Lake Forest was wealthy when wealth meant owning lakefront property. Now wealth means owning the jurisdiction the lakefront property exists in, and Lake Forest has adapted accordingly. The Canopy is a sovereign residential enclave — technically chartered under Axiom Industries' environmental governance subsidiary, practically governed by a homeowners' association with its own security force, its own courts, and its own definition of trespassing that includes 'existing within sensor range without authorization.' The name comes from the engineered tree canopy that covers the district: a bioengineered forest of modified oaks and elms that filter air, generate power through photovoltaic leaf coatings, and — not incidentally — block satellite and drone surveillance. Privacy, it turns out, is a natural resource if you can afford to engineer it.

The estates here belong to Tier 5 families — the executive class of the Big 20, legacy wealth dynasties that predate the sovereignty era, and the particular category of person who has enough money to live anywhere and chooses to live behind walls. The properties range from renovated historical mansions — some dating to the 1890s, maintained with the obsessive care of people who believe architecture is heritage — to new construction that looks like someone asked an AI to design a house for a person who has never experienced a consequence. The average lot size is four acres. The average property value is Φ180 million. The average occupancy is 2.3 people. The math of that is the point.

Corporate operations don't happen here — that's what downtown offices are for. But corporate decisions do. The Canopy's private dining rooms, estate libraries, and climate-controlled gardens are where the deals that shape GLMZ's power structure are negotiated away from surveillance, documentation, and the inconvenience of witnesses. When the CEOs of competing corponations need to agree on something that would be illegal if it were recorded, they meet in Lake Forest. When a board member needs to disappear for a weekend while a scandal is managed, they come here. The Canopy is not where power lives. It's where power sleeps, which is more honest.

The service population — approximately 4,000 people who maintain the estates, operate the security systems, cook the meals, and raise the children of people who are too important to do it themselves — live in a carefully designed staff quarter on the western edge of the district. The staff quarter is clean, well-maintained, and completely separated from the residential zones by a sensor barrier that the residents call 'the garden wall' and the staff call 'the leash.'