Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #11

If you are successfully receiving our holocom, you should be able to hear my voice and see the 3-D holographic images we are holcoming. In case you are simply reading a transcript of our holog, you will have to imagine what I am describing of the landscape along the shores of Lake Champlain in New Vermont.

What should immediately strike you as different about what you are seeing compared with the holograms you have probably seen of New Vermont is that the mountains you see here are entirely treeless. The thick green forests that gave these mountains and our nation their now-anachronistic names (the Green Mountains of Verre Mont), have, as I mentioned in a previous holocom, long since been cut down. In place of trees, you should be able to see the wind and solar energy farms that literally blanket the mountaintops, leading many a wag to refer to them satirically as the High Tech Mountains.

About 100 meters below the mountain ridge, you should be able to see large plateaus on which are situated New Vermont’s famous granite processing complexes, dozens of inter-connected buildings constructed with a sturdy aluminum alloy and topped by a maze of what look like antique Erector Set-constructions for giants. These are the wind and solar-powered hoists and stone-crushers in which granite slag is made into crushed stone, used in place of petroleum-based asphalt to pave roads and streets throughout the eastern half of our continent. The lightweight, but durable construction materials enable the buildings and cranes to be disassembled and lowered each year as granite removal causes the plateaus to slowly but inexorably creep down the mountainside (several meters per year).

The buildings beneath the crushers are the sheds in which generations of skilled granite workers, using low-energy, hydraulic machines, have carved uniform granite building blocks of specified and carefully-measured sizes out of the rough granite hoisted out of the dozens of quarries that dot the mountainsides. Like the crushed stone, these blocks are used throughout the eastern half of the continent; in this case, in place of energy-intensive building construction materials like concrete and steel. Over the past fifty years, the granite mountains of New Vermont have helped make our nation one of the wealthiest east of the Rocky Mountain divide.

Note what appear to be narrow shiny stripes running from the granite sheds straight down the steep grassy mountainsides. These are actually sheet metal chutes down which are spilling endless streams of crushed stone that dump out at the bottom of the mountain into a slowly moving, line of connected containerized dump-wagons. These wagons run over low-friction narrow-gauge rails, moving by a combination of anti-inertial, low-power solar electricity and the pull of powerful oxen, walking on paths alongside the rail lines that trace huge circuits from the mountain to the lakeside where barges await their loads, and then back to the base of the mountains for another load.

Slightly to either side of the crushed-stone chutes you should be able to see an even more unusual sight: the rocks on the mountains appear to be moving slowly downhill. In fact, they are… on huge natural-fiber gravitational conveyor belts, which carry the enormously heavy granite blocks. These belts, too, empty their cargo onto the dump-wagons for transport to barges, which will be drawn mechanically either down the lake and through the Champlain-Hudson canals to New York City for use along the Atlantic Seaboard or up the lake and through the canals of southern Quebec to Montreal for use in the Great Lakes Federation. If you look closely, you’ll see that running along the edge of the lake, as far as the eye can see, is a wide crushed-stone road, lined with enormous pulleys and cables, used by the drovers and their oxen to pull these barges up and down the lake.