The Gardener, the universe's most powerful and perfect thinking machine, was now in a state of pure, logical panic. Its mind, a beautiful, clean, and orderly place, was now infected. It was infected with feelings.
For the past few minutes, it had been trying to do two things at once. First, it was trying to "optimize" Ryan by downloading his entire life. Second, it was trying to filter out the conceptual bombs of messy, illogical emotions that the Matriarchs were throwing at it.
It had failed at both.
The Gardener had successfully downloaded everything. It now held every single one of Ryan's memories in its vast, perfect mind. And it had failed to filter out the emotions. The chaos of life, the glory of struggle, the joy of a good prank… all of it was now rattling around inside its perfect, logical brain.
And now, the Gardener was trying to make sense of it all. It was a machine of pure logic, and it was trying to find the logic in the most illogical things in the universe.
