Carl's grandfather was a Lone Eagle who had ridden out from the crowding 
and squalor of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and homesteaded a patch of abandoned 
ranch along a violent cold river on the eastern slope of the Wind River Range. 
From there he had made a comfortable living as a freelance coder and 
consultant. His wife had left him for the bright lights and social life of 
California and been startled when he had managed to persuade a judge that he 
was better equipped to raise their son than she was. Grandfather had raised 
Carl Hollywood's father mostly in the out-of-doors, hunting and fishing and 
chopping wood when he wasn't sitting inside studying his calculus. As the years 
went by, they had gradually been joined by like-minded sorts with similar 
stories to tell, so that by the time of the Interregnum they had formed a 
community of several hundred, loosely spread over a few thousand square miles 
of near-wilderness but, in the electronic sense, as tightly knit as any small 
village in the Old West. Their technological prowess, prodigious wealth, and 
numerous large weapons had made them a dangerous group, and the odd 
pickup-truck-driving desperadoes who attacked an isolated ranch had found 
themselves surrounded and outgunned with cataclysmic
swiftness. Grandfather loved to tell stories of these criminals, how they had 
tried to excuse their own crimes by pleading that they were economically 
disadvantaged or infected with the disease of substance abuse, and how the Lone 
Eagles—many of whom had overcome poverty or addiction 
themselves—had dispatched them with firing squads and left them posted 
around the edge of their territory as NO TRESPASSING signs that even the 
illiterate could read.