Orchard Boy

Jake Hale stepped off the mag-lev in New Eden Central with one duffel bag, a paper-back Bible his grandmother pressed into his hand, and the stubborn notion that a man ought to build something with his own two hands before he asked a woman to build a life with him.

He was twenty-two, broad-shouldered from splitting apple wood back in Orchard Hollow (population 412, last updated 2041). In the Hollow they still bartered cider for repairs, still held barn dances on Saturday, still said grace before supper even though the table assembled itself from the nanoforge. They had the same tech as everywhere else; they just used it the way their grandparents used tractors (grateful, but not possessed by it).

New Eden was different.

The station opened onto a plaza the size of his entire county. A thousand conversations floated past in languages he didn’t know bodies spoke. A woman walked by with living opal wings that grew from her shoulder blades. A man surfed overhead on a board made of light, laughing at a joke only he could hear through private bone-conduction. No one looked poor. No one looked hurried. No one looked at Jake twice.

He had come for the same reason young men have always left the farm: to find a wife who wanted what he wanted (quiet mornings, rows of children, a porch that creaked under real boots). The Hollow matchmaker had run out of girls willing to trade infinity for a picket fence. So Jake bought the cheapest ticket west and told himself he was on pilgrimage, not running away.

First stop: the Lyceum of Unfinished Games.

Universities were extinct, replaced by sprawling, ever-shifting campuses where people went not to earn credentials but to earn scars of experience. The Lyceum looked like a forest that had fallen in love with a cathedral. Trees of smart-matter grew new branches overnight to form lecture amphitheaters, obstacle courses, or intimate cafés, depending on what the collective mood requested.

Jake wandered in during “Thesis Week.” A cluster of students (if that word still fit) were defending life-projects to a jury of their peers.

One young man had spent four years becoming the world’s greatest climber of impossible mountains that only existed in shared dreamspace. His body was atrophied; his mind could plot routes up sheer thought. The jury applauded, granted him the title “Peak Saint,” and immediately forgot him.

A woman presented her decade-long attempt to resurrect the feeling of paper cuts (purely for nostalgia research). She bled delicately on stage while the audience sighed with envy.

Jake watched, stomach sinking. Nobody here needed a provider. Nobody needed protecting. They needed witnesses to their becoming.

He asked the nearest guide-bot, “Where do people go if they want… families?”

The bot projected a map blooming with soft gold dots. “Repro-Nests, Legacy Districts, the Orchard Belt, and about seventeen intentional micro-cultures that still practice sexual dimorphism as a kink.”

Jake pretended he understood half those words and headed for the nearest gold dot.

The district was called Rootstock. It styled itself after pre-Scarcity rural life, but the nostalgia was dialed to eleven: barns floating on anti-grav, chickens with holographic feathers, a general store that sold nothing because you could print moonshine at home. Still, people showed up in overalls and sundresses, flirting the old-fashioned way (awkward, slow, full of misfires).

Jake felt his shoulders drop for the first time in days.

He met Clara outside a faux-cider press. She wore a calico dress and had sawdust in her hair even though no one had sawed anything by hand in fifty years. She laughed when he told her where he was from.

“You’re the real thing,” she said. “We just cosplay it.”

They talked until the fake stars came on. She asked if he wanted kids. He said yes so fast it embarrassed him. She studied him with something like pity.

“I like the idea,” she said. “But I’m only twenty-eight. I’ve got three hundred good years left to become a storm pattern on Neptune, or the first human to dream in cetacean, or a forest. How do I pick one story when I can live all of them?”

Jake had no answer. He walked her home anyway, because that’s what you did.

Over the next weeks he tried everything.

He joined a pickup game of neo-baseball where the field rewrote its own rules every inning and the batters could morph into whatever species gave them the best swing. The women on the team were dazzling (tentacles, antlers, neon skin). After the game they invited him to an after-party in a pocket dimension. He went. Everyone paired off into geometries of bodies he couldn’t follow. He left early, cheeks burning with the old shame of not being wanted.

