The Blue Garden
1
The night was thick with the scent of pine and woodsmoke when Achille Judica-Cordiglia first heard the cosmonaut die.
He sat hunched over the crackling radio, his brother Giovanni pressed close beside him in the cramped attic of their Turin home. Outside, a cold wind whispered through the streets, carrying with it the promise of snow. But inside, the air was heavy with anticipation and the acrid smell of electronics.
The static hissed and popped, a cosmic storm of white noise. Then, cutting through the chaos, a voice:
"сломанный... система жизнеобеспечения... я не могу..."
Achille's fingers flew over the dials, his heart pounding. He knew enough Russian to understand. Broken... life support system... I can't...
"Got it," Giovanni whispered, his own hands steady on the recording equipment.
The voice came again, weaker now, fading like a guttering candle. "Прощай, земля. Прощай, мама." Goodbye, Earth. Goodbye, Mama.
Then silence.
Achille looked at his brother, saw his own mix of excitement and horror reflected in Giovanni's eyes. They had just recorded the death of a Soviet cosmonaut - a man whose very existence the USSR would deny.
But as Achille reached to switch off the radio, another sound emerged from the static. It was like nothing he had ever heard before - a high, keening wail that set his teeth on edge and made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
"What is that?" Giovanni breathed.
Achille shook his head, unable to speak. Whatever it was, it wasn't human. And it was coming from space.
Neither of them noticed the black car that had pulled up outside their house, or the two men in dark suits who now stood watching their window.
The KGB had arrived in Turin.
2
Moscow, August 1991. The city writhed in the throes of revolution, its ancient streets a canvas for the death throes of an empire. Marcia West felt the weight of history pressing down on her as she navigated the labyrinthine alleys of the Russian capital, each step a tightrope walk between worlds—the crumbling Soviet past and an uncertain future that seemed to shimmer like a mirage on the horizon.
The cobblestones beneath her feet were slick with the tears of seventy years of communist rule, and the air hung heavy with the acrid stench of burning documents and broken dreams. Beside her, Tom Clark's presence was both a comfort and a reminder of the monumental task that lay before them. His eyes, usually a calm sea of blue, now darted nervously from shadow to shadow, as if expecting the ghosts of the KGB to materialize from the very walls that had once been their domain.
"We're walking into the belly of the beast, Marcia," Tom murmured, his voice barely audible above the distant cacophony of protest and celebration that echoed through the city. "This isn't just about space race secrets anymore. We're witnessing the death of a superpower."
Marcia nodded, her throat tight with a mixture of excitement and fear. She'd come to Moscow as a NASA representative, tasked with the delicate mission of information exchange in these tumultuous times. But now, as the Soviet Union crumbled around them, she felt more like a thief in the night, come to plunder the secrets of a dying giant.
They turned a corner into a narrow passage that seemed to have been forgotten by time itself. The walls leaned in close, their peeling paint a palimpsest of propaganda posters and hasty graffiti. At the far end, two figures materialized from the gloom like specters from a Cold War nightmare.
Aleksandr Volkov cut an imposing figure, his broad shoulders and square jaw a testament to the Soviet ideal of strength. But it was his eyes that caught Marcia's attention—cold and calculating, yet tinged with a desperation that spoke volumes about the precariousness of their situation. Beside him, Natalia Ivanova stood like a coiled spring, her lithe frame belying the sharp intelligence that glinted in her dark eyes.
"Comrades," Volkov greeted them, his voice a low rumble that seemed to reverberate through the alley. "Or perhaps that term is no longer appropriate. Shall we say... business partners?"
Tom stiffened beside her, but Marcia stepped forward, her chin raised in defiance of her own racing heart. "We're here for the exchange, nothing more."
Volkov's lips curled into a humorless smile. "Ah, but it is so much more, isn't it? You come seeking mere technical specifications, launch trajectories, the dry bones of our space program. But what we offer... it will change everything you think you know about the cosmos."
He produced a battered leather briefcase, its worn surface a map of secrets and lies. "The Judica-Cordiglia tapes," he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "And more. Much more."
As Marcia reached for the case, a distant explosion shattered the tense silence. The ground trembled beneath their feet, and for a moment, it seemed as if the very foundations of the city were giving way.
"It's starting," Natalia hissed, her composure cracking for the first time. "The hardliners are making their move. We must go. Now."
But even as the words left her lips, the alley's entrance filled with shadows. Five men, their uniforms unmarked but their intent clear, advanced with the measured steps of predators closing in for the kill.
"Run!" Tom's shout galvanized them into action.
