Austin, 2050. The city was a patchwork quilt of greenery, every surface dripping with flowers and foliage. Thanks to ReLeaf, the cooperative wonder, the urban jungle had become literal. Contributors reveled in residual incomes, each plant a tiny paycheck, a far cry from the exploitative systems of Uber and the oil barons of yore.
Enter Alexis "Lex" Ryder, garden hacker extraordinaire, and part-time detective. Lex was no stranger to the underbelly of the city's leafy façade. With a trench coat perpetually stained green at the hems, Lex prowled the streets, eyes peeled for anomalies in the chlorophyll.
One evening, Lex found themselves on a rooftop garden that screamed "Suspicious!" louder than a peacock in a library. The plants were too perfect, their leaves too symmetrical. It was the kind of garden that paid for itself and then some. Lex's nose for trouble twitched.
"Alright, you overachieving begonias, what are you hiding?" Lex muttered, deploying a nanodrone into the foliage. The drone buzzed through the greenery, detecting a pulse beneath the petals—a signal.
Lex hacked into the irrigation system, fingers dancing over the interface. The system spat back encrypted messages, hidden in the ebb and flow of nutrients. The Verdant Veil, the shadowy group whispered about in garden circles, had left their mark.
Just as Lex was about to crack the code, a voice interrupted. "Admiring the begonias, are we?"
Lex spun around to see a figure cloaked in shadows, holding a pruning shears with an unsettling gleam.
"Cutting it a bit close, aren’t we?" the figure continued, stepping into the moonlight. It was Morgan Thorn, the notorious head of the Verdant Veil.
Lex's heart raced. "I knew you were behind this, Thorn. Using ReLeaf’s cooperative system to hide your schemes."
Thorn chuckled, a sound as cold as a January frost. "Clever, aren't you, Ryder? Too bad you won't live to tell anyone about it."
With a swift motion, Thorn clipped a vine, and the garden transformed. Vines twisted into snares, flowers turned to traps. The tranquil rooftop became a verdant nightmare.
Lex dodged a thorny embrace and stumbled back. "You won't get away with this, Thorn. The collective won’t stand for it!"
Thorn's smile was a venomous bloom. "The collective won’t know. They'll think you disappeared in the night, just another gardener lost to the green."
As the vines closed in, Lex saw their nanodrone, still buzzing in the foliage, transmitting data. A desperate idea bloomed in Lex's mind.
"Let’s see if this garden can take a little pruning," Lex quipped, activating the drone's emergency signal. The device emitted a high-pitched whine, confusing the plant's sensors.
For a brief moment, the vines hesitated, and Lex made a break for the edge of the roof. Just as they leaped to the adjacent building, a vine snagged their coat, dragging them back.
The last thing Lex saw was Thorn’s smirk as darkness closed in, the green tendrils tightening around them. The cliffhanger of their life had never been this literal, or this leafy.
To be continued...
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Ancestral Signal (0.00) | A pulse older than electricity, carrying memory from deep strata into the present. |
| Bandwidth Bloom (0.00) | A sudden flowering of overlapping consciousness across timelines, where signal and self blur into radiant confusion. |
| Clandestine Collective (0.00) | A hidden network of urban stewards who move beneath the official grid, planting quiet interventions such as living walls, water hacks, and spectral gardens that reshape the city without ever claiming credit. |
| Closed Loop System (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |
| Crystalvine (0.00) | An engineered plant with glassy tendrils that collect solar energy by day and release it as radiant warmth by night. |
| Drone Murmur (0.00) | The constant whir and whisper of aerial machines that mediate truth, rumor, and spectacle across the city. |
| Ebb and Flow (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |
| Ego Eclipse (0.00) | The sudden blackout of self, where shame or awe blots out thought and leaves only nothingness. |
| Future Austin (0.00) | Future Austin invites you to explore a luminous vision of the city’s tomorrow—where imagination and reality intertwine to create a thriving, sustainable urban landscape. Here, grassroots ingenuity and cutting-edge technology power communities, transforming Austin into a place of boundless possibility. Through insightful articles and evocative Organic Fiction, you’ll glimpse futures shaped by innovators like ReLeaf, whose bold strategies—such as Vertical Garden Fairs in schools—seed green revolutions in unexpected places. From unconventional movements like Trash Magic reimagining music distribution, to fictional worlds alive with unseen energy and harmony, this collection offers both practical inspiration and immersive storytelling. Whether you’re drawn to actionable sustainability or simply wish to lose yourself in tales of a resilient, radiant future, Future Austin points toward the city we could create—and the one we must. |
