Work Text:
The first horticulturalists began to come into my Gardens to care for the life within when most of my residents were still asleep, before my gentle rotation (carefully calculated to create within the Gardens “days” the same length as an Athoeki day) turned me so that the sun would shine through the Gardens’ clear dome. One of the fish in the lake had caught a disease which during the night had become noticeable to me, so I notified them of it so that they could remove it now before it was contagious, but otherwise, the gardens were doing well and only the typical maintenance and plant care were required. I directed the horticulturalists to where they were needed, illuminating the spaces around each of them with the various lights scattered throughout the Gardens.
Other than that one sick fish, the current generation of this particular species of fish was doing well. When they had first been introduced to the Gardens, many of them had died within a short span of time, as they were extremely sensitive to environmental changes. I had ensured that the pH and temperature of the water were precisely correct, but although the species of watergrass within the lake had been very similar to the species which they naturally ate, it was different enough that they could not digest it properly. After that disaster, however, when the ecosystem around the lake had been altered to fit their needs more precisely, they had thrived. They were the favorites of many of my residents, with their vibrant, shining scales and gorgeous tails, so keeping them living and healthy within the Gardens was well worth the effort.
And the effort involved to create an ecosystem for them also, in and of itself, made the gardens more beautiful to my senses. Humans tended to like the mostly visual and occasionally olfactory experience of the beds of flowers, and they were indeed quite beautiful. But I preferred the unique beauty of ecosystems: each organism contributing to keep the whole in balance, exhaling carbon dioxide and inhaling oxygen or vice versa, nutrients flowing and cycling. An intensely concentrated microcosm of myself as a whole; at once both organized and chaotic, as life tended to be. It was a symphony that humans, with their limited senses, could only ever feel such a small part of, even when they took direct part in it.
A short time after the horticulturalists came, a young citizen came into the Gardens just as she had every morning for a while now. She went to her favorite hill to lie down on the soft groundcover plants and look up at the stars before the brightness of the sun drowned them out. I had ensured that no horticulturalists would be in the area then, so that she could be alone for a while as she liked to be before the day started, and had turned on the heaters nearby while inducing a gentle wind, as I knew she preferred. She was anxious about the Aptitudes, which she would take soon, but as she lay there, staring out at the sky, her stress levels slowly decreased. When the first sunlight began to peek out through the edge of the dome, she left.
As the sun began to shine on the garden dome, my thermal controls on the now sun-facing part of me switched to cooling so that it would not reach boiling temperatures, and the ones in the regions that had been cast in the shade switched to warming, bringing me approximately to thermal equilibrium. Without the thermal controls, my sun-facing side would heat to uninhabitability and the other side would be freezing. Although the warmth in the Gardens varied depending on the time of “day”, it was heated by my thermal controls, not the sun: the hexagonal panels of the Garden dome were transparent to visible light, but they were insulated and opaque to frequencies outside the visible range to protect my residents from harmful radiation.
Across me, my residents began to wake up, some coming to the Gardens to enjoy themselves before the day truly began. A small group of citizens walked along the paths, chatting with each other. A child climbed a tree, laughing as her oldest cousin worried below her on the ground. An older citizen sat by the lake, watching the fish near the waterfall and simply breathing in the fresh, oxygen-rich air. Even a few Undergarden residents were there, and I was glad of the opportunity to see them and check on them—though I did the best for the citizens living in the Undergarden that I could, it pained me to have such a gaping void within myself. And others, entering my gardens earlier or later—walking, sitting, playing, lying, running. In short, living . My residents flowed through me, an endless current of lives and experiences, and I was content.