The nearest field was a spring garden full of tall grasses and wildflowers. The biggest butterfly garden you have ever seen.

Beyond that, the prairie got even taller, with acres of leafier grains. All of the plants hybrids, aided in their adaptation to the new world we had made. Most of them obviously succeeding. Closer to the river shined the solar roofs of the warehouses in which the products of those plants were stored for shipment.

They had been busier than he could have imagined. No wonder Lecker was worried about his monopoly.

The old footbridge across the canal was covered in foliage, mostly vines, some of them grown tree-trunk thick as they wrapped around the metal armature. It was only when he stepped onto the bridge and felt the give that he realized the vines had entirely replaced what was there before. The well-trod path was smooth and polished, but still glistening with life, and the rest was clumped with leaves and strands of bright-red flowers. At the end, he could see where the fast-growing trees were rooted at the waterline and then bent over to lean into their role, meeting their cousins with intertwining branches at midway.

When he stepped off, he found a group of young teachers seated in a meadow with a younger herd of kids. One of the teachers was Heather. And as he walked up to meet them, he knew how the repo man must feel.

33

When Maxine Price died, the inheritors of her legacy went through her papers and found more than they expected.

Maxine Price had been a college professor, a novelist, a radical activist, vice president of the United States for one truncated term, and fugitive convicted in absentia for conspiring in a plot to assassinate the president who succeeded her former boss. Surprisingly, the novelist part was what really stuck, even though what she wrote was mostly what people considered science fiction. Donny had read a couple of the stories when they were assigned by one of his more far-out teachers in college, but they were not his kind of thing.

Now they had incorporated it into their new gospel.

It started with the tapes. Old-school cassette tapes, pure analog tech, guaranteed surveillance-proof, a medium Donny could get fully behind even if he was uncertain about the content. Of which there were evidently hundreds of hours. Lectures to the people who would save the future, dangerous propaganda of a seditious radical who would lead the nation to ruin, or the solitary rants of a crazy old lady, depending on your point of view. Donny figured it was some variation of all the above.