The Garden of Forking Paths

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by Anthony Boucher when it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948. In 1958 it was translated back into English by Donald A. Yates and published in Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Spring 1958. In 1962 this translation was included in the book Labyrinths (New Directions).
The story's theme has been said to foreshadow the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It may have been inspired by work of the philosopher and science fiction author Olaf Stapledon.
Borges's vision of "forking paths" has been cited as inspiration by numerous new media scholars, in particular within the field of hypertext fiction. Other stories by Borges that explore the idea of infinite texts include "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand".
The narrator opens the story by noting a delay in a British attack on the Serre-Montauban line during World War I, and states that the signed statement of Chinese professor Yu Tsun allows the events to be understood in a new way. The remainder of the story consists of this statement.
Tsun is living in the United Kingdom during the war but acting as a spy for Imperial Germany, motivated not by a love of the latter country, but by a desire to prove to his chief that he is not racially inferior. He has discovered a crucial bit of information, the location of a new British artillery park. However, he also learns that a British intelligence officer of Irish ancestry, Richard Madden, has just killed another member of Tsun's spy ring and will surely catch Tsun within the day. Tsun forms a plan to transmit his information to Germany and flees on a train, narrowly escaping capture by Madden.
Tsun arrives at the village of Ashgrove to seek a man named Stephen Albert. Thinking about labyrinths as he walks, he remembers one of his ancestors, a provincial governor named Ts'ui Pên. Ts'ui Pen had retired from civil service to construct "a novel that would be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and a labyrinth in which all men would become lost." However, he was apparently murdered before he could complete either task, leaving only incoherent drafts of the novel and no known labyrinth.
On reaching Albert's house, Tsun is astonished to learn that Albert is a Sinologist who is himself studying Ts'ui Pen's incomplete novel. Albert, himself thrilled to meet a descendant of Ts'ui Pen, explains that he believes Ts'ui Pen's novel and labyrinth were not distinct projects, but rather two descriptions of a single project. Albert had acquired a letter by Ts'ui Pen that included the statement, "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths." In Albert's interpretation, these forking paths would represent the various possible futures that could have resulted from each event of the novel, all of which Ts'ui Pen describes in separate chapters, rather than choosing a single outcome for each event. The novel's apparent multiple drafts of various chapters would be in fact a single work, in which the infinitely forking futures are described. The novel is thus "an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time".
Overwhelmed with emotion, Tsun states that by unlocking his ancestor's masterpiece, Albert has surely earned his gratitude in every divergent future. Albert replies with a smile that there is at least one timeline where Tsun is his enemy.
At that moment, Tsun sees Madden running through the house's garden. He asks Albert to turn around on a pretext and shoots him fatally in the back. As Tsun awaits hanging in his cell, he explains that he successfully transmitted the message that the British artillery was in the town of Albert, Somme by killing a man of that name, and that his German chief understood the significance when he saw the murder in the newspapers. However, Tsun notes that the chief "does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness."