This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest from Grist. Read the 2021 collection now. Or sign up for email updates to get new stories in your inbox.
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Augusta learned not to take worms for granted.
When she moved to the project grounds, she had always felt that worms were something that turned up when it rained and got squashed and made the sidewalk slightly smelly. The idea of a worm swap would have sounded surreal — the idea that she would find herself at one, ridiculous.
And yet there she was in the cool morning of the San Jose outposts, standing over a series of buckets, peering skeptically. The soil in them was rich, dark, wet; even Augusta could see that it was better than the dry grayish stuff she had been divesting of its large chunks of concrete. The reddish brown worms writhed ecstatically through it.
“They’re not A... Read more
