The Ant Farm

Michelle Perry is living a double life.

She’s the bookkeeper on a huge ranch and she’s a spy. She made a huge commitment to her anti-GMO beliefs when she took the job, but now she’s involved with one of the ranch supervisors – someone she should be watching.

Why quit a management job on the east coast and move to Montana to get paid a fraction of what she was making? It’s 2040 and the bio-tech entrepreneur who owns the ranch has bred a small herd of Bison antiquus – extinct for ten thousand years and forerunner of modern plains bison. Colin Elliot, a shadowy activist and organizer of environmental causes, told Shel, as she calls herself, a new project would be coming to the ranch and that it would be about GMO livestock. She jumped at the chance to help him stop it.

Problem: nobody at the ranch has any idea what the project will be.

Over a period of months Shel settles into life on the ranch, all the while snooping, asking questions, and reporting to Colin. She makes friends on the ranch, a close community of honest, hardworking people who care deeply for the land. Shel befriends Matt Parker, construction supervisor for the ranch and they soon begin a passionate love affair. She wants to save the planet, or some small part of it, from ill-conceived science, and she wants a love life.

Judgment call: she thinks she can do both.

Tension mounts as the start date of the new project approaches. Construction at the research center is behind schedule, still nobody knows what the project is about, and Colin browbeats Shel for information that does not exist. When the project animals arrive the ranch community is stunned: they are not livestock at all, they are the very opposite.

In the aftermath of this revelation Shel fears her spying, if revealed, will turn the ranch community against her. Even Matt may abandon her if the truth comes out. Can she take that chance? Will she have a choice?