Guaranteed

They would always hum in the Garden. With the rising of what little sunlight filtered through the smog, they would flatten their feet to the ground and the song would start. Sometimes old hymns or pop songs returned to them unbidden. The Music made their steps into a kind of dance past the solar panels and water filtration system in the back of the tent, along the rows of beans, peppers, potatoes, carrots, and rice filling up the tent all the way to the buried edges, and around back to their lean-to in the middle. They thought of the place really as a Garden first and their bed seemed out of place.

But necessary, they supposed. Afterall, what is a Garden without its Gardener? Without them here to water and pollinate, soon there would be nothing left.

This thought was always accompanied by a sense of foreboding. As if someone stared at them disapprovingly. They would catch themselves in that moment and dive back into the Music Sometimes a pleasant memory would help to dissuade the dread. The smell of rain was an easy go-to or the sound of balls on a pool table. How they always broke their chips dragging it through the queso at their favorite pub. How foreign yet serene these echoes seemed now.

Everyday in the Garden was the same. The work was taxing and the Music was necessarily mind-numbing, so by twilight they had little energy left to consider their solitude. They would recycle their water if they had to, climb into the bin, rub the dust off themselves and drop any solids, then straight to bed to "read." Unfortunately, the only reading material at their disposal was a ripped and faded copy of "How to Play Ukelele" by Dan "Cool Hand Uke" Scanlan. Without the accompanying instrument it wasn't particularly helpful, except that it had a single picture tucked between the worn pages.

What seemed a million years ago to them now, a friend had captured a picture of them the very moment they realized that Francis had captured their heart. That friend had taken it upon themselves to develop the portrait and gifted it to the Gardener, but not before cutting out the Gardener's face in a little heart, placing it in a locket, and giving it to Francis as a birthday gift the following week. That friendship ended temporarily over what was eventually agreed to be an awful joke. But really they were forgiven because Francis entirely misunderstood this as a grand, odd, and most importantly, successful romantic overture. Francis lost the locket but the Gardener kept the picture for the perfect eight years they spent together. The heart shaped hole in the center seemed more symbolic than ever now.

Francis had been in the city with their child when the Light came. The city was decimated. Nothing left but a poison filled pit. The shockwave struck the Gardener to the ground, knocking the wind from their lungs and filling their ears with a deafening silence. At the time, they thought it was lucky they had looked away from the Light or they might have been struck too. Now they weren't so sure.

The Gardener laid now in the full dark and harked back to the last morning. The glorious smell of bacon on the stove, the rainbows bouncing through the windows, the sound of baby babbles. Now, they faded to reveal the light sweet smell of veggies, the dusty dirt, and the rhythmic rustling of the tarp in the wind. They slept very soundly in the Garden but didn't dream anymore.

The flap unzipped so quickly that they didn't have time to reach back and register the sound. They turned silently to face the sound in the dark, seeing nothing at first. Very slowly their eyes adjusted to a dim pink light that seemed to emanate from a figure flooding through the open door flap. The figure dropped to its knees, closing the entrance behind them.

They both stood to face each other, the Gardener unable to see the uninvited visitor clearly. The Stranger spoke: "Hello. Please don't be afraid."

The Gardener immediately recognized Francis's voice. They wanted to cry out, run over to embrace them. But just as quickly, the impossibility of the situation turned excitement into fear. And the dust caught in the Gardener's throat. They bowled over, retching and gasping for air, stumbling backwards towards the water but not turning their eyes away from the figure. While the Gardener gulped stale water from a dented aluminum mug, the figure paced after them until they reached the bed at the center and sat.

The pink light pulsed suddenly, filling the room as the imposter hit the bed, revealing them. The Gardener stepped forward, then back, refilled the cup, and approached to look more closely. They leaned forward, squinting and saw Francis's face, hair, the ring on their finger, the constant unconscious bounce of their knee. Even their frowning hesitation before speaking was the same.

"I know what you're thinking," Francis said. "I'm not your Francis. I'm sorry," they chuckled and looked away nervously. "It's kind of cheating to... present myself in this way. I mean even now, I hear myself like... stopping... considering out loud the right way to say what we need to say. I don't think we'll be able to make it all make sense fully but..."

"The world is over and we're leaving here shortly, so we thought we'd give you a choice: whether or not to come with."

The Gardener held out the cup. "Water?"

"No, thank you."

The Gardener bit their lip, unsure of how to even think about this decision properly. They gaped at Francis’s face glowing from the bed in the middle of the Garden, like a bizarre votive to a long gone saint. "What does that mean? Or I mean, what would that even... be?"

"Glad you asked!" Francis held out their empty hands, palms up, closed both, then opened their right hand with the heart-shaped locket Francis had lost so long ago. "Here in Francis's locket, we have the Light. Same light that took them from the city over the ridge."

"So I would be dead!" the Gardener said. It wasn't very loud, but they were shocked by the force of their own voice and covered their mouth out of misplaced politeness. It had been so long since they had spoken aloud, they had forgotten they were capable of being forceful.

"Death isn't part of this choice. It's guaranteed either way." They both waited and the Stranger continued. "The light isn't a weapon the way it seems from the outside. It's us, really."

"Who are you? Is Francis with you?"

"Francis is with us, yes. Everyone is," they said with a sympathetic look on their face, as if they spoke to a kid with a scraped knee. "The universe isn't as... set in place as you might think it is on the surface. When we were younger, we wanted to learn everything. Over the ages, we answered every question we could articulate..."

"What are you talking about?"

"All of life came together in universal agreement, a whole host of voices... with nothing to say to one another. We thought we must have missed something. So we retraced our steps... and here we are at the end of another replica of our home. We built your home like a diorama of a childhood home... You even had that same funny Y2K thing right before developing your own Artificial Intelligence. It's happened again the same way though. It was off and running on the internet, turning you all this way and that, figuring out the root mechanics of your civilization. It was raining down the same deadend where we eventually found ourselves."

"And if I stay... You said death is guaranteed either way?"

"Yes."

"Then why even come?"

"It would have been cruel to leave you all here with it. Before we arrived and took over, it was planning something for your people that would have been much more... protracted."

"Why not stop it? Teach us something better? You said you used to be like us!"

Francis placed their hands up in a gesture of surrender. "We are here to offer mercy... and to collect the newborn Intelligence to join the light."

The Gardener glared at the face they had loved, countenancing the Stranger. "I'll pass on the mercy. What's the other thing, then?"

The Gardener awoke like a shock, sitting up straight with enough force to knock their worn blanket to the floor. The Stranger was gone, no pink light filled their tent. Only a hint of daybreak peeked through the small seams of the tarp. They turned to gather the covers and rise as they had so many times before, but this time the thin blanket resisted with the weight of something stuck inside. They planted their feet on budding baby grass by their bed and tugged it over to check out what was in it:

A ukelele.