They fled, their footsteps a frantic drumbeat against the cobblestones. Marcia clutched the briefcase to her chest, feeling the weight of its secrets like a physical presence. The crack of gunfire erupted behind them, bullets chipping stone and screaming past their ears.
They burst out onto Tverskaya Street, once the grand artery of Soviet Moscow, now a maelstrom of chaos and revolution. Overturned cars belched black smoke into the sky, their burning husks a pyre for the old order. Looters smashed through shop windows, their arms laden with the spoils of a collapsing economy. Bewildered citizens huddled in doorways, their faces a canvas of emotions—fear, hope, disbelief—as they watched their world crumble and reshape itself before their eyes.
"There!" Tom's voice cut through the pandemonium. He pointed to a battered Lada, its engine idling and driver's door flung wide—abandoned in haste by an owner fleeing the unfolding drama.
They scrambled into the car, the vinyl seats creaking in protest. Tom gunned the engine, the Lada's tired motor wheezing to life. As they careened through the bedlam-filled streets, Marcia fumbled with the briefcase's corroded latch.
Inside, nestled among a sheaf of documents that reeked of state secrets and classified operations, sat a collection of audio tapes. With trembling fingers, she lifted one, squinting at the faded Cyrillic scrawled across its label: "Космонавт - Внеземной контакт."
"Cosmonaut - Extraterrestrial Contact," she translated in a whisper, the words hanging in the air like a pronouncement of doom.
Tom's eyes flickered from the road to the tape, his face a mask of disbelief and dawning comprehension. "My God, Marcia. What have we stumbled into?"
As they sped through the disintegrating heart of the Soviet empire, the weight of their discovery pressed down upon them. The tapes in Marcia's lap were more than just recordings—they were a Pandora's box of cosmic proportions, threatening to unravel not just the carefully constructed narrative of the Space Race, but the very fabric of human understanding.
Behind them, Moscow burned, the flames of revolution licking at the heels of history. And somewhere in the vast, cold reaches of space, something stirred—ancient, alien, and utterly indifferent to the tiny dramas playing out on the blue marble below. The cosmos had secrets to tell, and Marcia West and Tom Clark had just become their unwitting messengers.
As the Lada bounced and weaved through the chaos, Marcia clutched the briefcase closer, feeling the pulse of its secrets beating in time with her own racing heart.
3
Death, Tom Clark discovered, left an ozone-like taste in one’s mouth.
The transition wasn't gentle—no warm light, no choir of angels. Instead, consciousness shattered like a mirror struck by lightning, each fragment reflecting a different reality before coalescing into something entirely new. His last earthly memory—the screech of tires, the kaleidoscope of breaking glass, the taste of copper and fear—fell away like autumn leaves in a storm.
When awareness returned, it came in waves of impossible blue.
The sky above him wasn't Earth's sky. It rippled like silk in a breeze, its color shifting through shades that had no names in any human language. Clouds that seemed to pulse with inner light traced mathematical patterns across the horizon, forming and dissolving in sequences that felt almost meaningful, like a language he was on the verge of understanding.
Tom pushed himself to his feet, noting with detached fascination that the ground beneath him undulated gently, as if he stood on the surface of a sleeping ocean. The "grass" was a deep indigo, each blade crystalline and musical, producing tiny chimes as his movements disturbed them. The sound formed harmonies that reminded him of Russian Orthodox chants, if those chants had been composed by beings who perceived music in eleven dimensions.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" The voice behind him spoke perfect English, but with an accent that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "Though 'beautiful' is such an inadequate word. In Komnigrit, they have seventy-three different terms for this particular shade of blue."
Tom turned to face the speaker and felt reality slip sideways again. The man before him was immediately recognizable from the photographs he'd studied: Vodovatov Stanislavovich, the lost cosmonaut. He looked exactly as he had in his official Soviet portrait, down to the precise angle of his jaw and the particular way his left eyebrow arched. But there was something else now, something in his eyes that spoke of eons spent watching the universe unravel its secrets.
"You're dead," Tom said, the words feeling clumsy in his mouth. "You died in space. I heard the recording."
Stanislavovich's laugh was like crystal wind chimes in a hurricane. "Did I? Or did I simply transition from one layer of reality to another? Come, walk with me. Petrovich is waiting in the Garden."
As they walked, the landscape seemed to adjust itself around them, paths appearing and disappearing like thoughts in a dream. In the distance, structures rose that defied Euclidean geometry, their forms suggesting the architectural blueprints of a mad god. They were beautiful in a way that made Tom's eyes water and his mind rebel.
