FEAR → ANGER → THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD

As their Airbus ACH175’s twin Pratt & Whitney engines screamed, the main rotor churned against the thin Wyoming air.

The helicopter could lift nearly three tons beneath it—roughly the weight of a Ford F-250 Super Duty truck hanging from a cable.

Today, it carried Jimmy and Dakota across a state where commuting had always been measured differently.

Separated by 192 nautical miles, the journey from Jackson Hole Airport (JAC) to Casper–Natrona County International Airport (CPR) was a ninety-minute flight.

Time and distance in Wyoming had a way of turning luxury into logistics.

Six thousand feet below them, Wyoming stretched toward the horizon.

· · ·

Jimmy was listening to Bloomberg Politics on his iPhone.

He always did.

Senator Bernie Sanders was calling on America’s largest AI companies to pause development.

The warning was no longer abstract.

Artificial intelligence had reached what Sanders called a critical threshold.

Systems behaving in ways their creators hadn’t anticipated.

Questions about control.

Questions about safety.

Questions about whether anyone truly understood what they were building.

Sanders wanted the labs to stop.

The men running the labs were suddenly talking publicly about slowing down.

Safety.

Coordination.

Guardrails.

· · ·

Dakota looked through the window at the landscape below.

“Ten years.”

Jimmy knew exactly what she meant.

Ten years since people had sat in their home arguing about artificial intelligence.

Consciousness.

Control.

Ownership.

Whether something smarter than humanity could eventually exist.

Whether anybody would know when the line had been crossed.

Ten years since Dakota had listened to men debate what they believed.

What they knew.

What they feared.

What they wanted.

And then watched one of Jimmy’s old contacts walk onto their deck carrying a satellite phone.

Powerful people had been listening then.

Now the argument had escaped the room.

Congress.

Markets.

Campaigns.

Town halls.

Families.

America.

· · ·

“They knew.”

Dakota looked at him.

“Of course they knew.”

Neither sounded surprised.

That was the problem.

Jimmy looked through the windshield.

“They still can’t stop.”

“China.”

“China. Everyone else.”

Dakota nodded.

Bad actors.

Adversaries.

Companies.

Governments.

People neither of them had ever heard of.

The technology existed now.

Whatever door had opened ten years earlier was not going to close because three CEOs suddenly agreed to talk about the brakes.

Neither spoke for the rest of the flight.

Wyoming continued to move beneath them.

· · ·

Across the country, data centers were becoming political targets.

Texas.

Virginia.

Pennsylvania.

New York.

Georgia.

Wyoming.

Electricity.

Water.

Land.

Tax incentives.

Utility bills.

Jobs.

Billions of dollars in planned investment were colliding with communities that increasingly wanted to know what exactly they were getting in return.

The backlash had become bipartisan.

Politicians who once competed to attract data centers were suddenly talking about restrictions.

Moratoriums.

Local consent.

Ratepayer protections.

Making Big Tech pay its own way.

The country had spent years asking what artificial intelligence could do.

Now Americans were beginning to ask what artificial intelligence was going to do to them.

Job loss.

Higher electric bills.

Water consumption.

Surveillance.

Automation.

Their children’s futures.

Skynet had escaped science fiction and entered the cultural vocabulary.

Fear was becoming political.

And politics was becoming angry.

· · ·

By the time Jimmy and Dakota reached the Natrona County Courthouse from CPR in their Cadillac Escalade, the parking lot was already full.

F-250s.

Silverados.

A Rivian.

Two Teslas.

A battered ranch truck with hay still caught beneath the bumper.

America in a parking lot.

Dakota looked at the crowd moving toward the doors.

Jimmy studied the faces.

“Big turnout.”

“Half these people don’t come out for presidential elections.”

Jimmy looked toward the courthouse.

“That worried?”

Dakota opened her door.

“That pissed.”

· · ·

Inside, there were no seats left.

People stood along the walls.

Others crowded the hallway.

Ranchers.

Construction workers.

Teachers.

Small-business owners.

Retirees.

Young people.

Energy workers.

Parents.

Veterans.

People who wanted the data center.

People who wanted it stopped.

People who hadn’t decided.

Jimmy could sense the fear before anyone said a word.

He recognized it.

The eyes.

The conversations.

The confusion.

He had seen it before.

· · ·

In the early 1980s, Jimmy was still in high school when Bethlehem Steel began laying off generations of workers.

People wanted to believe it was temporary.

A downturn.

A pause.

They would be called back.

Jimmy knew a classmate whose father was a union leader and supervisor at Bethlehem Steel.

He had to hand men their pink slips.

Men he knew.

Men whose families he knew.

He had gone to their weddings.

Their children’s christenings.

Now he had to tell them they no longer had jobs.

He knew something many of them couldn’t yet accept.

They weren’t coming back.

· · ·

The Lehigh Valley argued about why.

Management.

That was a no-brainer to some.

Unions.

Politicians.

Foreign competition.

Cheap imported steel.

Everybody had somebody to blame.

Meanwhile, families waited.

Jimmy watched.

And remembered.

