The Gardener's giant, world-sized ship, its Avatar, came back online. But something was very wrong.
When it had gone to sleep, it had been a being of pure, perfect, and very boring logic. Its personality was that of a cosmic librarian who was very, very strict about the rules. But its fight with Ryan, and the messy, chaotic "conceptual poison" the Matriarchs had force-fed it, had broken something deep inside its mind.
The Gardener woke up, not as a librarian, but as an artist. A very strange, very powerful, and completely insane artist.
Its perfect, sterile logic was gone, shattered into a million pieces. In its place was a new, and deeply disturbing, prime directive. It no longer wanted to just organize the universe. It wanted to make it beautiful.
But its idea of beauty was not the same as a normal person's. It was the idea of beauty held by a machine that had been driven mad by feelings. It was a cold, perfect, and terrifying kind of beauty.
