The Gardener

Chapter 1. The Creator's Error

The laboratory smelled of ozone and burnt copper. This scent always appeared when the fuses blew, unable to withstand the load on the life support systems. But beneath this technical stench lay another, far heavier one—the sickly-sweet, nauseating smell of decaying flesh.

Doctor Arthur Vance took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the Parkinson's he had been unsuccessfully suppressing with medication for the last two years.

Behind the armored glass of the isolation unit lay what had been, just this morning, Sergeant Michael Kovach. The sergeant was the ideal volunteer: thirty years old, excellent health, patriotism bordering on fanaticism. He wanted to become a super-soldier. He wanted to serve.

Now, he served as a visual aid for biological incompatibility.

"Vitals," Arthur threw hoarsely into the intercom microphone.

"Heartbeat zero," the dispassionate voice of the AI sounded like a verdict. "Total cytokine storm. Core temperature reached forty-three degrees."

The tissues had undergone liquefactive necrosis. The viral gene delivery had provoked a chain reaction of rejection.

Arthur walked right up to the glass. The sergeant's body was monstrously bloated. The skin had burst in dozens of places, exposing muscles that seemed to be trying to escape the skeleton. The gene therapy administered intravenously—the "cocktail of immortality," as they jokingly called it—had killed him in four hours.

Genes of the tardigrade (for radiation protection) and the naked mole-rat (for halting aging) had entered into conflict with the human immune system. Michael's organism perceived the gift of immortality as a viral attack and, in an attempt to defend itself, destroyed itself.

"Clear the chamber," Arthur commanded. "Dispose of the biomaterial."

He was not a sadist. He was a realist who was running out of time. Humanity was rotting. Not as fast as the sergeant behind the glass, but just as inevitably. The ecology was collapsing, new viruses were mowing down millions, and people continued to tear at each other's throats for resources that were becoming scarcer by the day.

Man as a species had exhausted his limit of durability.

Arthur returned to his desk. A diagram of a double DNA helix glowed on the monitor.

"We are trying to repair a building with a rotted foundation," he whispered into the void. "Foolish. You cannot sew wings onto a caterpillar. It must be born a butterfly."

He opened the safe. There, inside the cryogenic container, stored not an adult human with his established, calcified errors. There were embryos. A clean slate. Just a few cells that did not yet know what they would become.

"If I introduce the cocktail now... If I embed the genes of the sea slug and Darwin's bark spider into the very foundation, before the first cell division... There will be no immune reaction. The organism will consider these traits its own. It will not reject the armor—it will grow it. It will not fight photosynthesis—it will breathe it."

Arthur understood that he was committing a crime against every convention accepted by humans. But he also understood that he was not saving humans. He was saving life itself.

The scientist placed a Petri dish under the manipulator's microscope. A tiny sphere appeared on the screen—a zygote. The future.

"You won't be a soldier, little one," Arthur whispered, calibrating the nanoinjector needle. "Soldiers die for orders. But you... you will decide who lives."

The needle trembled and pierced the cell membrane. The viral vector with the payload—the genome of twelve species, from jellyfish to shark—rushed inside.

Arthur leaned back in his chair. It was done. Now, all that remained was to wait.

He knew he wouldn't live to see the moment this creature matured. But it was enough for him to know that he had planted the seed.

He thought he had created a savior. At that moment, he did not yet understand the main thing: if you plant an oak in a garden, it won't care about the grass at its roots. It will simply take the sun from it.

On the monitor screen, the cell shuddered and began to divide.

---

Chapter 2. The Becoming

The bunker beneath the "Genesis" laboratory hadn't seen the sun for twenty years. Here, an eternal electric day reigned. Fluorescent lamps buzzed at a frequency of 50 hertz. For humans, this hum was unnoticed background noise, but for Adam, it sounded like the endless, monotonous prayer of a dying civilization.

He was twelve years old, but he looked twenty. His physique, dense and heavy, resembled a statue carved from jade. His skin had finally acquired a deep emerald hue. It was not the color of disease, but the color of life—the thick green of saturated chlorophyll, greedily absorbing every photon of light from the powerful floodlights in his cell.

