A Sunday Reflection
“Harmony 17 is a choice.” That line was always meant to carry a slight chill. The kind you get when something sounds a little too perfect. The smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.
Some readers didn’t see it that way. After posting A Day in the Life of Harmony 17, I received feedback ranging from confused to confrontational. One person asked, What the hell is quantum gardening? Well the language was a bit stronger than that. Another said the story lacked conflict or character development. Someone else called me a “terrorist” for using AI to create visual elements.
Welcome to the internet.
Still, I take this feedback seriously, at least the parts not designed to wound. I want to speak to it directly. Not to defend, but to reflect.
Let’s start with the phrase that sparked the most ire: quantum gardening.
No, it’s not a mainstream term. You won’t find a how-to guide on it in Home & Quantum Living magazine. But it wasn’t just plucked from the aesthetic void either. Like much of speculative fiction, it’s rooted in something real, even if it’s refracted through metaphor.
There’s a field called quantum biology. In certain photosynthetic organisms, researchers have found evidence that energy transfer happens not just through chemical processes, but through quantum coherence. That is, particles don’t travel a single path, they explore all possible paths simultaneously and collapse into the most efficient one. It’s how plants and bacteria achieve nearly perfect energy efficiency. The Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex in green sulfur bacteria is the canonical example, and it’s one of the most quietly profound discoveries of the last few decades.
Nature, it turns out, may be better at quantum information than any computer we’ve built.
So the idea behind “quantum gardening” was this: what if we didn’t just observe these effects in nature, but learned to work with them? To shape living systems at the quantum level. To garden not with spades, but with probabilities. Tending coherence like you’d prune a vine. Nudging emergent behavior, rather than enforcing it.
It’s speculative. Of course it is. But it’s also closer than it sounds.
The other criticism I heard, that there was no conflict, no real tension, also rings true, in a way. Harmony 17 is deliberately quiet. Nothing breaks. No rebels rise. But that silence is part of the point. Sometimes, the most unsettling stories are the ones that don’t scream. A utopia that feels just slightly off. A society where you sense you’ve agreed to something… but don’t remember saying yes.
And then there’s the AI criticism.
This, more than anything, seems to stir a righteous fury. The assumption that because I use AI to generate visuals, I must be stealing from someone. That my work is derivative. That I’m part of the problem.
But the truth is more ordinary.
I’m a writer. I can’t draw. I can’t afford to pay artists for every post. So I use tools, ones that let me express something visual to accompany my words. The ideas are mine. The aesthetics are directed by me. I’m not replacing anyone. I’m creating with what I have.
And yes, I care about ethics. About attribution. About fairness.
But we’re not going to solve the crisis of creative labour by yelling at individual creators using public tools. We need to talk about power, not just platforms.
Jobs have vanished in every industry, sometimes because of tech, more often because of profit. Entire fields have hollowed out. I know developers who can’t get work. Editors who’ve left the industry. Print designers who saw their trade evaporate overnight.
This isn’t new. And it’s not going to slow down.
We either adapt with intention or get adapted by default.
I don’t believe technology is good or evil. I believe it’s unresolved. A mirror. A tool. A possibility. And fiction, especially speculative fiction, is where we explore that space.
Quantum gardening may not exist today. But the forces it’s based on do. And imagining how we might one day work with them, rather than against them, feels like a seed worth planting.
Maybe it’s not to everyone’s taste.
That’s okay.
Some stories bloom slowly.
📬 Sunday Reflections from the Vortex Of A Digital Kind
Every Sunday, I share a retrospective. It’s part personal reflection, part philosophical inventory. A look at where we are, what we’re building, and the future we might be stepping into. Think of it as a sprint review for reality.
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