The Keweenaw Peninsula juts into Lake Superior like a broken finger, and at its base, straddling the Portage Lake Ship Canal, sit the twin cities of Houghton and Hancock — now collectively called Copperhead. The copper mines that built these towns in the 1800s were exhausted by the mid-twentieth century, but the mining infrastructure remained, and infrastructure has a way of finding new purposes. The abandoned mine shafts have been repurposed as geothermal energy installations, cold-storage data centers (the underground temperature is a constant 8°C, which is cheaper than any artificial cooling system), and deep-substrate research laboratories operated by Michigan Technological University.

Michigan Tech is Copperhead's reason for continued existence. The university has evolved from a mining school into the GLMZ's premier research institution for extreme-environment engineering — deep mining automation, cold-weather augmentation systems, underwater infrastructure, and the neural interfaces required to operate in conditions that would destroy baseline human cognition. The research is funded by a consortium of corponations who want the technology and a federal government that wants to keep the technology out of exclusive corporate hands. The result is a campus that operates as a neutral research zone, producing innovations that both sides of the UP war claim credit for and neither side fully controls.

The Portage Lake Ship Canal, an artificial waterway cut through the base of the Keweenaw in the nineteenth century, connects Lake Superior to itself via a shortcut that saves shipping 160 kilometers of travel around the peninsula. The Lift Bridge connecting Houghton and Hancock spans this canal — an ancient mechanical structure, upgraded with automated systems but still recognizable as the same bridge that was built 200 years ago. Copperhead is a place where the old infrastructure refuses to die and the new infrastructure grows inside it, like plants in the cracks of concrete.