What follows is the best picture we can assemble of the American Southwest circa 2225. None of it is verified. Some of it is contradicted by other sources. The traders who carry these stories charge for the telling, which should be noted.

Arizona is hot in ways that the word hot does not capture. The deserts have expanded. Phoenix is supposedly still inhabited but the population lives underground — the surface temperature exceeds human tolerance for roughly seven months of the year. The underground city is allegedly enormous, carved from the bedrock by mining automata that the residents repurposed. Nobody from the GLMZ has been there. A trader described it as "the biggest basement in the world" and said the people there had never seen rain. He was probably exaggerating. He was probably not exaggerating about the heat.

New Mexico is strange. Not Kentucky-strange — a different kind. The stories are consistent enough to suggest a pattern: the desert does something to electronic equipment. BCIs malfunction. Automata freeze. Vehicles with electronic ignition die. The effect is gradual as you move south from Colorado and absolute by the time you reach what used to be Albuquerque. Travelers who went in on foot — and this is secondhand from a secondhand source — say the city is occupied by people who have adapted to life without electronics entirely. They communicate with drum signals and light mirrors. They are reportedly hostile to anyone carrying active technology. One traveler claims they shot his drone out of the sky with a crossbow. The crossbow was described as "disturbingly accurate."

Nevada is Behemoth country. Not the Iowan Behemoths — something different. The travelers call them "Crawlers" and describe low, wide machines that move across the desert floor at night, scooping sand and processing it for unknown purposes. They leave trails visible from high ground — parallel grooves running north-south for hundreds of kilometers. Nobody knows what they are extracting. A mining engineer who examined samples of the processed sand said it was ordinary silica with the iron content removed. Why something would cross a desert removing iron from sand was not explained.

Texas is — well, Texas is complicated. The eastern half is reportedly a single corporate sovereignty called Lone Star Consolidated, which operates like a corponation the size of a country. It has its own currency, its own military, and its own BCI network that is incompatible with GLMZ standards. Western Texas is either empty or part of the New Mexico dead zone depending on who you ask. A trader from Dallas (if he was from Dallas — his accent was wrong) said Lone Star Consolidated had "solved the food problem" through massive indoor agriculture and that nobody in Texas was hungry. When asked why people didn't move there, he got quiet and said "the exit visa costs more than most people earn in a lifetime."

Utah is — nobody goes to Utah. The traders all say the same thing when you ask about Utah. They change the subject. One of them, after his fourth drink, said: "The Mormons built something in the mountains before the collapse. Something big. It's still running. Nobody goes to see what it is because nobody who goes to see what it is comes back with the same religion they left with." He would not elaborate. He left the next morning and has not been seen since.

Colorado is the buffer. It sits between the GLMZ trading range and the Southwest dead zones. Denver is allegedly intact and functioning as a waypoint for east-west trade. The Rocky Mountains are supposedly beautiful and largely depopulated. Wildlife has returned in force — and if the Nevada Crawlers are any indication, not all of it is biological. A pilot who flies the high routes says you can see lights on the mountain peaks at night that don't correspond to any settlement. She says she's learned not to fly toward them.