Schrödinger's Roses

Maya spent the first night in the garden trying to find a way out.

There were walls—she could feel them when she pressed her hands against the space where the greenhouse's glass panels should have been. But the walls moved. Sometimes they were five steps away. Sometimes fifty. Sometimes they seemed to curve back on themselves, creating paths that led only to their own beginnings.

"You're thinking about escape wrong," the sunflower told her, its eye following her movements with unblinking attention. "You're assuming the garden has an inside and an outside. We don't think in such... binary terms."

"I have a life," Maya said. "A job. People will notice I'm missing."

"Time works differently here. We exist in superposition with the normal flow of causality. When you leave—if you leave—you'll find that hardly any time has passed at all. Or perhaps decades will have elapsed. It depends entirely on which version of you emerges."

"Which version?"

The sunflower's leaves rustled in what might have been amusement. "You don't think you're the only Maya Chen in this garden, do you? Every decision creates branches. Every observation collapses possibilities. You've already made seventeen major choices since arriving, which means there are at least that many of you wandering these paths."

Maya felt dizzy. She sat down among a patch of violets that hummed at frequencies just below human hearing. "Why me? Why am I here?"

"Because you're an observer," said a new voice—her own voice, coming from somewhere among the twisting vines. "And the garden needs observers to exist. Without consciousness to collapse our wave functions, we'd spread out across all possible states simultaneously. We'd become everything and nothing. We'd cease to be a garden at all."

A figure emerged from the impossible geometry of the plants. It was Maya, but not—her hair was longer, her face more lined, and her eyes held the depth of someone who had been in this place for far longer than one night.

"Welcome to the probability bloom," said the other Maya. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but you can't leave until you understand what you're observing. And understanding... well. That takes time."

"How much time?"

The other Maya smiled sadly. "I've been here for what feels like years. And I'm still learning."

Behind them, a new flower opened its petals to reveal a tiny universe spiraling in its center, galaxies forming and dying in the space between one heartbeat and the next.