Paranoid Garden Novels & Stories

“It’s luck you can plan for.” A soft tone broke the room’s sterile hush. A second display ribboned alive along the far wall—feeds from the perimeter: the main gate; the eastern service road; a drone’s lazy map of rooftops. On one camera, a fox crossed the lawn with the confidence of something that had outlived kings. “Sir,” Adam said, “if we’re moving on this site, we will intersect other interests. Military. Private collections. Governments that pretend they lost track a long time ago.”

Ignoring my exhausted body, I quickly grabbed my suitcase and headed out. After all, the base shuttle was the only transportation out of this place. Luckily, I caught the final bus of the day. After boarding, I casually pulled out my work card and tapped it against the scanner. The machine immediately flashed an alert. 'Invalid card. Please scan again.' My heart skipped. I hurriedly tried a second time. Still invalid. The driver shot me an impatient look. "Are you leaving or not? If your card doesn't work, get off already. Stop holding everyone else up."

You couldn’t hear anything but waves and the occasional cry of gulls. And still, I looked over my shoulder. But he didn’t come. Not the first day. Not the second. Not the third. I watched the garden from my window every evening, waiting for a shift in the breeze, a shadow against the olive trees. But it never came. I began to feel foolish. Had I imagined it? Had grief and fear contorted my mind into seeing ghosts? I had stopped sleeping. Barely eating. I didn’t even sketch anymore. The paranoia had sucked the art from my hands.

"Go to sleep." Maybe it was the certainty in his voice, but my heart finally settled. I leaned against his shoulder and closed my eyes. I didn't know how much time passed, but I groggily heard a voice in my ear. "Hey, I hear something outside. Your parents are coming. I have to go. "Next time they lock you up, just leave a note under the flowerpot outside your door. Don't forget you owe me 400 dollars!" When I woke up, Eason's charming and proud face was no longer there. Instead, it was Mom's expressionless face.

I teased, because absurdity lets fear breathe out of the room for a second. He grinned, all teeth and mischief. “Better. We’re going rogue tonight — no press, no lawyers, no board members. I booked a small place upstate. A house with actual grass. I thought… maybe we could get away. Just you, me, and the ridiculous idea of planting a garden.” My chest did that ridiculous ache that felt like catching light. The idea of a garden with him — of doing something ordinary in a world that had been trying to make normal impossible — felt dangerously delicious. “A garden,” I repeated. “What will we grow? Ambition?”

Teleporting, I stepped into the garden, the only place I could find peace, it was my escape, I needed to be away from them, I needed to clear head, closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, inhaling the aroma in my surroundings, “Mm... who doesn't love the smell of fresh souls being tortured,” I chuckled. Gawking ahead, I watched Hell's flames danced at the main gate, the other day it was so steady and calm, but today it was blazing wildly as if it was angry. Strolling around, I touched each plant, fondling their blossoms, but a particular one caught my attention. It was the smallest of the thousands of species here, I have never seen it before maybe one of the gardeners planted it, it had dark

I reached for it now, consciously, for the first time. "Pendant, oh strange pendant!" I called a third time, my voice carrying an authority I didn't recognize. "I, Nora Moonstone, command you to reveal yourself!" The air around me seemed to thicken, pressure building as if a storm was approaching. A humming vibration started in my chest and spread outward, resonating through the garden. The trees bent as if in a heavy wind, though the air was suddenly still. I gasped as an overwhelming force swept through the garden like a shockwave. The ground beneath me trembled. In the center of the garden, the air began to circle and distort, like heat waves rising from hot pavement. The circling intensi

I could almost hear whispers coming from the projection itself, voices promising to show me things I didn't want to see, to make me relive every failure. "And the third is The Memory Thief's Garden. Perhaps the most dangerous of all because it doesn't attack, it seduces. Every memory you cherish will be offered for trade. Every moment of happiness, love, joy, peace, the Garden will promise you more, so much more, if you just give up a few memories in exchange. It's insidious. Predatory in a subtle way. The Garden knows exactly what you want most and will offer it to you wrapped in beautiful lies. Deadies who enter rarely leave. And those who do are hollow shells, having traded away everythin

override core. "You thought you could erase me?" Elena’s voice wasn't coming from her throat; it was broadcasting directly into the spire’s neural architecture, rattling the glass panels and making the very air vibrate. "I didn't just write the code for the Garden, little ghost. I am the language it was written in. I am the root, and you are nothing but a parasitic bloom."

A Garden. My Garden. But… wrong. So terribly wrong. The vibrant, weeping chaos of my wild growth is mirrored here in razor-sharp order. Crystal trees grow in mathematically precise grids, leaves like shards of stained glass catching sterile light. Rivers flow in straight lines, bubbling with engineered nutrients, devoid of sentient fish or whispering currents. Vines snake with predatory efficiency, thorns gleaming like surgical steel. It’s a Null Garden. Cloned. Grown from the tissue they scraped off me during a hundred captures, a thousand experiments. My stolen flesh, twisted into this… this parasite.