Nobody knows what happened to Kentucky. Contact was lost in 2198, but the loss was not the clean severance that the word "lost" implies. It was a degradation. Transmissions from Kentucky's remaining population centers — Lexington, Louisville's highland districts, a handful of smaller communities in the eastern mountains — became intermittent starting in 2195. Messages arrived with increasing delays. Audio was garbled. Video feeds showed static that resolved, occasionally, into images of vegetation that communications analysts initially dismissed as camera obstruction. By 2197, the transmissions had reduced to automated beacon pulses. By March of 2198, the beacons stopped. The silence has been continuous since.

Three expeditions were sent between 2198 and 2201. All three returned. Their reports are consistent in the broad strokes and disturbing in the details. The roads into Kentucky — Interstate 65 from the north, Interstate 75 from the east — remained physically intact for approximately forty kilometers past the former state boundary. Beyond that point, the pavement was present but increasingly obscured by vegetation. Not overgrowth in the conventional sense. The expedition botanists described plant species that did not match any catalogued flora — growth that was too dense, too uniform, and too rapid. One report notes that a cleared section of road was re-covered within six hours of cutting. The growth was not aggressive. It was simply relentless.

A fourth expedition was dispatched in 2203 with heavier equipment and a larger team. It did not return. Search-and-rescue operations located the expedition's vehicles approximately sixty kilometers inside the former border, parked in orderly formation on what remained of a highway rest stop. The vehicles were intact. The equipment was intact. The personnel were absent. No signs of struggle, no biological traces beyond what would be expected from normal occupation, no indication of where twenty-three people went. The vehicles' onboard systems recorded nothing unusual up to the point where all recordings ceased simultaneously.

Satellite imaging of Kentucky shows green. Not the green of agriculture, not the green of managed forest, not the green of any land-use category that remote sensing analysts have established. It is uniform, unbroken green extending from the former state boundaries to the horizon in every direction. There are no structures visible. No roads. No infrastructure of any kind. Thermal imaging shows no heat signatures consistent with human habitation, industrial activity, or large animal populations. The thermal profile is consistent with dense vegetation and nothing else. The territory that was Kentucky is biologically active and civilizationally absent.

Kentucky appears on old maps. The GLMZ cartographic database retains the boundary lines as a historical reference. Inside those lines, the current classification reads: "Status unknown. No entry authorized." The authorization restriction is, in practice, unnecessary. Nobody wants to go.