Missouri is not a state anymore. It is a swamp. The Mississippi River expanded beyond its banks in the 2140s after a cascade of levee failures that began in the southern reaches and propagated northward over a period of six years. The failure was not sudden — it was incremental, each breach compounding the next, each flood season leaving more water behind than the previous one. By 2149, the Army Corps of Engineers — or what remained of its institutional successor — declared the levee system irrecoverable. The water never receded. It found its level, and its level was everything below sixty meters elevation.

What exists now is a territory that satellite imaging classifies as wetland but which travelers describe as something closer to an inland sea with ambitions. The old river channel is indistinguishable from the surrounding flood plain. Cities that once sat on high ground — Jefferson City, Columbia, Springfield's northern reaches — are now islands, some accessible by boat, some not accessible at all. The infrastructure that connected them — highways, rail lines, power grids — is submerged or collapsed. Missouri's contribution to the continental economy ceased in the 2150s. Its contribution to continental mythology began shortly after.

Travelers who claim to have come from the Missouri Wetlands describe a world of fog, silence, and structures that sink a little more each year. They speak of platform villages built on stilts above the waterline, of houseboats lashed together into floating neighborhoods that drift with currents that follow no predictable pattern. They describe communities that have adapted entirely to aquatic life — people who navigate by the sound of water against submerged buildings, who trade in salvage pulled from drowned cities, who measure distance not in kilometers but in hours of paddling. The economy, if it can be called that, runs on barter. The currency is dry goods. Φ has no value where everything is wet.

Nobody from GLMZ has verified any of this. The few official survey missions dispatched into the Wetlands returned with inconclusive data — fog interfered with imaging, water depths were inconsistent with models, and GPS positioning drifted in ways that suggested either equipment malfunction or genuine navigational anomaly. One survey team reported finding a settlement of approximately two hundred people living on a platform constructed from the upper floors of a submerged shopping mall. They could not relocate the settlement on a subsequent visit. The coordinates matched. The mall was there. The platform was not.

The Missouri Wetlands remain officially uncharted territory. GLMZ cartographic databases list the region as "hydrologically active, status undetermined." Travelers continue to arrive in GLMZ from the west, damp and quiet, with stories of a world where the water is patient and the land is losing.