CHAPTER ONE: The Garden Wasn't Safe Anymore
In the opening chapter of The Tin Can and the Tomato Garden, Keith and his loyal dog Willow navigate a decaying America where the collapse has already begun. As drones loom overhead and food becomes resistance, Keith discovers whispers from a rogue network warning of what's to come. This chapter introduces the eerie calm before the storm—seeds, static, and a sense that the garden might be the last place of truth. A haunting beginning to a surreal dystopia rooted in real-world events.
THE TIN CAN AND THE TOMATO GARDEN
Keith Kalm
6/29/20252 min read
"Let's mix all of me, my stories, businesses, projects, Willow, all of it into a dystopian near future based on current events, the war in Israel and Iran, the US involvement, how countries will turn against the US, brics will become a major currency, the US dollar will fall, countries will stop trading in it, crypto will rise, but the blind will start to consume electrical systems, hard currency, hard times, AI, and robots, all of it, into one, with Willow and me as the main charactera, think pkd and haruki murakami had a baby that was this story."
Got it. Here's the opening chapter of your dystopian near-future novel, blending your world with PKD paranoia, Murakami's dreamlike mystery, and our collapsing reality:
CHAPTER ONE: The Garden Wasn't Safe Anymore
The air in Northeast PA had changed. It wasn’t just the shifting climate patterns or the whisper of drones overhead—it was heavier. More electric. More watched.
Keith stood beneath the bent rib of a greenhouse frame, a compost-smeared glove on one hand, the other holding a cracked phone that hadn’t received a real signal in weeks. Around him, the last heirloom tomatoes of summer wept into the soil. He could smell the ozone in the wind. Another pulse was coming.
“Willow,” he called, wiping his brow with his forearm. “You smell that?”
The Great Pyrenees lifted her massive head from a patch of lemon balm, eyes glowing faintly with the residual charge of whatever she’d sniffed out. Since the Grid Collapse, dogs had become more than companions. They were sensors, shields, oracles.
And Willow had changed.
Not just from the diet—mostly canned lentils and powdered bone broth—but something deeper. She could sense when the sky was lying.
Keith walked back toward the van—his 1990 Vanagon Country Home, retrofitted with a small AI node, solar panels scavenged from an abandoned high school, and a propane-fueled cooking setup that doubled as a distillery for ethanol and storytelling. The van still smelled like Oregon rain and Miami soil. Like memory. Like loss.
Inside, a small screen flickered to life. The last remaining connection to the underground network of garden punks, rogue chefs, and crypto-anarchists he once knew. They were scattered now, most either underground or uploaded—swallowed by the AetherNet in hopes of avoiding the War Drafts.
Incoming Packet
Source: CompostCat_47
Subject: They found another node. Go dark. New BRICS order active. U.S. trading halted in 67 zones. Tonic’s hot. Hide your seed.
He read it twice. Then again.
So it had begun.
The BRICS currency had replaced the dollar in most global exchanges. U.S. cities were flickering in and out of darkness, trapped in cycles of controlled blackouts and AI martial law. Even the local markets were taking silver over swipe. Some bartered with tomatoes. Others with data. Some… with loyalty.
Love & Vegetables had gone underground. Its last shipment of survival seed vaults had been intercepted—tagged as "agro-subversive" under the new AgTech Defense Act. Growing your own food was now seen as a political statement. A threat to supply-chain control.
But Keith wasn’t giving up. Not yet. The Garden still pulsed with life. And somewhere, beneath the compost, beneath the war-torn cloud of surveillance, lay the ancient memory of what it meant to be wild, rooted, and free.
He placed a hand on Willow’s head.
“They forgot something,” he whispered. “We know how to grow in the dark.”