In the near future, Austin gleamed like an emerald city under the midday sun. The skyline was no longer jagged with concrete but smoothed over with foliage, as if nature itself had swallowed the bones of the city whole. Towers of living wood, their surfaces breathing with bioluminescent moss, rose from the earth. Around them, wind-harvesters swayed in the breeze, their petal-like blades catching every soft gust. The air was thick with the hum of aeroponics, a gentle rhythm of floating farms suspending vines of fruit, cascading like waterfalls from rooftop to rooftop. Everywhere, green architecture prevailed, a woven dance of flora and steel—part machine, part forest.
They called this movement Verducity now. Every building was a “growth,” each district a “biocrest,” where citizens lived within lush ecosystems that purified the air, captured water, and regenerated energy, leaving the city untouched by pollution or waste. Austin had become a hypercycle city, where nothing was wasted and everything was reabsorbed, recycled, renewed. In the evenings, the bio-lanterns would light up slowly, shimmering with a soft, organic glow, casting everything in a twilight that never truly left.
On the streets below, under the shade of towering ferns and vines, a woman walked alone. Her name was Ella, and she had come to hate this world of biosplendence. It wasn’t the greenery—how could anyone hate the quiet beauty of it all? It was the emptiness. No one ever talked anymore. They merely existed, their lives folded into this grand experiment, this seamless union with nature.
Ella’s fingertips brushed the stem of a crystalvine hanging from a building. The crystalvines were engineered to collect solar energy during the day, their glassy tendrils shimmering like jewels in the sunlight, and then release that energy in the form of soft, glowing heat at night. It was beautiful, sure. But wasn’t it supposed to mean something?
She had once loved someone here, in this verdant utopia. His name was Sam, and together they had dreamed of revolutionizing the city, helping it blossom into this verdurevolution. Sam had believed in all of it—the fusion of nature and machine, the new bio-economies where ecosystems produced everything. He had talked for hours about how they were going to save the world.
Now Sam was gone, a casualty of eco-exodus. People left as quietly as they lived now, disappearing into the wilderness, seeking the untouched wilds beyond Austin’s carefully cultivated jungle of living buildings and whispering streets. Sam had left Ella with a note, as soft and fragile as a leaf. “This city isn’t alive,” it had said. “We are not alive.”
Ella had wanted to follow him, but something held her here. The city was all she had known. Sam had seen what she couldn’t, and for that, she hated him as much as she loved him.
“Ella?”
A voice startled her. She turned to see Isaac, another eco-savant, someone she had once admired for his devotion to the greenstrata—the layers of vegetation that formed not just the city’s outer skin but its very heart. Isaac was pale, his dark hair falling messily over his eyes, his hands wrapped in gloves woven from leaf fibers. He had the look of someone who had given too much of himself to the cause, like most people here.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said, stepping closer. “You’ve been... quiet.”
“I’ve had nothing to say.”
Isaac nodded, his eyes drifting to the crystalvine beside her. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The way they grow, the way they—”
“They’re not growing. They’re engineered.”
He blinked. “Well, yes, but they live. It’s part of the syndigenesis—the synthesis of nature and design. You know this.”
“I know what it’s called,” she said. Her voice was sharper than she intended. “But it’s not enough. None of this is enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“To make us feel alive.”
Isaac frowned, but she could see the hurt in his eyes. “We’ve given everything to this city. To make it better, sustainable, regenerative. We’ve become part of something larger.”
“I didn’t want to become part of anything,” Ella said. “I wanted to feel something. Don’t you feel like we’re just... managing this living machine? Where’s the life in that?”
“Life is survival,” he said softly. “We’re ensuring we can survive.”
Ella stepped back, shaking her head. She looked around at the verdant sprawl, the aetherglow rising from the streets as evening began to fall, the subtle bio-lights that turned the city into a dream. But it was a cold dream. A clean, polished dream. It was survival, but it wasn’t life.
“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered. “Maybe that’s all this is. Survival.”
Isaac reached out, but she pulled away. Without another word, she turned and walked toward the river, where the old world still lay hidden beneath the endless tendrils of this new one. There was a place, just beyond the city’s edge, where the wild grasses grew taller than the tallest bio-building, where the trees stretched beyond human design. Sam had gone there, she was sure of it. Maybe she could find him. Or maybe, she thought, she would lose herself to the wild too.
As the light dimmed, the crystalvines flickered softly behind her, but Ella didn’t look back. She was done with their glow.