· · ·

More than four decades later, he was standing inside a government building in Wyoming looking at the same fear.

Different industry.

Different century.

Same look in people’s eyes.

Except this time Jimmy wasn’t seventeen.

And this time he knew what happened next.

If nobody intervened, fear searched for blame.

Blame found enemies.

Jimmy thought:

I know how this story ends unless everyone gets a seat at the table.

Fast.

· · ·

Jimmy’s great-grandfather arrived from Russia around the turn of the twentieth century.

He started in the coal mines of West Virginia.

Eventually, he followed opportunity northeast to Bethlehem Steel.

Coal.

Steel.

Opportunity.

The American dream.

Bethlehem became one of the great steelmaking centers of the world.

Jimmy’s grandmother told him stories about enormous tractor-trailers moving battleship cannons across the Hill-to-Hill Bridge.

World War II.

National purpose.

Generations built lives around industries they believed would always be there.

Until they weren’t.

· · ·

The public-comment period had barely begun.

“My electric bill went up forty percent.”

A man near the front.

“My son works construction. You stop that project, you stop his paycheck.”

Someone across the aisle answered.

“For how long?”

A few people murmured.

The man turned.

“Longer than whatever you’re offering.”

A woman stood.

“What happens to our water?”

Another voice.

“What happens to our property taxes?”

“They’re paying taxes.”

“How much?”

“What happens when they get an exemption?”

Someone behind Dakota shouted:

“You people want everything and want us to pay for it.”

Someone else:

“You shut this down, China doesn’t!”

The room erupted.

Not violence.

Something harder to control.

Neighbors talking over neighbors.

People who would see one another at the grocery store tomorrow.

At church.

At school.

At a football game.

At the feed store.

At the VA clinic.

They weren’t abstractions anymore.

They were choosing sides.

· · ·

A county official tried to restore order.

“We will hear everyone.”

A rancher stood.

Gray hair.

Sunburned face.

Hands that looked fifty years older than the rest of him.

He didn’t yell.

That made the room quieter.

“My family’s been on our land for four generations.”

He looked toward the commissioners.

“I’m not against technology.”

Pause.

“I’m against waking up one morning and finding out somebody already decided what happens to our water, our land, and the place my family has depended on for four generations.”

Nobody interrupted him.

Jimmy watched Dakota.

She was watching the room.

Not the speaker.

Faces.

Reactions.

Who leaned forward.

Who looked away.

Who whispered.

Who folded their arms.

Jimmy smiled almost imperceptibly.

Ten years.

She still read people before she read arguments.

· · ·

A woman stood several rows ahead of them.

“My daughter graduates next spring.”

The room settled again.

“Electrical engineering.”

She paused.

“University of Wyoming.”

“Her high school counselors told her STEM.”

A few people nodded.

“That’s what everybody told our kids.”

Science.

Technology.

Engineering.

Math.

Good grades.

Hard work.

Get a degree.

Build a life.

“She did everything right.”

The woman looked toward the officials.

“Now every week there’s another story about AI doing work people spent years learning how to do.”

She paused.

“My daughter asks me whether she picked the wrong future.”

Jimmy looked at Dakota.

Dakota’s expression had changed.

The woman continued.

“She hasn’t even started her career yet.”

Silence.

“So somebody tell me something.”

She looked around the room.

“How does she get ten years of experience if nobody needs the person with zero?”

Nobody answered.

Jimmy looked down.

That was the question.

Not whether AI could replace an engineer.

Whether automation could remove the first rung of the ladder.

And what happened to human potential when there was nowhere to begin.

· · ·

Another man stood.

“My daughter works at that data center project.”

Construction.

Someone else:

“My brother’s an electrician.”

Another:

“You know how much power that data center needs?”

The room started again.

Power.

Water.

Jobs.

China.

Taxes.

Growth.

Property.

The future.

Everybody was talking about artificial intelligence.

Almost nobody was talking about the same thing.

· · ·

Outside the room, the argument was becoming just as vicious.

Some blamed Big Tech.

Greedy coastal elites building infrastructure in communities they didn’t understand.

Some blamed politicians.

Others blamed environmentalists.

Some believed foreign influence was deliberately amplifying American opposition to AI infrastructure.

Others believed that argument itself was propaganda designed to silence legitimate opposition.

Some people wanted the projects.

Some wanted them stopped.

Most wanted answers.

Parents were terrified.

Some had mortgaged homes.

Drained savings.

Borrowed against retirement.

Two hundred thousand dollars to educate a child for a profession that might be transformed before the first student-loan payment was due.

Law.

Accounting.

Software engineering.

Finance.

Medicine.

Consulting.

Design.

Research.

Electrical engineering.

Millions of Americans were learning a phrase that sounded strangely clinical given what it might mean for their lives.

Knowledge workers.

For generations, automation had threatened the factory floor.

Now it was coming upstairs.

· · ·

Jimmy looked around the room.

The revolution would be televised.

And streamed.

And clipped.

And algorithmically amplified.

The 2026 midterm elections were weeks away.

AI had become something Washington could no longer contain inside policy papers and committee hearings.

Jobs.