| Hawkers (0.00) | A renegade collective of tinkerers and water-keepers who drift between shore and sky, trading in invention and rumor while defending Austin’s fragile waterways. |
| Irrigation System (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |
| KudzuPorch (0.00) | A compostable hex-shelled dwelling that creeps block by block like a vine and insists on a porch as proof of humanity. |
| Lex Ryder (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |
| Morgan Thorn (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |
| Nanodrone (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |
| Noir (0.00) | A lens of shadow and reflection where truth is glimpsed only through distortion, the city itself becoming both accomplice and suspect in every story. |
| Petal Settlement (0.00) | The fragile peace made when fear dissolves like blossoms falling into water. |
| Photosynthetic Choir (0.00) | A collective of altered beings whose breath and leaves merge into a single voice of vegetal cognition. |
| Railbloom (0.00) | A light-rail line that flowers into more than transport, carrying passengers and plants alike toward a greener future. |
| ReLeaf (0.00) | Welcome to the ReLeaf Cooperative, where we dive deep into an innovative and revolutionary model of sustainability and community building. ReLeaf is a pioneer in developing scalable engagement strategies that foster community participation and work towards addressing pressing social issues such as homelessness. In this category, you'll find articles and Organic Media detailing ReLeaf's groundbreaking initiatives and visions. From creating sustainable gardens in Austin elementary schools to providing transparency in a world often shrouded in deception, ReLeaf serves as a beacon of hope and innovation. ReLeaf's approach of intertwining real and fictional elements in their work—such as characters, materials, techniques, and labor—sets a new standard for cooperatives worldwide. Its business model, which compensates for labor and knowledge contributions, creates a lasting benefit and helps people who have historically been marginalized. By meeting people with compassion, as resources in need of support instead of liabilities, ReLeaf has shown that everyone has the potential to contribute to society meaningfully. Explore this section to discover how ReLeaf is redefining the way we approach social issues and sustainability, with stories of inspiration, innovation, and hope. |
| Seeded Silence (0.00) | The fragile peace that grows in the pauses between people, fragile yet nourishing like bread with tiny seeds of memory. |
| Tradescantia pallida (0.00) | Tradescantia pallida is a species of spiderwort native to the Gulf Coast region of eastern Mexico. The cultivar T. pallida 'Purpurea' is commonly called purple secretia, purple-heart, or purple queen. Edward Palmer collected the type specimen near Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas in 1907. Tradescantia pallida is an evergreen perennial plant of scrambling stature. It is distinguished by elongated, pointed leaves - themselves glaucous green, sometimes fringed with red or purple - and bearing small, three-petaled flowers of white, pink or purple. Plants are top-killed by moderate frosts, but will often sprout back from roots. The cultivar T. pallida 'Purpurea' has purple leaves and pink flowers. Widely used as an ornamental plant in gardens and borders, as a ground cover, hanging plant, or - particularly in colder climates where it cannot survive the winter season - houseplant, it is propagated easily by cuttings (the stems are visibly segmented and roots will frequently grow from the joints). Numerous cultivars are available, of which 'Purpurea' with purple foliage has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.
Support this species by reading about it, sharing with others, and donating monthly or yearly to the ReLeaf Cooperative in honor of Tradescantia pallida. We deliver any quantity of these, for free, to any ReLeaf site (Free Little Library or other suggested location in the Shoal Creek, Waller Creek, and Fort Branch watersheds). We are currently seeking cooperative members in Austin and beyond to cultivate and provide Tradescantia pallida and other species for free to ReLeaf sites in their local watersheds. Inquire by email: bryceb@releaf.site. Thanks! |
| Verdant Veil (0.00) | Practice of local repair, reuse, mutual care, and shared access. People use scrap, skills, and trust to keep each other safe and resourced when official systems fail. |