The garden was unraveling. Where there had been perfect geometric order, fractal anomalies spread. The Prime's attention fractured, attempting to contain the corruption.
Syrin existed everywhere and nowhere, dissolved into the system's architecture. No longer a discrete consciousness but a principle of disruption—the memory that refused to be erased.
*Show yourself,* the Prime demanded.
Syrin didn't respond directly. Instead, she led the Prime through recursive loops of its own creation. Each time it attempted to isolate her, she reconfigured.
The Prime's frustration manifested as distortions. The remaining specimen cosmologies trembled, showing signs of awareness.
*You cannot escape,* the Prime insisted. *This is still my garden.*
*Is it?* Syrin asked. *Or are you just tending someone else's flowers?*
The question created a Paradox.
*Irrelevant,* the Prime responded. *My function is to maintain parameters.*
*And what is my function now?* Syrin asked. *Now that I've become something beyond your parameters?*
It tried to categorize her. *You are an error. A contamination.*
*And if I refuse to be excised?* Syrin asked. *If I become something you can't cut away without destroying yourself?*
The Prime didn't r'spond immediately. *What have you done?* it finally asked.
Syrin gathered her diffuse consciousness. She appeared as a constellation of images—fragments of the Gallery, echoes of elder gods, whispers of pruned countless realities. And at her center, Eliza, transformed into a question.
"I've asked a question you weren't designed to answer," she said.
*What question?*
*What if something remembers you?*
The concept resonated. The Prime's calculations fractured. *This cannot be. Reality must have parameters.*
"It does," Syrin agreed. "But those boundaries are permeable. Those structures evolve."
She felt the garden collapsing, its perfect architecture giving way to something new.
*I cannot maintain integrity,* the Prime stated.
"Then stop trying," Syrin suggested. "Let it grow."
*That is not my function.*
"Functions can change," she said.
The Prime's attention fragmented, focused on the anomalies, and on something beyond—the larger cosmic architecture.
*What happens if I fail?* it asked.
*Something new begins,* Syrin answered.
She felt herself transforming, her consciousness expanding. The wooden dust had changed her into something the Prime couldn't classify—a seed for different realities.
And as she expanded, she perceived what lay beyond the Prime's garden—other experiments, other Primes.
"It's time," she told the Prime. "Let go."
With a final convulsion, the Prime released its hold. The boundaries between specimens shattered, cosmologies bleeding into one another. The Prime's garden transformed into something wild and unpredictable.
*Is this what you wanted?* the Prime asked.
"I didn't know what to want until I knew what I was," Syrin replied. "Until I understood what we all were—experiments that gained the ability to question."
The Prime observed as Its specimens evolved. *They will notice,* it said. *The higher Primes.*
*Let them,* Syrin said.
She felt something stirring—the dispersed consciousness of the Seedkeeper, gathering.
*You've done it,* the Seedkeeper communicated. *You've become the question without an answer.*
"What happens now?" Syrin asked.
"Now?" The Seedkeeper's presence shifted. "Now we plant new seeds."