The underground vault of the Manhattan Gene Bank glowed with a faint, cold blue light. Evelyn's eyelashes were thickly encrusted with frost crystals formed from liquid nitrogen. She pressed her palm against the DNA identification screen, and suddenly, a hundred thousand gene test tubes inside the glass enclosure began to boil. These spiral chains, which stored the Rothschild family's bloodline for a hundred years, were being broken down into bloody foam by the bacteriophages she had implanted.
"You're much more skilled at replacing the coolant than you were when you were twelve years old," Lucas's voice seeped out from the ventilation duct, carrying the mechanical texture of a voice changer. He dropped down upside down among the liquid nitrogen tanks. Under his bulletproof monk's robe, his body was revealed, wrapped in detonation wires, and each wire was connected to brain slice specimens of Evelyn from different ages.
Evelyn pried open the safe numbered B-09 with her fingernails. In the cold air, what emerged was not a gene map, but a certificate of her umbilical cord blood from when she was a baby. On the yellowed parchment paper, the fingerprint of Daniel's father was imprinted in the place where the notary's signature should be, and the notary date was exactly three days before the explosion of the chemical plant. When she tore the certificate to pieces, the fluorescent powder bursting out from the fragments formed a surveillance image in the air: In the neonatal intensive care unit, a doctor wearing a protective suit was injecting a jade-green liquid into her fontanelle.
"Is the fireworks of cognitive subversion beautiful?" Lucas ripped open his monk's robe. The quantum computer implanted in his chest was cracking the gene bank's firewall. "The abortion pill your mother took back then had the exact same formula as the preservative in my sister's coffin." Suddenly, he coughed up blood with ice shards, which landed at Evelyn's feet and congealed into an array of miniature chips.
A pale pink mucus suddenly seeped out from the blast-proof door of the vault. Evelyn knew this was a sign that Daniel's mechanical army was approaching. Those killing robots cultivated from the nerve fibers of her cloned body had footsteps that carried the rhythm of the fourth act of Swan Lake. She turned the valve of the liquid nitrogen tank to the critical point, and the low-temperature gas instantly froze half of Lucas's body into an ice sculpture, while the other half seeped out scalding plasma due to the subcutaneous heater implanted in it.
"Your pain threshold has increased by 37%," she crushed the blood crystals congealed on the ground with her foot, and the fragments cut into Lucas's retina. "Thanks to the live craniotomy training you gave me in Afghanistan."
The alarm suddenly switched to Chopin's "Funeral March." Evelyn knew this was an ultimatum. The nerve gas she had buried on Wall Street would spread to the financial district in two minutes and seventeen seconds. When she tore off the wires of Lucas's quantum computer, the display screen suddenly showed an image that made her tremble: At the age of eight, she was being carried onto the experimental table by Daniel's father, and outside the glass observation window, the young Lucas holding a camera had the menstrual blood of her mother stained on the hem of his white coat.
"This is the real birth video," Lucas's frost-cracked vocal cords made a sound like sandpaper rubbing. "You're nothing but a living revenge program cultivated by the Rothschild family..."
The bulletproof glass of the gene bank suddenly exploded into a diamond-like dust mist. The mechanical battle tank driven by Daniel crashed through the wall. The gun barrel was welded together from three hundred cloned uteri, each filled with concentrated ricin toxin. His mechanical spine extended out nerve tentacles, which were now in a state of quantum entanglement with the chip interface at the back of Evelyn's neck. "I've finally been waiting for you to activate the ultimate protocol, my bride."
The implant in Evelyn's temple suddenly overloaded, and the truth that made her soul tremble emerged in her retina: All the revenge actions were just the enactment of a preset program. From the first encounter in the art gallery to the showdown in the church, every turning point precisely corresponded to the script inscribed in her mind by the Rothschild family. She tore open the skin on her left arm, pulled out the blood-stained nerve bundle, and inserted it into the main console. All the display screens in the gene bank simultaneously played her real birth video — the cultivation chamber was numbered E-09, and the signatures of the supervisors were jointly signed by Lucas's father and Daniel's father.
"The frequency of your trembling is 22% higher than the design parameters." Daniel's mechanical tongue licked the bar code behind her ear. The metallic saliva melted the camouflage coating, revealing the mark of "Property of Rothschild" branded underneath. "Do you know why 'Swan Lake' was chosen as the trigger? What your mother danced in the fire before she died was precisely the dying swan from the third act."
Lucas suddenly detonated the miniature nuclear device buried in his ribs. The shock wave shattered a hundred thousand gene test tubes into a bloody galaxy. The splashing spiral chains automatically reassembled in the air, forming a map of Evelyn's brain neural network. His maimed fingers inserted into the coolant pipeline, and he let out a final mocking laugh in the ice mist: "Look at the memory sector in the seventh area of the map... The childhood you thought you had... is all fake data input twenty years ago..."
Evelyn danced the dance of revenge in the rain of genetic blood. Every spin triggered the pre-buried bombs, and the shock wave dismembered Daniel's mechanical battle tank into sacrificial parts. When she leaped onto the main console stepping on Lucas's skull, the entire gene bank began to collapse towards the center of the earth, and the same toxic gas from the chemical plant all those years ago seeped out from the radiation-proof walls.
"You miscalculated the variables." She pulled out the backup power source beside her heart and connected it to the DNA sample bank of the ancestor of the Rothschild family. "Do you know why my uterus could give birth to three hundred clones?" When a current of tens of millions of volts coursed through the gene chain, all the preserved Rothschild genes began to self-ignite. In the firelight, the curse she had engraved on the uterine wall of each clone emerged — those who shed this blood would surely have their eardrums shattered by the beating of their own hearts.
Daniel's mechanical eyeball catapulted into Evelyn's palm during the explosion, and the iris unlocked the final core secret: The surveillance footage showed that the real Evelyn had already been made into a specimen thirty years ago, and all the current actions were just a carnival of clones controlled by AI. She laughed maniacally and crushed the eyeball, only to find that her own blood was crystallizing — this was a sign that the genetic self-destruction program had been activated.
The salty seawater of the Atlantic Ocean leaked through the collapsing dome. In the face of the impending disaster, Evelyn connected to the global live broadcast signal and simultaneously uploaded the nerve toxin formula and the Rothschild gene map to the dark web. When the seawater filled her torn vocal cords, what was finally broadcasted was not a declaration of revenge, but a variation of Chopin's "Lullaby" — this was precisely the melody that Daniel had looped in her clone cultivation chamber.
The undersea fiber optic cable suddenly overloaded and exploded, and the lights of Manhattan went out one by one. In the absolute darkness, Evelyn felt her body molecularizing. The last image her consciousness saw was the laboratory log from twenty years ago:
The 100th personality reset is completed, and the revenge program version 4.0 has been successfully loaded. Experimental subject E-09, I wish you a pleasant revenge.