He thought he was saving the future. He didn't realise the future had been arranged.

Jake Firelli is a mid-career operative in the Corps—one of a handful of people born with the rare genetic marker that makes forward time travel possible. The Corps has a noble mission: travel to the future, identify extinction-level threats, and prevent them. Forty million lives saved in Chennai. A nuclear exchange averted over Frankfurt. The record is public and celebrated.

Then Jake finds the other files.

Quiet interventions. Careers redirected. Researchers nudged away from discoveries they were about to make. A second layer of work the Corps never talks about—and Jake's own signature on authorizations he hasn't signed yet.

Deeper in the archive is a third layer, older than the Corps itself: the Perennial Trust. A name that sounds like where wealthy families park their money. A group that has been patient for a hundred years, refining a genetic program that was supposed to have ended in 1945. They didn't stop. They went quiet. And the rare marker that makes Jake useful wasn't discovered—it was cultivated.

His personality profile. His recruitment. The letter he received before he ever heard of the Corps. All of it, projected with 91% accuracy, decades before he was born.

He can't undo what's been done. He can't warn anyone who isn't already inside. And the Trust, patient as always, has already priced in his rebellion.

The Gardeners is a novella in the tradition of Asimov and Clarke: an idea followed to its uncomfortable conclusion, where reasonable people make reasonable choices that compound, across generations, into something that looks very much like inheritance.

For readers of Ted Chiang's Exhalation, William Gibson's The Peripheral, and Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility—literary science fiction about time, systems, and the quiet machinery of long-term power.

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