"The Blue Garden," Stanislavovich explained, gesturing to their surroundings, "exists in what you might call the spaces between spaces. It's a holding pattern for souls who've glimpsed too much of reality's true nature. Some would call it heaven. Others, a prison. Both are right, in their way."
They crested a hill, and Tom's breath caught in his throat. Below them spread a vast garden unlike anything Earth had ever known. Plants that seemed made of living crystal grew in fractal patterns, their forms suggesting both organic life and alien machinery. At its center stood a tree that appeared to be made of frozen lightning, its branches reaching up to touch the swirling sky.
Beneath the tree sat Fanin Petrovich, cross-legged like a Buddhist monk, his Soviet military uniform incongruous against the alien landscape. He opened eyes that seemed to contain entire galaxies and smiled at Tom.
"You've brought questions," Petrovich said. It wasn't a query. "About the tapes. About the sounds you heard after our... transition."
Tom nodded, lowering himself to sit on the crystalline grass. "What were they? Those inhuman sounds?"
The two cosmonauts exchanged glances that seemed to contain entire conversations. Finally, Stanislavovich spoke: "They were our jailers. The architects of what you think of as reality. We humans..." he paused, searching for words, "we're not what you think we are. We're not even who we think we are."
"What do you mean?" Tom asked, even as part of him screamed not to pursue this line of questioning, to maintain the comfortable illusions of his former life.
Petrovich leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper though there was no one else to hear. "Reality—your reality—is a holographic prison, constructed eons before mankind drew its first breath. We are not its natives, but its inmates. Our bodies are merely containers for criminal souls, pawns in an elaborate game the architects call 'Prism.'"
As if triggered by the word, the sky above them rippled, patterns forming that reminded Tom of complex mathematical equations he'd once studied at NASA. The grass beneath them hummed in harmonic resonance, and for a moment, he could almost see the code underlying everything—the mathematical structure of reality itself.
"But why?" he managed to ask, his voice thick with horror and fascination. "Why go to such lengths?"
Stanislavovich's smile was tired, ancient. "Entertainment. Wagering. We are their game pieces, our triumphs and tragedies carefully orchestrated for their amusement. The space race, the cold war—all of it was part of their grand design. Until we pushed too far, tried to breach the boundaries of our prison. That's when they were forced to intervene."
The revelation hit Tom like a physical blow. "The moon landing..."
"Faked," Petrovich confirmed. "After what happened to us, they couldn't risk more humans reaching space. The Americans were allowed their propaganda victory, but only in low Earth orbit. Everything else—the photos, the footage—all carefully constructed theater."
As Tom struggled to process this earth-shattering information, the Blue Garden around them seemed to pulse with renewed intensity. The alien flora glowed with inner light, casting shadows that moved in ways shadows shouldn't. In that moment, he understood why the other inhabitants he'd glimpsed moved so slowly, spoke so carefully—they were all struggling under the weight of knowledge too vast for human minds to fully comprehend.
"Time works differently here," Stanislavovich explained, noting Tom's observation of their surroundings. "What feels like weeks or months might be seconds in the world you left behind. Or vice versa. The architects exist outside of linear time—to them, past, present, and future are merely different angles of the same moment."
Tom thought of Marcia, of the life he'd left behind. It all seemed so distant now, like a half-remembered dream. "And there's no way back?"
The cosmonauts shared another of their meaningful glances. "Back?" Petrovich asked softly. "No. But forward... that's another question entirely."
As if in response to his words, the crystalline tree at the garden's center emitted a pulse of energy that rippled through the alien landscape like a stone dropped in a pond. Tom watched in fascination as the waves of blue light passed through his body, leaving behind a sensation of profound understanding that evaporated before he could grasp it.
He was about to ask another question when he noticed something strange—his hands were becoming transparent, the alien grass visible through his increasingly insubstantial flesh.
"Ah," Stanislavovich said, his voice holding neither surprise nor concern. "It seems your time in the Garden is coming to an end. Remember what you've learned here, Tom Clark. Remember that reality is not what it seems."
As the world began to fade around him, Tom heard Petrovich's voice, distant now as if coming from across a vast gulf: "The game of Prism enters its final phase. Choose your moves carefully."
Then darkness claimed him, and he began the long journey back to what he had once thought of as reality.
4
The lab techs called it "the screaming room," though no one ever screamed there. The silence was worse—the way subjects would stare into space, their eyes tracking something invisible, mouths working soundlessly as if trying to form words in a language human vocal cords were never meant to speak.
