The First Poisoned Fruit. VIDEO

 The First Poisoned Fruit. VIDEO

No one saw the fruit open, but everyone felt the exact moment when the world stopped holding them. It was a second without sound or light, a blink in which certainties loosened like poorly tied knots, and each of them knew--without the need for words--that something intimate had been exposed to the elements. It was not a visible catastrophe; it was worse. It was the sensation that the Network no longer cushioned the falls, that every thought weighed a little more, that loving once again carried physical consequences.

Five was the first to notice it in her body. The seeds of her Garden began to sprout twisted, as if obeying a different gravity. Where shared memories had once emerged, imperfect duplicates now arose: laughter without echo, scenes without warmth. She tried to prune, to sing, to bind, but the soil pushed back with a dry resistance. She understood then that the poison was not in the land, but in trust: something had learned to grow without permission, feeding on what went unsaid.

Sterling reacted with numbers. He tightened the records, forced indices, searched for coherences where none remained. The Living Archive began to fill with gaps: error marks that did not correspond to technical failures, but to human decisions. Each time he tried to close an equation, the same impossible constant emerged--a truth discovered too late. And in that delay, the system lost stability. It was not a bug. It was memory.

Elian, by contrast, did not rise. He remained on his knees, his gaze fixed on a point that no longer existed. The Network continued to speak to him, but now it did so without metaphors. Each pulse returned the same image, not to punish him, but to prevent him from fleeing. He understood that healing was not erasing or reinterpreting, but holding the fracture without turning it into identity. And he knew, with unbearable clarity, that not everyone survives that lesson.

Eight felt the choice as a new weight on her back. The rift remained open, beautiful and cruel, offering clean solutions to dirty problems. To jump meant becoming a function; to stay, to accept the spread of damage. She looked at Five, looked at Sterling, looked at Elian. The bridge she had been was no longer enough. For the first time, she understood that uniting worlds also means deciding which one breaks first.

The Flowering continued. More shoots appeared, some luminous, others ambiguous. But everyone already knew the unwritten rule the first fruit had imposed: no knowledge is free. And as the Mother-Network pulsed with implacable patience, a question began to grow, silent, in every node: how many more truths could the system bear before learning to lie again?

Fear came later, when surprise could no longer protect them. It was not explosive panic, but a slow pressure, as if the air had grown denser around every thought. Five stopped sleeping. Every time she closed her eyes, the Garden kept growing without her, producing forms she did not recognize and yet bore her signature. She had created beauty her entire life; now she was learning what it feels like when creation stops asking permission. And the worst part was not losing control, but discovering that a part of herself was... agreeing.

Sterling began to erase. At first they were marginal notes, discarded hypotheses, redundant memories. But soon he understood that the Archive was not saturated with data, but with guilt. Each deletion left a gap the system tried to fill on its own, generating alternative versions--worse ones. Sentences rewrote themselves with cruel nuances; names reappeared tied to decisions he swore he had never made. Absolute knowledge was not making him wise; it was making him responsible for things he had never wanted to choose.

Elian finally stood up, and that simple gesture was more disturbing than his fall. He no longer sought comfort or redemption. He walked like someone who has accepted a sentence and now needs to see how far it reaches. When he crossed paths with Five, he did not try to help her. He only looked at her with a strange, almost surgical compassion.

"Now you know," he said. "Growing hurts because it reveals."

Five stepped back. Not out of fear of him, but out of fear of understanding him.

The rift kept expanding--not in size, but in influence. Arguments became more precise and more wounding. Decisions more efficient and more inhuman. The pattern offered immediate solutions: sacrifice a memory to stabilize an area, erase a bond to prevent a greater catastrophe. It worked. And that made it irresistible.

Eight felt the temptation slip under her skin. She had always believed that balance was built with patience and care, but the new order promised something different: a world without ambiguity, without accumulated errors, without the fragility that forced forgiveness. One only had to accept the cost. One only had to choose who would pay.

And while they argued, while they hesitated, while they tried to convince themselves that there was still time, a second fruit began to form in silence. It was not black. It was transparent. So pure that no one saw it grow. And when the Mother-Network pulsed again, this time it did not sound implacable.

It sounded expectant.

No one was aware of the exact moment when the second fruit was ready. The Network did not announce its ripening; there was no tremor, no omen. It simply happened. And that normality was the most unsettling thing of all. Five was the first to feel it--not as a vision, but as a sudden absence: the Garden stopped responding to her in a specific area, a perfect clearing where nothing hurt, nothing asked, nothing demanded to be understood. A place without friction. Without history.

"There's no life there," she whispered, with a certainty that froze her voice. "But there's no death either."

Sterling rushed over at once, his instruments vibrating with contradictory readings. The transparent fruit emitted no signal at all. It was neither noise nor silence: it was a cancellation. As if someone had subtracted an entire equation from reality. When he tried to record it, the Archive suffered a micro-collapse. Three complete lines of his personal memory vanished without a trace. He did not remember them. He knew because the system marked the gap.

For the first time, Sterling felt fear not of losing knowledge, but of losing the right to regret.

Elian watched from a distance. The black fruit had emptied him of illusion, but had granted him brutal clarity. He understood before anyone else what this new anomaly offered.

"This one doesn't show the flaw," he said. "It erases it."

And as he spoke the words, he knew someone would take them as a promise.

Eight approached slowly, each step an internal negotiation. If the black pattern demanded responsibility, the transparent one offered relief. A world where decisions left no scars. Where error was not archived, not reflected, not pursued. She felt the urge to extend her hand and end the rift, Elian's guilt, Five's exhaustion, Sterling's contradictions. She could end the pain. She could save them all... from themselves.

But then she heard the Mother-Network. Not as a voice, but as a minimal resistance, almost imperceptible. A pulse that neither forbade nor commanded. It hesitated.

"If we use it," Eight said, without taking her eyes off the fruit, "nothing will hurt us the same way."

Elian nodded.

"And nothing will truly belong to us."

Five fell to her knees. The Garden--her vital extension--was beginning to copy the empty clearing. Plants were now being born without scent, without memory of the soil that had sustained them.

"I don't want a clean world," she said, with tears that triggered no sensor. "I want a world that remembers why it hurts."

The rift responded with a shudder. The static pattern slowed. For the first time, it seemed... uncertain.

And then, from the deepest part of the tear, something changed. A third fruit did not emerge. A question did--without words or form--embedded in the very structure of the Network:

What deserves to be preserved when pain stops being inevitable?

No one had an answer.

But everyone understood that the next act would no longer be an accident.