When dawn came, the survivors—plants and people, patchwork zombies included—sat on the lawn and traded stories. Someone pressed a brass badge into the Gardener’s hand: 10, embossed, warm. The backyard had been upgraded, yes, but more importantly, it had been invited to imagine.

The zombies adapted, too. They traded tattered coats for patched leather jackets, grew curious about fluorescent fungi, and began to leave notes—on bits of cardboard, in chalk—asking politely for directions home or the recipe for a perfect grilled cheese. A few even formed a choir. None of it mattered to the rules Upgraliam set: change is the garden’s currency. A brain offered in exchange for a favor might return as a wind-up bird that scouts the next wave.

The first to change was the Peashooter. Where once it spat tidy green pellets, Upgraliam melted the old rules. Peas now went spherical and strange—tiny glass orbs of light that orbited foes before bursting into a storm of glitter and old radio static. The sound lingered in the grass: jazz notes, the creak of attic doors, a child's laugh from a decade removed. Zombies paused, not from fear but from a sudden and uninvited nostalgia.

They said the backyard had seen it all — sunflowers humming with contentment, peashooters practicing their aim, and lawn chairs staged like silent sentinels. Then the Upgraliam arrived.