The Repeated Motif

By the third week Imran had found the signature. Every designer leaves a habit, a thing they cannot stop doing, and Eshara's designer loved a particular spiral. It was in the seed heads of the meadow grasses and the branching of the river deltas and the way the reef organisms in the shallows laid down their skeletons. The same spiral, the same proportion, at every scale, from the microscopic to the continental. Now, a spiral repeating at scale is not proof of intention. Imran knew that. Nature loves a spiral, it falls out of simple growth rules. But this spiral did not fall out of any growth rule she could model. It had to be placed. Someone had placed it everywhere, the way a painter signs a canvas, except the canvas was a world, and the more she traced the signature the more certain she became of a thing that frightened her. The signature was not old. It was being maintained. Something was still here, still gardening, still signing its work.