Every ton of iron ore, grain, limestone, and manufactured goods moving between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes passes through the Soo Locks, and the Soo Locks sit on the American side of the St. Marys River, which makes Lockhaven South the most strategically valuable small city in the Great Lakes Metropolitan Zone. The locks were built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the nineteenth century. They are now operated by a rotating consortium of corporate sovereigns — currently led by Stonepath Logistics and Ferrogate Transit — who maintain the infrastructure in exchange for tariff revenue on every vessel that transits. The arrangement makes the consortium very rich and makes Lockhaven South very tense, because everyone involved understands that controlling the locks means controlling the GLMZ's arterial commerce.

The city wraps around the lock complex like a parasite around its host. The waterfront is entirely corporate sovereign territory — lock operations, vessel staging areas, cargo inspection facilities, and the security infrastructure required to protect the most important chokepoint in the interior of the continent. Behind the waterfront, the city proper is a contested zone in a different sense: Lockhaven South sits in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which is the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute between the states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Michigan claims historical sovereignty. Wisconsin claims the UP was economically abandoned by Michigan's lower peninsula government and that Wisconsin's integration of the UP into its economic sphere constitutes de facto jurisdiction. The federal government, such as it remains, has declined to adjudicate. The result is a city with three competing authority structures — corporate (the lock consortium), state (Michigan and Wisconsin both), and federal (the military presence that guards the locks as critical infrastructure).

The residential population lives in this jurisdictional overlap and has developed the particular cynicism of people governed by everyone and represented by no one. The Upper Peninsula's war — Wisconsin versus Michigan — plays out here in competing propaganda, dueling law enforcement agencies, and occasional violence that both sides blame on the other. The locks don't care. The ships keep coming.