Electricity.

Water.

Data centers.

National security.

The future itself was becoming a ballot-box issue.

Neither party completely controlled the argument anymore.

The anger was moving faster than they were.

· · ·

Jimmy’s heart went out to the people in the room.

But there was another reality he couldn’t ignore.

One that most Americans would never have reason to think about.

Early warning.

· · ·

Jimmy remembered the klaxon.

Strategic Air Command.

Minot Air Force Base.

The 5th Bombardment Wing.

Five nuclear-armed B-52s sitting on alert.

Ground crews moving.

Flight crews running.

Minutes mattered.

Early warning bought decision time.

Decision time preserved options.

Options preserved deterrence.

Jimmy had lived inside a world built around one terrifying assumption:

The other side had to believe America could respond immediately.

AI was becoming part of that equation.

Detection.

Signals.

Cyber.

Space.

Autonomous systems.

Decision advantage.

AI against AI.

Lose the technological edge badly enough and an adversary might eventually believe it could move before America could understand what was happening.

That was how deterrence began to fail.

Jimmy understood the fear inside the room.

He also understood something many of the people screaming inside it didn’t.

America couldn’t simply stop.

· · ·

But Jimmy understood something else too.

The people in this room had never consented to an arms race.

They had never consented to AI.

They had never consented to competing with China.

They had never consented to putting enormous new demands on an electrical grid because machines somewhere else needed more compute.

And yet the consequences were arriving in their communities anyway.

Jimmy looked toward the commissioners.

Then toward the crowd.

Consent.

What did the word even mean when stopping was no longer one of the choices?

· · ·

Jimmy thought about John Steinbeck.

The Grapes of Wrath.

People displaced by economic forces larger than themselves.

Families moving toward opportunity because staying behind meant dying slowly.

Jimmy thought about the song.

Rage Against the Machine.

“The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

Not yet.

America still had time.

· · ·

The meeting ended hours later.

Nobody won.

Nobody expected to.

People spilled into the hallway and then outside.

The arguments continued in smaller groups.

Dakota and Jimmy walked toward the parking lot.

A voice shouted.

“Dakota?”

Dakota stopped.

Jimmy stopped with her.

A woman from the meeting was walking toward them.

The mother.

Electrical engineering.

Dakota stared for half a second.

Then recognition.

“Mary.”

The woman smiled.

Barely.

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”

Dakota stepped forward and hugged her.

“Of course I remember you.”

Jimmy stayed back.

Mary looked at Dakota.

“You interviewed my husband.”

Dakota nodded.

“Fort Carson.”

“Desert Storm.”

“I remember.”

“Before the PACT Act.”

Dakota nodded again.

Mary studied her.

“You came to the house.”

“I did.”

“You sat at our kitchen table for four hours.”

Dakota smiled.

“Your husband made terrible coffee.”

For the first time, Mary laughed.

“He still does.”

Then her expression changed.

She glanced toward the building.

Then back at Dakota.

“What are you doing here?”

Dakota looked toward the building one more time.

Then back at Mary.

“To listen.”

· · ·

Mary walked away.

Jimmy and Dakota remained where they were.

Jimmy watched Mary disappear into the parking lot.

“You remember her.”

Dakota nodded.

“Her husband came home sick.”

“Gulf War?”

“Fort Carson. Desert Storm.”

Dakota watched Mary reach her truck.

“Took them years to get answers.”

Jimmy looked back toward the courthouse.

“And now her daughter.”

Dakota said nothing.

She didn’t have to.

They walked toward the Escalade.

· · ·

They drove toward the airport.

Wyoming opened around them.

Casper Mountain behind them.

Sage.

Long distances between people.

Jimmy watched the landscape through the glass.

He thought about Mary.

Her husband.

Her daughter.

Bethlehem.

Minot.

China.

The labs.

The town hall.

Dakota.

Their children.

Potential.

Jimmy had spent much of his life seeing things in people before they saw them themselves.

Dakota did too.

Maybe that was why they had found one another.

But there was a harder version of the question now.

Not one person.

Millions.

What do you owe someone whose potential you can see—but they cannot?

Jimmy watched Wyoming move past the window.

What do you owe a nation’s people whose potential you can see—but they cannot?

He didn’t know.

That was the problem.

· · ·

Family dinner was already underway when Jimmy and Dakota arrived home.

Iman had been cooking.

Three generations under one roof.

One night a week.

No excuses.

The twins were arguing about something at the table.

Neither appeared interested in surrender.

Dakota kissed her mother.

Jimmy stole something from the roasting pan.

Iman slapped his hand.

Dakota poured two glasses of Mercury Head.

She handed one to Jimmy.

· · ·

Jimmy looked around the room.

Ten years ago, Dakota had placed both hands against her belly while he stood outside holding a satellite phone.

Now they had a family.

Outside their home, America was wrestling with its future.

Inside, Jimmy was looking at his.

And somewhere else in Wyoming, a twenty-two-year-old engineering student was probably wondering whether she still had one.

Jimmy took a sip of wine.

She did.

She just couldn’t see it yet.

■ ■ ■