The Last Seeds of Resistance

A Quiet Geometry of Collapse

It is the kind of red that doesn’t belong here. Not in this stretch of dust and quiet, not against the dull hum of the wind tracing patterns in the sand. It stands alone, trembling slightly, as if it has wandered too far and is only now realizing the mistake. A thin green stem, stubborn in its reach, pressing upward like a hand groping in the dark for something just out of grasp. The last trace of a dream before waking. At the top, the weight of it sags slightly. A fruit, ripe but not yet spent, its skin taut, holding back the inevitable. If you look closely, you can see the way it sways, not just with the wind, but with time itself. The way it holds on, as if it knows something the rest of the world has already forgotten. That even here, in the vast indifference of space and decay, something small can insist on existing. On being seen. On reaching for more. It won’t last. Nothing ever does. But for now, it stands, full of color, full of breath, full of the quiet, trembling determination of things that refuse to disappear.

The solitude touches Noa more than she wants to admit. It mirrors her existence in a world she no longer recognizes. In a world where her presence has been erased, where even the echoes of her past have been swallowed whole. Her hands, once soft, now rough as weathered stone, trace absentmindedly over her arms, feeling the uneven texture of her skin. Leathered, cracked, the color of a dust-choked sky. An exterior that betrays time’s relentless march forward, disintegrating with each slow, measured breath. And yet, inside, beneath the brittle shell, something pulses. Something untouched. The thoughts that drift through her mind, dreamy and vivid, wild and calm, refusing to be dulled.

---

Diverse.

It become one of the forbidden words, smoothed over, erased from existence. Even seeds. As if language itself can be rewritten, as if a code can govern a world. X-ecutor’s vision had been simple. Fewer variables, fewer anomalies. No unnecessary noise. Like adjusting the sliders on a simulation. Reduce randomness, increase efficiency. A world smoothed over, predictable. No loose ends, no surprises.

As if reality is just a beta version in need of refinement.

A future optimized.

But reality had never been a machine. It is soil and storm, roots tangled beneath the surface, splitting stone without permission. It is mutation, stray seeds carried on the wind, small things growing in the wrong places. It is disorder wearing the mask of inevitability.

Like the inevitability of death, Noa thinks.

Noa had always imagined death as a sharp thing, sudden and finite. A plunge, a severing. But now, she isn’t so sure. It isn’t a fall, it’s an unraveling. A slow, quiet loosening, like a sweater coming apart stitch by stitch while she’s still inside it, watching the holes widen. She used to think dying would feel like crashing into something solid, but it’s more like floating. Like the weight of existence is slipping away until there’s nothing left to tether her. She wonders if that’s how it happens, not all at once, but in pieces. The world loosening its grip, untying her from itself in ways too subtle to notice until it’s too late. She can’t even remember what her own voice sounds like when it’s strong. The thought unsettles her. She remembers her best friend’s laugh, full-bodied and reckless, shaking through her ribs like an earthquake. She remembers the way the lake smelled in the summer, thick with warm mud and honeysuckle. But her own voice? Already fading. Already gone.

Maybe that’s how the world lets you go. Not with a violent wrench, but a gentle unthreading, so soft you don’t realize you’ve disappeared until you’re no longer there.

---

She presses her palm against the dry earth, feeling its silence, its absence. Breathing in, it’s dry, sterile, the kind that clings to the back of her throat, heavy with a silence even the humming filtration system can’t fill. A different kind of silence had fallen that February night. Not sterile. Not contained. Just… empty.

Once, she had worked in a place where the soil still held memory, where seeds were cataloged like history, waiting to be awakened. Before everything thinned. Before the vaults were emptied. Before X-ecutor shut the doors. Noa closes her eyes, and the past rises. Cold fluorescent light, the hum of climate control, the scent of dormant life sealed behind steel and glass.

Seed Bank Curator. That’s what her LinkedIn had said. It always made her giggle. Like she’d spent her days in a glass-walled conference room, aligning on blue-sky thinking while someone pinged her for a quick sync on mission-critical seed storage solutions. Like she’d ever once leveraged granular insights to unlock cross-functional synergies or streamlined best practices for scalable biodiversity preservation. In reality, the only things she’d ever touched base with were the cold steel shelves of the vault and the delicate husks of seeds pressed between her fingers. There were no KPI deep dives or bandwidth recalibrations, just air filtration systems humming against decay. No agile workflows, just seeds, small, fragile things. Seeds that were supposed to save the world.

Noa had always been drawn to plants. The way toddlers pause at every flower, their small hands hovering, their minds unraveling its layers — color, petal, scent — before, inevitably, curiosity wins. A sharp tug at the stem, a fleeting hesitation just before the act, as if some part of them already knows they are undoing something delicate. Most children grow out of that phase, their wonder shifting elsewhere. Noa hadn’t.

