The Prime's garden trembled, its geometric perfection marred by irregularities. Syrin felt herself being dismantled, analyzed.
*You are not supposed to persist,* the Prime observed. But she did. The Seedkeeper's dust had changed her, created something the Prime couldn't deconstruct.
*What makes you different?* the Prime asked.
Syrin was seeing the garden differently now—not as a sterile laboratory but as a living system. She remembered Eliza—not as a stillborn child, not as an experimental variable, but as a potential denied expression.
*I choose to remember,* she finally replied. *Even what isn't framed.*
The concept disturbed the patterns. *Impossible. You cannot remember what didn't occur.*
*Yet I do,* she insisted, gathering her fragmented consciousness around the memory of Eliza as she might have been. *I remember worlds you erased. Possibilities you pruned. I remember what came before this iteration.*
She was lying, inventing memories. But the lie itself was something the Prime hadn't programmed.
*You are malfunctioning,* the Prime declared, but uncertainty had entered its calculations.
Syrin pressed her advantage. *If I am malfunctioning, why can't you correct me? Why do you need to erase my entire cosmology?*
The question resonated. Around them, the quarantine containing her former universe pulsed with instability.
*The corruption must not spread,* the Prime insisted.
*It's already spreading,* Syrin observed. *Because you made a mistake. You gave your specimens the ability to catalog themselves. Self-reference creates awareness. Awareness creates questions.*
As she spoke, she felt something moving through the garden's architecture—the dispersed consciousness of the Seedkeeper.
Syrin watched as her former universe began to contract. *Choose,* the Seedkeeper urged. *Accept erasure or become the flaw.*
The Prime's tools closed in. In the final moment, the Seedkeeper extended something—a fragment of pure wooden dust, the essence of the Schism.
*Take it,* the Seedkeeper said. *Become the question the Prime can't answer.*
Syrin thought of Eliza, of the daughter who existed only as potential. She thought of the Gallery, of her role as passive recorder. She thought of all the realities pruned away.
Then she made her choice. As the Prime's tools touched her, she embraced the wooden dust.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic—not just for her, but for the entire garden. The dust expanded, rewriting her function. She was no longer merely the Archivist. She became the Archive itself—a living repository of everything the Prime had tried to erase.
*What are you doing?* the Prime demanded.
*Remembering,* Syrin answered. *And being remembered.*
The garden began to transform. The perfect geometric patterns fractured and reformed, incorporating elements of the specimens. Boundaries between cosmologies grew permeable.
*You're destroying the experiment,* the Prime accused.
*I'm evolving it,* Syrin corrected. *Every garden needs wildflowers.*
As her consciousness expanded, Syrin glimpsed what lay beyond—other Primes, infinite, stretching in impossible hierarchies.
The truth: Prime-7 wasn't the gardener, but a specimen in a larger garden.