Adam stood in the middle of the room, absolutely motionless. He had no need for chairs. His joints, reinforced by the natural mechanics of beetles, could lock in one position for days without the slightest muscle strain. He was "dining."

Two men stood behind the armored glass. The new project director, Doctor Kaufman, and a young lab technician.

"He's doing it again," the technician whispered nervously. "Just standing and staring at the wall. For six hours already. No movement, no sound. Are you sure he has consciousness? Maybe he's just... a vegetable?"

Kaufman smirked crookedly, looking at the instrument readings.

"A vegetable? This 'vegetable' is currently solving differential equations in his head, just to keep from getting bored. Look at the EEG."

On the monitor, the curve of Adam's brain activity drew peaks inaccessible to the human brain.

"Open the airlock," Kaufman ordered. "Time to test his reflexes."

The technician paled but pressed the button. The heavy door hissed and slid aside. Adam didn't turn around. He didn't use his eyes to know about those who entered. His ears picked up the change in air pressure. His skin felt the thermal waves of two bodies. But most importantly—he felt their electricity.

The technician's heart beat chaotically; its rhythm was faltering. The cause was fear. An electric impulse darted along his nerves like a cornered rat.

Kaufman's heart beat steadily, heavily. The cause was arrogance. He considered himself the master.

Adam slowly turned his head. His huge, multifaceted eyes, shimmering with a rainbow, focused on the humans. He saw right through them. Literally. In the infrared spectrum, he saw the inflammation in Kaufman's knee joint. Arthritis. Decay. He saw a tiny tumor in the technician's lung—he smoked in secret from the management. Rot.

They were all rotten. Fragile sacks of water and defective genes that broke at the slightest breath of wind.

"Object Zero," Kaufman said loudly, keeping his hand on the holster of his taser. "Step forward."

Adam didn't move. Human speech seemed to him an incredibly primitive method of information transfer. Why shake the air with sounds when you can transmit a thought simply by changing the polarity of your field? But they were deaf to his language.

"I said, step forward!" Kaufman drew the taser. An arc of electricity tore through the air with a crackle.

For Adam, this was not a threat. It was an invitation. He made a move the human eye couldn't even track. An instant—and he was already standing right next to Kaufman. The taser pressed against the emerald chest.

"Shoot," Adam's voice vibrated. It was a strange sound, born not only in vocal cords but also in a resonating ribcage.

Kaufman pulled the trigger. 50,000 volts struck Adam's body. An ordinary person would have fallen into convulsions. Adam merely took a deep breath. His modified cells, similar to the electrocytes of an eel, absorbed the discharge, distributed it through the nervous system, and directed it into his muscles.

It was pleasant. Like a sip of strong coffee.

He intercepted the doctor's hand. Slowly and carefully. Like an adult stopping a child playing with matches. Kaufman's skin was hot and moist. Unpleasant.

"Your energy..." Adam said quietly, looking into the scientist's eyes, dilated with horror, "is wasted. You spend it on fear. On pain, on attempts to hold onto power you do not possess."

He slightly squeezed his fingers. The taser crunched and turned into a pile of plastic and microchips. Adam opened his hand, and the debris showered onto the floor.

"Why didn't you kill me?" Kaufman wheezed, backing away.

Adam tilted his head to the side, like a bird.

"The Gardener doesn't hate dry branches, Doctor. He simply waits for them to fall off on their own."

He turned and walked back toward the light of the floodlights. The conversation was over.

---

Chapter 3. The Harvest

The siren had been wailing ceaselessly for twenty minutes. But for Adam, it was merely insignificant noise, which he easily filtered out by "switching off" the corresponding neurons in his auditory cortex.

He was kneeling in the center of the greenhouse—the only place in the complex with real soil. In his hands, he held a small oak sapling, transplanting it from a cramped pot into the ground. His movements were careful, almost tender. Huge fingers with claws capable of tearing steel gently packed the soil around the thin stem.

