Traverse City was the Cherry Capital of the World. Millions of cherry trees on the hillsides around Grand Traverse Bay, producing fruit that was shipped across the country. The National Cherry Festival drew hundreds of thousands every July. That was before the growing seasons shifted, before the pollinators collapsed, before three consecutive years of unprecedented spring frost events killed 80% of the traditional cherry stock between 2158 and 2161.

What grew back was not cherries. Or rather, it was cherries in the same way that a NovaMind is a hearing aid -- technically descended from the original, engineered beyond recognition. Verdana BioSystems and a consortium of agricultural biotech firms moved into the Traverse City region in 2163, acquiring the devastated orchards at distressed prices and converting them into the largest open-air agricultural biotech laboratory in North America. The Orchard -- as the region is now known -- produces genetically modified fruit trees that function as biological factories: cherry variants that synthesize pharmaceutical compounds in their fruit, apple cultivars that sequester atmospheric carbon at ten times the natural rate, plum hybrids whose root systems filter groundwater contaminants. The hillsides around Grand Traverse Bay are still covered in blossoming trees every spring. They are beautiful. They are also patented, sensor-monitored, and producing outputs that have more in common with a chemical plant than a farm.

The city itself has bifurcated along familiar lines. The bayfront and the old downtown -- Front Street, the marina, the beaches -- have been developed into a corporate research campus and executive residential zone. The biotech firms' employees live well, eat well, and have access to fresh air and clean water that most GLMZ residents would consider fictional. Inland from the bay, the communities that used to farm conventionally now work the engineered orchards under contract terms that make them tenants on land their families owned for generations. They are paid to maintain trees they cannot eat the fruit from, because the fruit is not food -- it is intellectual property. The Cherry Festival still happens. It is sponsored by Verdana BioSystems. The cherries served are from the legacy variety preservation greenhouse, the only unmodified trees left. There are eleven of them.