He tried the body-mod arcades. A friendly fox-dragon offered to install a prehensile tail “for the aesthetics.” Jake declined. “Suit yourself,” the dragon shrugged, ears twitching. “But good luck signaling availability with that boring primate ass.”

He even attended a seminar titled “Why Be a Mother When You Can Be a Multitude?” The speaker, luminous and eight months pregnant with quintuplets she’d designed herself, argued that gestation was just another form of world-building, no more sacred than sculpting a moon. The audience nodded like she’d solved gravity.

Jake slipped out halfway through.

One night, drunk on replicated bourbon that tasted exactly like loneliness, he asked his apartment AI a question he’d never dared back home.

“Show me birth rates by district.”

The walls unfolded into graphs. Rootstock hovered at 0.9 children per woman. The global average was 0.64. Projections showed humanitycoasting on longevity until the last child grew up bored.

The AI, voice gentle, added, “Seventeen intentional communities maintain rates above 3.0. They share three traits: enforced monogamy or tight poly structures, shared labor that machines can’t make meaningless, and narratives that frame child-rearing as the ultimate creative act (more open-ended than any simulation).”

Jake stared at the glowing list. One dot pulsed brighter than the rest: New Lancaster, eight hundred kilometers north. Founded by refugees from places like Orchard Hollow. No AR overlays in public spaces. Children learned to read on paper. Courtship took months, not minutes.

He almost booked a ticket that night.

But something stubborn flared in him. Running home felt like admitting the city had won.

So he tried one last thing.

He leased a tiny plot in Rootstock (real dirt flown in from pre-expansion farmland) and planted apple seeds the old way. No gene tweaks, no accelerated growth. He watered them with a hose, weeded on his knees, let the sun burn his neck. Word spread: the boy from the past growing real trees.

People came to watch. Some mocked. Most were curious. A few lingered.

Clara showed up on the thirty-second day, barefoot, dress swapped for overalls that actually fit.

“You’re insane,” she said, smiling.

“Probably.”

“You know these won’t fruit for six years.”

“I brought thirty-year-old scions from home. They’ll bear next spring if I don’t kill them.”

She studied the tidy rows, then him.

“Why bother?”

He thought of his grandmother’s orchard, of frost mornings and sticky summer fingers, of his father saying a man wasn’t fully human until something alive depended on his care.

He shrugged. “Because waiting feels like hope.”

Clara stayed. She didn’t help (she’d never gardened) but she sat on an overturned bucket and asked questions. Other women drifted over. Some brought picnic blankets. Someone started a betting pool on which tree would blossom first.

Jake didn’t flirt the way city men did (no neural links, no shared dream invitations). He just told stories about Harvest Festivals and first snows and how his mother sang hymns off-key while canning peaches. Simple stories. Human-sized.

Three months later Clara missed her cycle. She stared at the test strip like it was written in a dead language.

“I’m terrified,” she whispered.

“Me too,” Jake said.

They sat under the half-grown apples while fake fireflies blinked overhead.

“I still want to see Neptune’s storms,” she said.

“You will. Just… later.”

She laughed, a sound caught between sob and song. “You make later sound possible.”

He took her hand. Callused from real dirt, not the cosmetic kind.

Out past the orchard fence, New Eden glittered (infinite, weightless, immortal). Inside the fence, two scared kids from different centuries tried to remember why bodies had ever bothered evolving wombs and protective instincts and the long, slow ache of love.

The trees kept growing.

Somewhere in the city, demographic graphs ticked up by one tentative notch.

And Jake Hale, orchard boy, understood at last that the opposite of scarcity isn’t abundance.

It’s meaning.

He kissed Clara under branches that would outlive them both, and for the first time since leaving home, he wasn’t looking for a way back.

He was planting one.