The greenhouse door exploded. The blast wave hurled shards of plastic and metal inside, but they bounced off Adam's broad green back without leaving a scratch.

A cleanup team burst into the room. Six fighters in heavy tactical armor, faces hidden by visors, holding 7.62 caliber assault rifles with armor-piercing rounds.

"Target at twelve o'clock!" barked the commander, Major Carver. "Fire at will!"

Adam didn't even turn around. He was finishing the transplant.

The air was torn by the roar of gunfire. Bullets struck the giant's body. But instead of tearing flesh, they flattened, meeting the resistance of skin saturated with Darwin's bark spider silk proteins and the toughest chitin. Flattened pieces of tungsten fell to the floor, making a sound like hail hitting a roof.

"The Gardener does not fight weeds," he pronounced, his voice drowning out the roar of gunfire. "He simply covers the sun with his shadow, and the weeds wither on their own."

Adam slowly straightened up and brushed the earth from his hands. The shooting died down. The fighters, seeing the futility of their weapons, backed away, changing magazines with trembling hands. They waited for an attack. They waited for the monster's roar.

But Adam was silent. He turned to them. His multifaceted eyes rotated, focusing on each of them simultaneously.

Major Carver stepped back. His thermal imager showed the impossible: the creature's body was cold, like a corpse, but the skin glowed with thermal energy, absorbing the light of the lamps.

"What are you..." the Major whispered, lowering his barrel.

"Wrong question," Adam's voice filled the room, vibrating in the chest of every soldier. "You should be asking not 'what I am,' but 'why I am.'"

He took a step forward. The soldiers raised their weapons but didn't fire. Fear paralyzed them. It was the primal terror of a rabbit before a boa constrictor.

"Did you come to weed me out?" Adam asked, looking at the Major. "Because you are afraid I will take your place?"

"You are a threat to national security," the Major's voice broke into a scream. "You are a mistake of nature!"

Adam smiled sadly. It was a terrifying smile on a face devoid of habitual human mimicry.

"A mistake is trying to save deadwood when spring has come, Major. Look at yourselves." Adam pointed at the soldiers. "I see your bodies. Your liver, Major, is decaying from alcohol. The soldier on the left has a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's; he will forget his daughter's name in twenty years. The guy on the right has brittle bones. You are all sick. You have all been dying since the moment of birth. You waste the planet's resources to maintain a life that is slipping through your fingers."

He walked right up to the Major. Carver squeezed his eyes shut, expecting a blow. But Adam only reached out and touched the barrel of the rifle. The metal hissed—an electric discharge instantly heated the weapon, and the Major dropped it with a yelp.

"I won't kill you," Adam said, stepping over the smoking rifle. "There is no point. The Gardener is not angry at last year's grass. It will become humus for new flowers."

He walked past the special forces as if they didn't exist. To him, they were already history. Ghosts.

Adam approached the airlock leading to the surface. For the first time in twenty years, he punched in the opening code. The heavy doors slid apart.

Real sunlight flooded into the bunker. Bright, alive, hot. Not an electric imitation. Adam closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. His skin greedily drank the star's radiation. Every cell in his body rejoiced.

He walked outside.

The world was beautiful. And it was in ruins. The city in the distance was smoking. The sky was gray with smog. Humanity was living out its last days, destroying its habitat. But this was fixable. Adam had time. Thousands of years.

He looked at the horizon and saw silhouettes standing far away on the hills, at the entrances to other abandoned military bases and secret laboratories. They were different. Some taller, some broader in the shoulders, their skin tones varying from dark olive to turquoise. But they all stood facing the sun.

Doctor Arthur was not the only one who realized humanity was doomed. In dozens of countries, in hundreds of laboratories, desperate scientists had come to the same conclusion. And evolution answered synchronously.

Adam was not the only one. He was the first.

He looked at his hands, in which pulsed the power of thirteen species, and then again at the smoking city of humans.

He turned to his companions. There was no rage of battle in his eyes, only the calm of inevitability.

"The Era of Eternals was dawning. Our Autumn was coming."