This is the opening of a 4700-word short story. It was written for the Fix/Grist Imagine 2200 contest but wasn’t selected. I plan to revise it and submit to a science fiction magazine. I also have plans to write a longer version. Enjoy.

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If it weren’t for the sound of robes flapping in the wind, Carlton might have missed the woman. Her djellaba vanished against the sand as she knelt to Harvest water from beneath the webbing of a dew collector. The people who still lived in this part of Denver were as few as the scattered raindrops. They knew the desert, though—they could read the dunes like lines on a map—and that was exactly what Carlton needed.

Wary of startling her, he dismounted his horse, the sole conveyance available after the road surrendered to the shifting dunes. He straightened his stiff legs. Quantum physicists weren’t cut out to ride horseback, and knowing that atoms were mostly empty space didn’t make his ass hurt any less.

“Peace,” he said as best he could through the bandana that kept dust out of his mouth.

She stood and turned to him. Her robe, blown taut, shrink-wrapped her lean body, and a head covering left her as faceless as a mannequin.

“There used to be a lab nearby, a couple decades back. Can you help me find it?”

Servo motors whirred as she raised a prosthetic hand. It opened the slit of her head covering and revealed her face, weathered, with sharp curves, like one of the dunes. 

The wind stopped as if the sand and heat relented in respect. Her gray eyes measured him.

“I know of it,” she said, and as quickly as it had come, the stillness was gone, replaced with a blistering gust of wind and grit. She left her water jar by the webbing, turned, and beckoned him to follow.

After a distance Carlton couldn’t measure, she stopped within the crescent of a dune. Near her sandaled feet, stunted cacti and brick façade pierced the cryptobiotic soil. 

He turned around to orient himself in what remained of the technology park. It didn’t seem so long ago.

He found an exposed ventilation pipe and tied his horse to it. And after he unstrapped his shovel, he began to dig.

He cursed the government that literally buried his research. Every shovelful reminded him that he had a solution for the broken climate, and every centimeter down brought it closer.