From Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award winner Weyodi OldBear, the Root & the Seed is a fiercely human science-fiction novel about resistance, inheritance,and learning to disobey.

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Wheatstraw LTD owns the food, the laboratories, the soldiers, and nearly everyone's future.

R316 was engineered to obey. One of hundreds of identical Deaf clones raised as disposable corporate weapons, she has never questioned an order, imagined a life beyond combat, or believed herself capable of becoming anything more than company property. Then the death of the only soldier who treated her like a person leaves her with something Wheatstraw never intended her to possess: memories, questions, and a hunger to discover where she came from.

Years earlier, geneticist Marjorie Morning Star uncovered a secret hidden inside Wheatstraw's laboratories. With the help of reluctant corporate employee Gary Glicksberg, radical repairman Ira Jakobs, and brilliant runaway hacker Ray Einar, she risked everything to keep it from the company's grasp.

Now those buried choices are coming home.

As R316 searches for her origins, Wheatstraw closes in-and the strangers connected by her creation must decide what they are willing to sacrifice for family, freedom, and the seeds of a future no corporation can own.

Weyodi OldBear was born on the shores of Long Island Sound among her father's people but raised among her mother's people, The Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, where she is an enrolled voting citizen. Her work includes the Nebula nominated table-top role playing game Coyote & Crow. She is winner of the 2017 Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award for her story "Red Lessons." Other work includes he novella "As Many Ships As Stars" (2024, Android Press), as well as contributions to the anthologies "A Howl" and the Water Protectors Legal Collective Anthology Guide.