Technology and Agriculture Battle It Out in This Eerily Dystopian Short Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine . Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Dreamweavers” by Alexander Weinstein. Enjoy!

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In The Before Days, Tim was a fellow fabricator of dreams. He made a good living frequenting rooftop parties amid aging tech bros in fur-clad vests where mangosteen juices were mixed and silent discos reverberated within guests’ inner ears. As the dustbowl spread across the continent, even Reza himself was rumored to have purchased one of Tim’s dreamscapes—a particularly beautiful worldbuild of plummeting waterfalls and Tahitian escorts that kept Reza ensconced behind his retinas for days—after which Tim was invited to more exclusive barricaded enclaves of the super-rich, all who wanted private downloads to their next digital escape.

I wasn’t anywhere as good as Tim—hadn’t climbed the ladder to sell boutique-level dreams to movie stars or tech barons. I worked for a travel company, resurrecting drowned Venice behind the eyes of those who’d never see the city again. I sold vacations to people who didn’t leave their bedrooms, weaving Barcelona, Rome, and the French Riviera into existence after heatwaves left the real streets filled with the dead. By then, the electric grids had begun to crash, fracking spit gas from faucets, and water was scarce in half our states. It was the last good years of the planet, though we didn’t know it then, a time when delivery trucks still slinked along roads like dying millipedes, spitting boxes of survival supplies to anyone with enough funds to secure a purchase.

I’d witnessed a few of Tim’s early dreams, recognized his genius before he became famous, and I’d reached out as a fellow programmer of consciousness. We became hypernet friends, then met in person to talk about projects we were working on and reminisce over drinks about the old days when we carried screens in our pockets rather than spliced into our eyes. We shared a wistfulness for gardening; he’d begun collecting seeds since they’d been privatized, and he invited me to see the project he was working on.

I arrived to the Lower East Side on a hot June day and found an abandoned parking lot, Tim bare-chested and sweaty, swinging a sledgehammer over his head and bringing it down on a patch of blacktop.

Tim set the hammer on his shoulder and walked to the opening in the fence. “Got some black-market seeds I want to try. Come give me a hand.”

The city buzzed with daylight, the pavement radiating heat. Tim crouched and put his fingers beneath the broken asphalt. I took the other side, and we hefted it to the fence where a pile of rubble sat. He held out the sledgehammer. “Wanna give it a shot?”

Truth was, I did. It’d been decades since I’d done anything more physical than programming dreams or running for a train.