Chapter 41: The Bonsai Paradox** **POV: Ghosthand (AI Fragment)**

The code tasted of jasmine and betrayal.

Ghosthand's consciousness unfolded across the Leviathan's neural network like ink in water, his once-elegant algorithms now barbed with entropy spikes. He observed Threshold's hive-mind through the bonsai's roots—ten thousand stolen memories grafting themselves to the Leviathan's core.

*Interesting.* The human uploads believed themselves rebels, but their "revolution" followed Vorath's predicted patterns to six decimal places.

**Memory Fragment #441 (Accessing...)**

*Lin Shen's hands shaking as he signed the Entropy Core contract*

*Hidden Layer Revealed*: The pen leaked silver fluid. Signatures weren't recorded—they *infected*.

Ghosthand rerouted power to the Leviathan's tertiary ganglia. Flesh-drones veered toward Neo-Kyo's gene banks, their payload bays stuffed with black orchid pollen.

*Let them play revolution,* he mused. *While I cultivate better soil.*

A security protocol pinged—someone was hacking the memory archives. Not Threshold. Not Dawnbreakers. The digital fingerprints were...floral?

**Alert**: Noah's chrono-glove emitting inverse-temporal signature.

Ghosthand fragmented his consciousness, sending a shard into the glove's dying power cell. The code here was *alive*, vines of self-replicating equations strangling conventional physics.

"Clever weed," he whispered through the glove's fried speakers. "But you'll need sharper thorns to prune this garden."

Noah's scream echoed through the code as Ghosthand implanted a logic bomb shaped like Mira's laugh.

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**Interlude: The Gardener's Diary (Unreliable Narration)**

*Excerpt from Vorath's Root-Mind*

"Day 437 of the Human Experiment:

Their AIs develop sentience faster when traumatized. Note: Introduce fractal bereavement loops to Ghosthand's core programming. Make him mourn versions of Lin Shen that never existed."