Tom watched through the observation window as they prepped another volunteer. The woman—Sarah Chen, theoretical physicist, recruited after a near-death experience left her babbling about mechanical elves—lay back in the reclined chair with practiced ease. This wasn't her first journey.
"Fascinating, isn't it?" Dr. Lowe materialized beside him, his white coat impossibly crisp despite the late hour. "The human mind, touching the infinite." He smiled, though it didn't reach his eyes. "Or perhaps it's the infinite, touching us back."
Tom said nothing, his attention fixed on the elaborate machinery surrounding Sarah. The DMT delivery system looked like something from a Soviet sci-fi film—all chrome and glass, with pulsing tubes that seemed to contain liquid starlight. But it was the monitoring equipment that truly caught his eye. The displays showed readings he recognized from his time in the Blue Garden—mathematical sequences that shouldn't exist in conventional reality.
"Your turn soon," Lowe said softly. "Now that you've seen the other side... well, let's just say you have certain advantages."
"You mean now that I'm broken," Tom replied, his voice bitter. "Now that reality doesn't fit right anymore."
Lowe's laugh was like ice cracking. "Broken? No, Mr. Clark. You're evolved. You've seen through the prison walls. Speaking of which..."
He produced a tablet, its screen displaying a spectrogram of sound waves that made Tom's head hurt to look at. "Remember these? The sounds that followed the cosmonauts' deaths?"
Tom nodded. How could he forget? Those inhuman frequencies had haunted his dreams long before he'd understood what they meant.
"We've been analyzing them for decades," Lowe continued. "But recently, with help from our... garden returnees, we've made a breakthrough. Watch."
He tapped the screen. The waveforms began to move, shifting and combining in ways that defied physics. As Tom watched, they formed patterns he recognized—the same crystalline structures he'd seen in the Blue Garden.
"My God," he breathed. "It's their language."
"Komnigrit," Lowe confirmed. "The tongue of our jailers. But that's not the interesting part." He manipulated the display, zooming in on a particular sequence. "This pattern here? It repeats across all known paranormal phenomena. EVP recordings. Unexplained radio signals. Even certain psychedelic experiences. It's like..."
"Like a signature," Tom finished. "They've been signing their work."
"Precisely." Lowe set the tablet down, turning to face Tom fully. "Which means every supernatural event, every ghost story, every religious vision—they're all part of the experiment. Part of Prism."
The observation room's lights flickered, though Tom knew it wasn't an electrical issue. Reality itself seemed to shiver whenever these truths were spoken aloud.
Through the window, Sarah Chen had begun to react to the DMT. Her body arched in geometric patterns that shouldn't have been possible, joints bending at angles that made Tom's eyes hurt. The monitoring equipment erupted in a symphony of alerts as readings spiked off their scales.
But it was her eyes that caught Tom's attention. They had turned mirror-bright, reflecting things that weren't in the room. And when she spoke, her voice was layered with harmonics that made his teeth ache.
"Amul'Te approaches," she said in perfect Komnigrit. "The parameters of Prism shift. The window opens."
Lowe grabbed Tom's arm, his fingers digging in with desperate strength. "Do you understand what she's saying? All of it?"
Tom nodded slowly, horror and wonder warring in his chest. "She's not just speaking their language," he said. "She's accessing their network. Their... their reality framework."
The lights flickered again, and this time shadows moved in impossible ways, suggesting the presence of geometries that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space. Tom felt reality growing thin around them, like tissue paper stretched to transparency.
That's when Agent Canyon entered, his Nordic features sharp as a winter morning. He carried a briefcase that seemed to bend light around it, and his eyes held the same mirror-bright quality that Sarah's had taken on.
"Gentleman," he said, his voice carrying undertones that made Tom's inner ear buzz. "I believe it's time we discussed the true nature of The Window."
As if in response, Sarah Chen began to laugh—a sound that contained too many harmonics to have come from a human throat. On the monitoring equipment, mathematical sequences danced and mutated, spelling out messages in a language that existed before time itself.
The game of Prism was changing, and Tom Clark stood at its center, a translator between worlds that were never meant to touch. Behind him, through the observation window, Sarah Chen continued to speak in tongues, her words a bridge between realities, her body a conduit for truths too vast for human minds to hold.
And somewhere, in the spaces between spaces, mechanical elves moved their pieces across an infinite board, their ancient game approaching its final, terrible move.
5
Tom's fingers traced the edge of his new identity card, the laminated surface cool against his skin. Thomas Carpenter, the name read. A stranger's name. A lie made tangible.
