Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #15

After a short walk from the marina, I am now approaching the main drag of the town. In the granite buildings that stretch for miles either way I look, you can find any and every product or service you might ever need. Check out the store signs I'm videocaming, as I walk down the road: Melvin and Daughters Licensed Architects and Engineers; New Brandon Medical Research Laboratory; Special FX Holographic & VR Studio; Champlain Valley Mental Health Agency--New Brandon Branch; Ramon and Ikuji’s Atelier--Native New Vermont Arts and Crafts; and the New Brandon Municipal Stage Company.

Now, here’s a large operation, occupying four entire buildings: New Brandon Spinning and Weaving Workshop. And here’s one of my personal favorites, although I don’t have the time to drop in today: Springfield Tool and Dye, New Brandon Division. And just up this side street, you should be able to make out the New Brandon School; it’s the one with the New Vermont flag flying outside.

It’s time for me to make my pick-up of food stuffs at the Champlain Valley Co-operative. We like to call it “the coop” because it’s not really a co-op; it’s owned by the New Vermont Stake of the Church of the Latter day Saints, i.e. the Mormons, which wields a lot of power in New Vermont these days.

You may not know it, but Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons was born in Sharon, Vermont and there is still a monument to him in nearby South Royalton, now a remote outpost in central New Vermont. Even though it's quite hard to get there in these days, this monument serves as a focal point for Mormons who now live east of the Mississippi, all of whom try to make at least one pilgrimage there in the course of their lives. They do this , I've been told, because ever since the Great Change, they have been forever cut off from Salt Lake City, Utah, the former center of their religion. Of course during the petroleum panics that marked the beginning of the Great Change, many Mormons fled Vermont in an attempt to reach Utah. But from what we hear, not too many of them actually made it out there. What happened to them is the subject of lots of speculation by us non-Mormons and claims by their brethren who remained. Some say that many of these Mormon pilgrims perished along the way, victims of gasoline gangs, car-jackers, and kidnappers. Others say they got caught up in the Indigenous American Uprisings of 2019 on the Great Plains, but I don't think that likely since the petroleum panics took place later than that, around 2022. According to others, most of them were refused entry to various states along their route and ended up re-settling in areas along the west bank of the Mississippi River, which had been abandoned when flooding wiped out many cities and towns along that mighty river. Nobody really knows what happened to them, as information about that period in American history has been so heavily censored by the Authorities that it's impossible to know the truth about it.

Sorry about the digression. That's just my nature I guess. In any case, the Coop is just up this side street. You probably can’t tell, but the store we’re entering right now is really just a small part of the Coop that fills this entire three-story building and then two more like it. What goes on in the rest of this space is primarily food preserving and canning, the results of which is exactly what I’ve come to pick up.