Sandbag Squidward

This genre works to challenge us to look at the world we’re shaping and the worlds we might yet create with both wonder and unease.

In a future where virtual reality has replaced reality itself, Henry Block, a disillusioned gamer and reluctant Conservation Corps recruit, finds himself knee-deep in the mud of a collapsing Louisiana coastline. Sent to “restore” beaches with genetically modified microbes that eat plastic, he’d rather be inside building his digital paradise, Empyrean. But as his virtual beaches fill with trash collectors instead of pleasure seekers, and as the real sand begins to shape his imagination, the lines between the simulated and the living world begin to blur.

Blistering, funny, and eerily plausible, this story unearths a central paradox of our time: that the more we upload our lives to the cloud, the less we remember what it means to have a body or a planet to return to.

Excerpt from Sandbag Squidward
by Ashlee Lhamon

Four days in, and January is rapidly becoming February. With the weather warming and some of the trash cleared, this beach is looking more like it could be a research opportunity. So, after finishing his hideous lunches, Henry spends the last minutes of his break writing notes to himself about the texture of the salty wind or the smell of the damp sand on his crappy little dumb phone. He can do this because, save for an unending litany of corrections and criticism, Commander Ratched isn’t exactly a fount of conversation; any downtime is spent mostly in silence. So when she says, “We tried robots,” Henry nearly jumps out of his skin.

His eyes jerk up from his phone’s screen. “Sorry?” he says.

“We tried robots. The people here destroyed them.” Commander Ratched isn’t looking at him, but at the ocean’s rolling bank of gunmetal waves. Idly, she scrapes at the gray sand with her fingertips. “Do you know why?”

“Because they’re inbred, illiterate swamp people?”

“You know, almost all of your fellow recruits are from here,” she says. “Their parents worked in oil, their grandparents worked in oil, their great-grandparents worked in oil, and their great-great-grandparents were poor Cajun and Creole dirt farmers. Oil made these people prosperous. It’s their culture, their community. It gave them purpose and dignity and a good livelihood. When we took away oil, we took away that, too, even if it wasn’t the intent. And then we spent a lot of time berating them for objecting and arresting them for destroying the robots we told them they were too stupid to appreciate.

“But not everyone is happy to give up working and rely on Uncle Sam to pay their bills. For some people, that’s a spiritual injury. It took us too long to learn that if you take someone’s livelihood away, you have to at least try to replace it with something that’s meaningful, that connects them to their land and their communities the same way those old industries did. Having a robot do this does none of that.”

“ … so this is all a make-work tax-suck for inbred, illiterate swamp people, is what you’re saying,” Henry says.

She fixes him with a look that he expects to be reproachful but isn’t. Instead, her gaze holds a strange weight.

“You asked for ‘beach’ instead of a state or a city on your duty assignment form,” she says. “Why is that?”

Henry doesn’t think she’d understand Empyrean, and doesn’t really feel like explaining it, so he just shrugs. “Why not?” he says.

She doesn’t press. But for some inexplicable reason, the question bothers him for the rest of the day.

Read the full story on Tractor Beam, where speculative fiction meets the ecological imagination. And look out for Mad Agriculture Co-Founder and CEO, Philip Taylor,  in the forthcoming print edition of Tractor Beam, Tractor Beam Extra Extra.