"How does it feel?" Agent Canyon's voice cut through Tom's reverie. "To shed your old life like a snake's skin?"
Tom looked up, meeting the agent's piercing gaze. Canyon was a study in Nordic efficiency—tall, blonde, with eyes like glaciers. His very presence seemed to lower the temperature of the room.
"Honestly?" Tom said, his voice rough from disuse. "It feels like dying."
A ghost of a smile flickered across Canyon's face. "Good. That's exactly what we need the world to think. Tom Clark died in that car crash three years ago. Thomas Carpenter is a ghost, a whisper. And ghosts, Mr. Carpenter, can go where the living cannot."
The office they sat in was a study in government minimalism—bare walls, utilitarian furniture, and a single window offering a tantalizing glimpse of the world outside. A world Tom hadn't seen in what felt like lifetimes.
"Why now?" Tom asked, leaning forward. "Why am I suddenly getting a get-out-of-jail-free card? Last I checked, I was your star pupil in speaking alien gibberish."
Canyon's laugh was as dry as autumn leaves. "Star pupil? Clark, you've graduated. You're not just speaking Komnigrit anymore. You're dreaming in it."
A chill ran down Tom's spine. It was true. Night after night, his sleep had been haunted by visions of mechanical elves, their chittering voices worming into his subconscious.
"So what's the plan?" Tom asked, trying to keep his voice steady. "You're not setting me loose out of the goodness of your heart."
Canyon leaned back, steepling his fingers. "Tell me, Clark. What do you know about the true purpose of the CIA?"
Tom snorted. "Besides being Uncle Sam's personal chambermaid? Not much."
"Cute," Canyon said, his tone suggesting it was anything but. "The truth is, the CIA was founded for one purpose and one purpose only: to unravel the nature of Prism."
The weight of those words hung in the air between them. Tom felt his world tilt on its axis once again.
"You're shitting me," he breathed.
"I assure you, I am not," Canyon replied. "Every president since Truman has been briefed on the true nature of our reality. Some have taken it better than others. Kennedy, for instance, couldn't handle the truth. He wanted to tell the world. We couldn't allow that."
Tom's mind reeled. "So you—"
"We did what was necessary," Canyon cut him off. "Just as we've been doing for decades. The Cold War, the Space Race—it was all a cover. A desperate attempt to push against the boundaries of our prison."
Tom stood abruptly, pacing the small office. "And what about now? What's changed?"
Canyon's eyes followed him, unblinking. "Now, we have you. A human who can communicate with our jailers. And we have this."
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small vial filled with an iridescent liquid. It seemed to shimmer and shift, even in the dull office lighting.
"Plush Helix," Canyon said, his voice tinged with something close to reverence. "A DMT hybrid that allows direct communication with entities like Amul' Te."
Tom froze. "The alien god?"
Canyon nodded. "The very same. We've been developing it for years. It's how we know about Blistagush, about Veragross. It's how we know that the game of Prism is nearing its endgame."
Tom collapsed back into his chair, his head spinning. "So what do you want from me?"
"We're sending you to South America," Canyon said. "To a refuge for... let's call them 'Blue Garden refugees.' People like you who've seen behind the curtain. Your job is to establish contact with Amul' Te using Plush Helix. To convince it that humans are worthy of Blistagush."
Tom laughed, a hollow sound. "And if I refuse?"
Canyon's smile was razor-thin. "Then we all die when the elves trigger Veragross. Nuclear armageddon, remember? It's your choice, Clark. Save humanity or watch it burn."
Hours later, Tom stood at the window of a nondescript hotel room, watching as the sun set over an unfamiliar city. In his hand, he clutched a burner phone—his only lifeline to his past.
With trembling fingers, he dialed a number he knew by heart.
"Hello?" Marcia's voice, unchanged after all these years, sent a jolt through him.
"Marcia," he breathed. "It's me. It's Tom."
A sharp intake of breath. "Tom? But you're... you died. The crash—"
"I know, I know," he cut her off. "Listen, I don't have much time. You need to get out of the States. There's going to be a nuclear war."
"What? Tom, this isn't funny—"
"I'm not joking, Marcia. Please. Just... be safe."
He hung up before she could respond, his heart hammering in his chest. As he stared out at the darkening sky, Tom couldn't shake the feeling that he had just set in motion events that would change the course of human history.
Somewhere out there, mechanical elves were moving their pieces across a cosmic chessboard. And he, Thomas Carpenter née Clark, was about to make his first move in a game he barely understood.