Donny had seen Lecker’s vision of the future. There was a whole TV show about it, back when Tripto Labs launched its first commercial plantings on land that had been reclaimed by the feds. Lecker wasn’t on it—he knew extreme wealth went best with maximum anonymity. But Helen was, because she really believed in the project—a way to do something with her money that helped people, while generating profits far beyond what the businesses she had inherited were capable of.

The show was propaganda, on one of the channels that pretended to be independent but was owned and controlled by an ally of the President. But it was the kind of propaganda anyone could get behind. Because everyone was hungry in those days. It was easy to get them to go with the program. Especially the way they packaged it, with the happy rainbow families of farmers helping to propagate the new crops that would restore the American breadbasket and clean the air and the soil in the process. As an extra benefit, one of the varietals was optimized for processing into a reasonably clean fuel.

Maybe the backers of the program actually believed that was how it would work. The idea of the independent farmer was the lodestone of the American experiment, even if that species was now as rare as the wild birds that had once inhabited the forests and prairies they plowed under. The problem was, the family farmer model didn’t work for the new crops they had engineered to survive in the new conditions. To make them grow, and reproduce, you had to bring back the plantation model.

The era when armies of cheap labor would come from the global South were a distant memory, from a more prosperous era that played back in your head like a movie that had never been real. Fortunately, the border fortifications they had erected to keep people from leaving meant there was a healthy supply of cheap labor back home—many of them the farmers who had been turned into refugees by the failure of their own business model.

It made perfect sense that Tripto Labs and AMR ended up under common ownership. They had “synergies,” as the investment bankers liked to put it. The same synergies as the cotton field had with the whip. The kind of synergies that are so powerful in their productive and wealth-generating potential that entire bodies of law are developed to perpetuate them.

And when he finally saw that clearly, Donny realized that he had the theory of his AMR case all wrong. Miles knew, and they killed him for it. The deaths in the camps weren’t about politics. They were about labor. About people trying to organize. About who owns the means of production—when the means of production is the very stuff of life.

Too bad he figured it out too late.

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