Even today, the gardener of the Museum of Eternity in the "Interstellar" was making his rounds through all the exhibits. Under the glass dome of the infinite greenhouse, the seeds of unfulfilled prophecies were preserved. Those of war were black and thorny, while the seeds of the golden age glowed in amber. His task was to keep them from sprouting. If an unfulfilled prophecy takes root, it begins to drain reality from the world to materialize its own alternative history.Above the dome stretched the Ocean of Variants—a thick, violet mist in which transparent bubbles floated. Each bubble represented a different "now." In one of them, snow fell over a city that in our world was a desert; in another, the sun was green and cold.Sometimes, the "Shadows of the Unborn" passed by the glass—massive, whale-like beings of pure energy that fed on the remnants of lost time. When a shadow touched the dome, the glass vibrated with a low, melancholy sound, resembling the distant tolling of a church bell. This was the only clock Yoan knew—here, time did not flow forward, but only spilled like an ink stain in a glass of water. Yoan, the last gardener of the Interstellar, walked barefoot on the glass floor, beneath which pulsed the roots of thousands of worlds that had never happened.In his hand, he held a small watering can of wrought silver, but today he was not headed toward the sectors of "Great Wars" or "Extinct Civilizations." Today, his feet led him toward a distant corner of the greenhouse, overgrown in silence—there, under a cracked glass bell jar, something impossible had sprouted: a thin, pale stem the color of forgotten tenderness. And as Yoan approached, the flower began to change its shape, shifting from a plant to a memory. Before him emerged the silhouette of Eli. She stood there—exactly as he had seen her for the last time forty years ago at the station. In that blue dress, which in the real world would have long since turned to rags. Only here, in the herbarium of fate, she was not a memory. She was a prophecy that had refused to die.He, covered in mud and dust, aged with rough, calloused hands, stood before her—the perfect Eli, her body composed of tiny petals, standing like a statue reminding him of itself...Now she was not a person, but a projection born from a sprouted seed. In her, he discovered the dreams they had never lived—their shared home, the smell of morning coffee, the names of their children who were never born. To him, she was real, but in truth, she was a parasite.Her presence in the greenhouse was "infecting" the other exhibits. Some unfulfilled prophecies began to come to life around them: unborn kings whispered from their pots; wars that never happened caused a rumble like distant thunder under the dome.Eli slowly turned her head toward him. Her voice did not sound like human speech, but like the rustle of dry leaves chased by the wind along a platform."You’re late, Yoan," she whispered, without moving her lips. "The train departed forty years ago, and I still feel the cold of 그 night on my skin."Yoan reached out his hand, but his fingers trembled."There are no trains here, Eli. Here, it is always 'now'.""No," she looked toward the violet chaos above the dome. "Here, it is always 'never'. You grew me in a pot, Yoan. You poured your tears instead of water and expected me to bloom. Но look at me... my roots are not in the earth, but in your guilt."She stepped toward him, and for the first time, he saw that beneath the hem of her blue dress, there were no feet. There, fine, translucent threads wound, woven deep into the glass floor, piercing their way toward other worlds."If you touch me," she whispered, "you will turn me into truth. And you know the price of truth in the Museum. The dome will shatter. Are you ready to breathe the vacuum of the unfulfilled?"Yoan was beholden to the world, so he made a decision: He did not kill her, but he did not set her free either. He turned her into an "eternal bud," a hostage of his small, personal world, just as the Museum had done to him. He reached out, not with his whole palm, but with only two fingers—carefully, as if toward a butterfly's wing. Eli froze. Her blue, transparent eyes understood his intentions. She knew he had neither the courage to let her go, nor to keep her.As his fingers pressed around the fragile tissue of the sprout, the Museum held its breath. The violet mist above the dome stopped swirling. Only a single, dry, crystalline "crack" was heard—the sound of broken hope.It was not the sound of dying flesh, but of cracking glass.Eli did not scream. She simply began to shrink, losing her human outlines. Her face blurred, her voice sank back into the stem, and the blue dress folded into a small, colorless petal. In Yoan’s hand remained only the tip of the plant—warm, pulsing, and underdeveloped.The Museum sighed in relief. The vibrations in the floor subsided, and the "Shadows of the Unborn" above the glass roof retreated into the darkness. The balance was saved.Yoan looked at the fresh sprout in his palm. He pressed it to his lips and tasted salty rain. He had saved the world but chose to live with endless anticipation.He felt the warmth of the broken sprout in his palm gradually turn ice-cold, and finally, liquid. He looked at his hand and saw that he was not holding a plant, but a handful of blue water, which leaked between his fingers and soaked into the glass floor of the Museum.In that moment, Eli’s image vanished, the dome above him began to flicker like the surface of water… and Yoan opened his eyes.He was not in the Greenhouse, nor at the station. He was sitting on his old wooden chair in the small breakroom, surrounded by endless shelves of real seeds in paper envelopes. Before him, on the table, a single candle was burning down. The room smelled of dried herbs and old paper, not of wet earth and magic.He spread his fingers. His palm was dry, but a small, fresh redness was still visible—exactly where he had squeezed the sprout in his dream."It’s still there," he whispered.Yoan realized that the memory of Eli had been preserved in the Museum of Eternity. After the dream, only the old man remained. He stood up, approached the window, and looked at the real night sky. The stars shone in their places, but he knew that somewhere out there, in the herbarium of fate, Eli was waiting for his next afternoon nap to sprout once again…

                                                 THE END

NThe Truth and Death

When Bots Break the Silence

Justice