Dave-87 is the mega-city on Lancaster-3 that receives Joe Mulligan and Maggie during their copyright dispute. It is not presented as a destination of wonder so much as a dense, highly developed urban node: the couple arrives there by shuttle, finds lodging arranged by Maggie, and uses the city as the point from which she can pursue legislation against Bubble Spotlight Studios. Its importance lies in how efficiently it turns interstellar travel into bureaucracy, hospitality, and legal procedure.

Setting on Lancaster-3

Lancaster-3 is an older colony whose exploitation has advanced considerably further than that of Butterpond-4. As the shuttle approaches, Maggie observes substantially less greenery, a much larger population, and distant mega-city lights spread across nearly the entire largest continent. Thick smog surrounds the planet strongly enough that the shuttle must pass through it, although enormous terraforming machinery keeps the air clean and breathable in civilized areas. Much of Lancaster-3 remains uninhabitable, making Dave-87 a concentrated enclave of managed habitability within a heavily industrialized world.

The city also frustrates Maggie’s interest in living things. She would have liked to locate and study unfamiliar life forms during the visit, but the environmental conditions offer no realistic opportunity for that exploration. She therefore sets aside the question of local fauna and focuses on the visit’s stated purpose: legislation. Dave-87 consequently functions as a place where curiosity is narrowed by circumstance and where the built environment has displaced the natural world that Maggie hoped to investigate.

Arrival and Legal Purpose

After the shuttle lands and Joe stops shaking, Maggie searches for the law firm representing Bubble Spotlight Studios. The firm has a branch office in Dave-87, allowing the city to become the couple’s temporary headquarters. Maggie quietly books a hotel room for both of them and is preparing to call the firm for an appointment when security personnel ask her to enter a small side room at the spaceport. She complies, bringing Joe with her, and encounters Oliver Millington, the regional director of the Supernatural Eviction Agency, accompanied by two uniformed troopers.

The unexpected meeting changes the emotional character of the arrival. What should have been a straightforward legal stop becomes another encounter with the agency and with Oliver Millington, whom Joe dislikes because he believes Millington exploited Maggie’s direct and trusting nature during their contract negotiations. Maggie is not pleased by the encounter, but she is less visibly troubled than Joe, whose presence reflects both personal loyalty and suspicion toward institutions that might once again take advantage of her.

McLarson’s McLawyers

Joe insists on accompanying Maggie to the legal meeting even though the technicalities are unlikely to interest him. He takes a three-hour nap before leaving so that he will not fall asleep during the meeting again, buys a sharp business suit, and tolerates the uncomfortable outfit because he wants to support Maggie and avoid embarrassing her. The law firm sends an unusually luxurious vehicle to their temporary residence: a spacious car with elaborate seats, tinted windows, unnecessary amenities, and a chauffeur in a black-tie uniform and matching hat.

The grandeur of the transport proves misleading. McLarson’s McLawyers occupies only three rooms: a large, relatively empty meeting room and two tiny chambers containing VR pods and computer towers. Joe initially finds the offices cramped enough to compare the entire business with Maggie’s apartment, then revises that judgment by remembering that the apartment itself is unusually large. The contrast between the almost limousine-like hospitality and the modest office suite gives Dave-87’s legal infrastructure a distinctly theatrical quality: institutional authority is displayed through service and presentation even when the underlying workplace is compact and technologically ordinary.

Amy McLarson and Ike McLarson greet the visitors in the meeting room. Amy appears barely out of her teens because of gene modifications that obscure her actual age, while Ike presents himself as a dignified older gentleman with decorative horn-rimmed spectacles, a cultural remnant from an era when corrective eye surgery was less accessible. Both wear precise suits and short, practical haircuts, yet their expressions show childish excitement and unrestrained enthusiasm. Their mismatch of professional appearance and exuberant attitude becomes part of Dave-87’s larger pattern of surfaces that promise one thing and reveal another.

Narrative Significance

Dave-87 is defined by concentration: concentrated population, concentrated industry, concentrated legal and administrative power, and concentrated dependence on machines. Its lights cover the continental landscape while smog and terraforming systems govern the conditions under which people can live. The city is therefore both an achievement of colonial development and evidence of its costs. It offers breathable urban districts, efficient transportation, hotels, law offices, and institutional access, but it exists within a planet where greenery has receded and large areas have become uninhabitable.

The location also connects the story’s personal and technological networks. Maggie’s legal mission, Joe’s protective involvement, the Supernatural Eviction Agency’s intervention, the law firm’s staged hospitality, and the city’s advanced infrastructure all converge there. Even outside Dave-87, the broader world is shaped by systems that turn tiny financial transactions into profit, animate machines with alien substance, and organize domestic life around automated assistants. Against that background, Dave-87 is less a backdrop than a compact expression of the setting’s central condition: human life is sustained by immense systems that are useful, impressive, and difficult for any individual to fully comprehend.