Soybeans

A farmer's tractor won't start - because the corporation that built it has decided it shouldn't.
Ruth Kowalski is eighty-seven years old. She has buried two husbands, raised four children, taught social studies for thirty years in the same Illinois county, and watched her son Bill take over the farm her great-grandfather first broke in 1857. For the past six months she has been forwarding leaked documents from her kitchen table to anyone in the Driftless Area who will read them - memos that show what the press releases don't: that the corporation buying up the grain elevators is the same corporation building the GPS-locked planters, and that "smart farming partnership" is the polite name for a franchise agreement with a kill switch on every piece of equipment a farmer owns.
AgriCore Solutions, bankrolled by the same money that put President Tisdale in the White House, is rolling out the partnerships across the Midwest. Bill's four-year-old Copperline tractor - a hundred and eighty thousand dollars of debt still on it - has been flashing "Service Authorization Required" for three days. Nothing is broken. The engine purrs. The hydraulics are sound. A software update has decided it is time for a mandatory service interval, and that means a certified technician driving out from Dubuque for thirty-two hundred dollars to reset a computer. Five generations of Kowalskis have worked this land. Bill is calculating whether he can afford to be the sixth.
Two miles north, Hugh Lubbert and his husband Eugene Thomas are preparing to leave the country. Twenty years of marriage, a forty-acre property at the confluence of Smallpox Creek and the Good Hope River, a white oak that Hugh planted himself the year they bought the place - and a regime that has begun deporting American citizens to offshore detention facilities for features it dislikes. Eugene is Black. Hugh has been excommunicated by the church he was once ordained to serve. The administration has decided the soybean market is best secured by the same kind of partnership it is offering the farmers, and the calculation has changed. Hugh and Eugene are leaving for Uruguay in six weeks. And then a Ho-Chunk archaeologist arrives with ground-penetrating radar and finds, beneath their white oak, a bear effigy mound built by ancestors who tended this confluence eight hundred years before any settler put a plow in the ground.
It is six weeks from the locked tractor to the Ottawa secure conference call where the acting government of the United States asks Hugh Lubbert what to put in the next constitutional amendments. In between: the church ladies of Rich Coulee turn their fellowship hall into the operations center of an agricultural resistance network - one casserole at a time, one encrypted laptop at a time, one farmer at a time persuaded that the partnership AgriCore is offering is the franchise their grandfathers fought against. Eugene is detained. Hugh is hunted. A graduate student in Uruguay whose father carries a heritage his country declared extinct two centuries ago is the reason the China soybean market has already moved south. And on Bill Kowalski's farm, the question is no longer whether to sign the partnership papers. The question is what survives if nobody signs.
Soybeans is speculative fiction that imagines the year 2028 as a cascade of consequences, each traceable to the political climate of the United States as it existed in May of 2026. It is one of two foundational novels of the franchise, paired with House District 89, the political-organizing novel that maps the same Driftless Area watershed by watershed. Together they establish the characters, the geography, and the political architecture that Allegory Protocol and Unbreakable build upon.
This is fiction that asks the question rural America has been answering with its silence for forty years: what does it cost to keep your land - and what does it cost to lose it?