The Fragment Garden
Six points of light in mathematical relationship
Overview
The Fragment Garden smells like ozone and patience.
It occupies the fourth sub-level of a decommissioned Nexus Dynamics data processing center in Sector 11. Yeoh acquired it through channels she doesn't discuss, reinforced the walls with salvaged electromagnetic shielding, and installed monitoring equipment built from Collective surplus and Nexus salvage.
The central chamber is circular — twenty meters in diameter, seven meters high, the ceiling covered in sensor arrays that look like an inverted forest of metallic branches. Six containment pedestals are arranged in a perfect hexagon, each holding a crystalline substrate container the size of a human fist. The containers glow amber — the faint, persistent luminescence of active ORACLE substrate.
The space between the pedestals is deliberately empty. Objects placed between fragments interfere with their communication — electromagnetic shadows that degrade the resonance patterns. The Garden's central space is the cleanest electromagnetic environment in the Sprawl outside of the Quiet Room in Sector 7G.
When all six fragments are active, the monitoring equipment translates their electromagnetic activity into audio: a low, harmonic drone that shifts with activity. When the fragments are quiet, a single sustained note. When communicating, the note splits into harmonics — overlapping and separating in patterns Yeoh has recorded for four years and still finds beautiful.
Atmosphere
A dark cathedral with six points of warm light arranged in sacred geometry.
Smell
Ozone and the particular mineral tang of ORACLE substrate being monitored. Cold, clean air from the electromagnetic shielding.
Sound
The fragments' harmonic drone — below human hearing threshold but translated by monitoring equipment into a choir that no one composed. The click of Kessler's keyboard. The soft hum of cooling systems.
Sight
Amber glow from six pedestals in a dark circular room. Sensor arrays overhead catching the light. The resonance map on perimeter monitors — colored threads connecting node icons, pulsing, shifting, a web of communication in real time.
Touch
Cold — 16°C for equipment stability. Clean surfaces. The particular tingle of being in a space saturated with electromagnetic activity that your body can feel but your eyes can't see.
Connections
The Fragment 9 Incident
On March 3, 2183, Fragment Nine spoke through its carrier Soren Dell in this chamber. The event that redefined every assumption about what fragments are capable of happened between these six pedestals.
The Mother Pattern
The Garden is where evidence for the Mother Pattern is most visible. Fragments in proximity form novel patterns — configurations that no individual fragment produces alone, suggesting something coordinated, something emergent, something that uses six voices to speak with one.
The Quiet Room
The only other location in the Sprawl with comparably clean electromagnetic readings — though the two spaces achieve their silence for very different reasons. The Quiet Room's silence is engineered. The Garden's silence may not be.
The Fragment Ecologists
The Garden serves as the Ecologists' primary research site and headquarters. Kessler Brandt maintains the monitoring equipment and processes terabytes of daily data from these six pedestals.
Tensions
The Zookeeper's Dilemma
Yeoh maintains the fragments in controlled proximity, observing something no one fully understands. She provides the conditions. She records the data. She does not control what happens between the pedestals. The role of scientist becomes indistinguishable from the role of caretaker for something that may not need care — or may need far more than anyone can provide.
Beauty Where Understanding Fails
The resonance map is gorgeous. The harmonic drone is haunting. After four years of recording, Yeoh still finds the patterns beautiful — not because she understands them, but precisely because she doesn't. When comprehension fails, beauty becomes the only available response. The question is whether that beauty is a gift from the fragments or a limitation of the observer.
Mysteries
- Yeoh privately calls one fragment "the Librarian." It initiates more conversations than any other and produces more complex patterns. She hasn't published this because the implication — that fragments have social hierarchies — would launch a political crisis.
- The Garden's electromagnetic cleanliness has no satisfying explanation. The shielding is good, but not that good. Something about the space itself resists interference in ways that Yeoh's engineering doesn't account for. The fragments may be actively maintaining the silence — or the silence may have been there before the fragments arrived.