is a mercenary flotilla that sells security services to the other colonies and occasionally to GLMZ interests who need deniable maritime capability. The Nursery — and no one outside it knows why it's called that — is a colony of approximately 200 people who do not permit visitors and who have been observed, via drone, building something on their central platform. The something is large. It is not a building. Drones that fly too close are shot down with disturbingly accurate railgun fire.

The colonies trade with Old Harbor. This is the open secret that Ouroboros tolerates because the colonies provide fresh-caught fish, salvaged materials, and — most critically — a labor pool that exists outside the tier system and can therefore be hired without the bureaucratic overhead of corporate employment. Colony workers come ashore, work a shift, get paid in Quanta or barter, and return to the water. They have no BCI registration. They have no tier. They do not exist in any database. CorpSec finds this irritating. Ouroboros finds it profitable. The colonies persist because the math works for everyone except the people who care about principles.

Life on the water is not paradise. The colonies are cold in winter — Lake Michigan does not forgive — and cramped and wet and subject to storms that the Spires never feel. Medical care ranges from competent (Freeport's clinic) to nonexistent (Iron Ring treats injuries with vodka and optimism). Children grow up knowing how to swim before they know how to read, which is either charming or tragic depending on your tier. But the colonies offer something GLMZ cannot: the sky. The whole sky, horizon to horizon, with no Spires blocking the sun and no surveillance drones tracking your movement and no elevator that knows which buttons you're allowed to press. A colony kid asked what it was like to live on land looked confused and said: "Why would you want a ceiling?"

The corponations do not officially acknowledge the colonies. Unofficially, Ouroboros has invested in Freeport's desalination infrastructure, Vantablack has attempted (and failed) to install Cameraman drones on three colonies, and Arcturus maintains a quiet relationship with Iron Ring that both parties deny. The colonies are, in the language of the intelligence briefings, "tolerated non-state maritime entities." The colonists have a simpler term. They call themselves free.