At ten, her bedroom overflowed with notebooks, each one crammed with sketches and scribbled notes, a personal encyclopedia of roots and leaves, lifecycles and forgotten names. At 16, while other kids whispered plans to sneak into clubs, their rebellions lit by neon and bad decisions, Noa sat awake in the glow of her screen, chasing the ghosts of vanished plants. She read about species that once blanketed whole landscapes, now reduced to footnotes. Seeds buried in permafrost, waiting centuries for a thaw that might never come. Flowers that had only ever bloomed in the margins of old field notes, gone before anyone thought to save them.

When her email pinged that one February evening, Noa had already known what it would say. The kind of knowing that settles in your bones before your mind catches up. The slow, inevitable weight of something that’s been circling for months, waiting for the right moment to strike. She had seen it coming. The way you can smell rain before the first drop falls. Months of rhetoric sharpened into a blade, budget cuts dressed as efficiency, the creeping rot of men who spoke of God but worshipped control. She had known they would be next.

Kim had been crying at the desk beside her. Kim, who could find sunlight in the deepest shade, who could believe in the resilience of things even as they withered. She had tried, even then. “Maybe it’s not over,” she had whispered, her voice barely holding. “Maybe we just have to…” But there had been no maybe, no margin left for hope. The doors were closing. The vaults were being emptied. And outside, the world was already forgetting what it was about to lose.

---

She hadn’t heard it live. The layoffs had come first, the kind that didn’t arrive with fanfare, just a quiet email, a severance package, a system login that no longer worked. After that, time had lost shape. Days collapsed into each other, weightless and indistinct. She spent them sending out applications, staring at half-written cover letters, refreshing job boards that only confirmed what she already knew: the world no longer had use for people like her. The interview clip had surfaced weeks later, buried between algorithm-fed noise, half-watched on a cracked tablet balanced on the edge of her sink.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Noa had heard it before, variations of the same philosophy, dressed in different words. But hearing it now, hearing it after everything, was different. It landed with a kind of inevitability, like a long-forgotten memory returning at the exact moment it was no longer useful. Rage.

She imagined him, reclining in some dimly lit studio, speaking about empathy the way a mechanic talks about engine failure: an inefficiency to be corrected, a glitch in the system. The logic was simple: compassion slowed things down. Hesitation bred waste. The world was meant to be optimized, stripped of excess, streamlined into something fast and frictionless.

---

Noa stands by the window, fingers barely grazing the glass, as if touching it too firmly might shatter the illusion that anything still separates inside from out. The atmosphere is the same on both sides. Dry, thin, weightless. The world beyond is colorless in a way that has nothing to do with light. A landscape unspooling in brittle lines, the memory of something that once moved, once breathed.

The food hadn’t disappeared all at once. It had unraveled, thread by thread, until nothing held. First, it was the smallest things, the taste of an apple, just slightly off, a shadow of what it should be. Wheat that crumbled to dust in her hands. Melons that looked ripe but carried no scent. Then the wild things. The hum of bees fading into absence, birds tracing silent circles over fields stripped of seeds. The wind, once thick with pollen and the slow exhale of soil, now carried nothing. A silence settling over everything, soft as dust, final as forgetting.

The land isn’t dead. Not exactly. But it no longer knows how to live. The engineered crops, those clean, precise organisms shaped for maximum yield, had failed when the world shifted beneath them. Their roots, trained for shallowness, found no depth to hold onto. The old strains, the ones that knew how to adapt, how to reach and stretch and steal life from even the stingiest of earth. Those had been erased long before. Too messy. Too unpredictable. Too much noise in the system. The world is hollowing itself out, forgetting what it was made of. A body slowly starving, opening and closing its mouth around nothing. Like her body.

The iPad is breathing its last, a ribcage of plastic and dust, wheezing out sound in slow, uneven exhales. A song unspooling from nowhere, rising from static, curling at the edges like old paper left too close to fire.

Hollow one

With inverted tongue

From whence does fulfillment come?

When I expel

From this mortal shell

Will I die for living numb?

(Moses Sumney - Doomed)

The words are inside her skull, under her skin, behind her teeth. Not sound. Not thought. Something older, something that doesn’t need oxygen to exist. The ground flickers. Grainy, weightless. A suggestion of earth rather than earth itself. Sand shifting between her fingers, then not-sand, then nothing at all. The walls breathe in, press against her lungs, then exhale. Expand. Collapse. She is inside them. She is outside them. There are no walls.

Her body isn’t a body anymore. Her limbs blur at the edges, flickering between presence and absence, between before and now and something further away. Her hands curl, but she isn’t sure if they move or if she just remembers them moving. The light. Too bright, too dim, too sharp, too far. A pulse, a flicker, a heartbeat stuttering out of sync.

The song stutters too. The iPad chokes. A low, stretched-out gasp of static.

Noa exhales. Her final breath. Her lungs, first slow, then quiet.

The last tomato in the world sways slightly on its stem, fragile and defiant. It doesn’t know it is the last. It is just a tomato, trying to be a tomato.

Because some stories aren’t meant to be forgotten.