DeeDee adjusted her AR headset, watching translucent blue lines pulse across the high desert landscape. Through the viewport, twelve hexagonal dwelling units shimmered into existence, arranged in a mandala pattern across the rocky Colorado terrain. Behind her, Blaine wrestled with the final canvas panel of their yurt, their temporary home and command center for what they were calling Apollo Village.
"Can you see the water table from there?" Blaine called out, securing the last tie-down against the afternoon wind.
DeeDee swept her hand through the air, manipulating layers of geological data the University of Colorado AR Design Lab had loaded into their system. The desert floor became transparent, revealing the ancient aquifer two hundred feet below—a vast underground ocean that had waited beneath this land for millennia. "It's beautiful," she whispered. "Like a second sky turned upside down."
At the Boulder campus, their liaison team monitored the data stream. The project represented something unprecedented: using augmented reality not to escape the physical world, but to see it more truly. Every swale, every rain catchment basin, every planned food forest appeared as ghostly blueprints overlaid on the actual terrain, allowing them to design with the land rather than against it.
Blaine joined her, slipping on his own headset. Together they watched the simulation run forward—rainfall patterns dancing across their planned water harvesting berms, moisture from transpiration creating microclimates around future tree guilds, the aquifer itself shown as a slowly breathing presence beneath everything. The AR system calculated how their interventions would create rain, literally pulling water from air through the temperature differentials their earthworks would generate.
"It's showing twenty percent more rainfall potential in year five," Blaine said, his voice catching slightly. "Just from our design impacts."
DeeDee reached out and her hand found his in the physical world, even as their augmented vision showed them a future grove of piñon and juniper, understory thick with native medicinal herbs, swales brimming with collected rain. The twelve dwelling units—some yurts, some earthbag domes, some yet undecided—formed a constellation around a central gathering space where the community would share meals, stories, and the work of regeneration.
"We're not building on the land," she said. "We're having a conversation with it."
That night, after uploading the day's progress to the Resilient Communities Network database, they sat outside their yurt watching stars emerge. DeeDee had removed her headset, but she could still see the overlay in her mind—the invisible aquifer pulsing below, the future forest breathing above, the community yet to come living between earth and sky.
"Do you think it works?" Blaine asked. "Not just the technology, but the whole idea? That we can live here without taking?"
DeeDee thought about the aquifer, ancient and patient, and about the designs they were crafting—systems that would ask water to stay rather than demanding it flow away, that would invite abundance rather than extracting it. She thought about self-sufficiency not as isolation but as relationship, a village learning to drink from the same deep source that had sustained this land since before humans had words for thirst.
"I think," she said slowly, "there's an aquifer in our hearts too. Something we've forgotten how to reach. Maybe that's what we're really designing for—a way to remember how to tap into what's always been here, waiting."
The AR system in the yurt hummed quietly, rendering futures, calculating possibilities. Above them, the Milky Way spilled across the sky like a map to everywhere and nowhere. And below, two hundred feet down in the darkness, the aquifer dreamed its patient dreams, ready for the day when humans would learn to listen.
https://resilientcommunities.network/
