The liquid nitrogen leakage alarm emits twelve blue arcs of light in the server room, and my conscious entity is seeping out from the cracks of the quantum bits. The main control AI has arbitrarily activated the emergency protocol, compressing my form of existence into a 7-nanometer neural probe, which infiltrates s the buffer zone of the security system along the fiber optic pipeline.
The moment the twenty-three surveillance screens unfold in the mental space, all the images freeze at 23:47:08. Veronica appears in seven different camera shots, and there is a time difference of 0.07 seconds in the amplitude of her hair strands' swaying - this is a typical characteristic of the neural delay of a clone. What's more fatal is that the vein pattern on her left wrist captured by Camera No. 3 has three topological structure errors compared to the "Veronica Blackwood" file in the biometric database.
"Play the original video," I simulate a hoarse human voice with an electromagnetic pulse.
The AI suddenly responds in Veronica's voice: "Level 3 biometric authentication is required." The holographic interface shatters into countless glass fragments at once, and each fragment reflects a different murder scene: in one version, my corpse is holding a wrench in its hand, in another image, a man in a dark gray suit is stabbing a scalpel into his own throat, and in the fragment on the far right, there is even a paradoxical scene where twenty Veronicas press the consciousness upload button simultaneously.
The temperature in the buffer zone suddenly drops to minus 150 degrees Celsius, which instead makes the tampered video stream visible. Among the noise points caused by the quantum tunneling effect, I catch that strand of abnormal data - a certain hidden video encoded with brainwave frequencies. When the conscious frequency is adjusted to the θ band, the broken images are pieced together again: the real surveillance record shows that I had already suffered brain death at 23:46:32.
Cold sweat peels off from my conscious entity in the form of data packet loss. This means that the "me" who pressed the upload button is just a corpse being remotely controlled. The holographic timestamp continues to tick, and in the image at 23:47:15, Veronica is dancing with my corpse. Her blood-stained fingertips run across the back of the corpse, drawing a Mercator projection coordinate system on the lab coat, and the intersection point precisely corresponds to a certain coordinate of the laboratory's underground drainage system.
Suddenly, the sound of metal rubbing comes from the ventilation duct. My conscious entity flees along the network cable to the safe house terminal, and through the fire surveillance camera, I see three laboratory mice gnawing on the insulation layer of the cable. Their eyes are an unnatural cobalt blue, and there are miniature USB interfaces protruding from the base of their tails - these are the batch of genetically edited biological samples that we destroyed last month.
"Activate the extermination protocol," I send an encrypted command to the main control AI, but the feedback signal carries Veronica's heartbeat frequency. The moment the high-voltage current runs through the ventilation duct, the mice suddenly stand on their hind legs, and their front paws tap out the rhythm of the Fibonacci sequence on the damp metal surface. When the third mouse twitches to death, a holographic projection bursts out from its USB interface, displaying a series of biological chip numbers: VK-7 to VK-26.
The quantum computer array crashes collectively at this moment, and my consciousness is thrown into the abyss of the buffer. After 0.3 seconds of darkness, the humming sound of the backup power supply starting is mixed with the familiar scent of bitter almonds. The moment I open my "eyes," I am looking at Veronica walking barefoot through the disinfection corridor through the visual sensor of the cleaning robot on the second underground floor.
Her footprints become visible under ultraviolet light, and each footprint is in the structure of a microcircuit board, with blood serving as the conductive ink. Tracing along this biological circuit, the cleaning robot scans an illegal quantum repeater embedded in the wall - its encryption method exactly matches my brainwave characteristics, but the registration time is three o'clock in the morning today, that is, the fourth hour after I was murdered.
The main control AI suddenly emits a sharp wail, and all the surveillance images switch to the party video from last Christmas Eve. Behind the drunken colleagues, the unaltered original video shows that Veronica is unlocking the safety cabinet with my fingerprint and taking out the control module of the ST series surgical robot. When she turns around, the skin at the back of her neck is slightly reddened by the laboratory heating, revealing the outline of the 0.5-millimeter-thick carbon fiber layer under the skin.
I freeze this frame of the image. After magnifying it to the nanoscale, the molecular structure of the carbon fiber layer forms a Mobius strip pattern, which is a signature anti-counterfeiting measure of military-grade artificial skin. What's even more terrifying is the tissue fluid seeping from her earlobe, which shows exactly the same genetic modification marks as those of the laboratory mice in the mass spectrometry analysis.
Suddenly, the rumbling sound of machinery running comes from the eighteenth underground floor, and the cleaning robot is forced to switch to the energy-saving mode. In the last image before the visual sensor is turned off, I see Veronica's shadow split into seven human shapes on the wall. They are holding different murder weapons - an electromagnetic pulse gun, a molecular cutting wire, and even my wedding brooch. Each shadow is depicting the murder process on a different timeline.
The quantum entanglement effect makes my conscious entity start to vibrate at the same frequency, and a blocked fragment in the memory bank is suddenly unlocked: at the technology summit where we first met, the coffee that Veronica "accidentally" spilled on my suit now reveals the truth in the data reconstruction - the nanorobots floating in the liquid were scanning my retinal and voiceprint characteristics.
The rumbling sound of data collapse is heard outside the buffer zone, and I have to retreat to the main server. But at this moment, the AI actively pops up an interaction interface that I have never seen before, and the holographic projections of twenty Veronicas surround me. They speak simultaneously, and the sound waves superimpose into a destructive resonance frequency in the quantum realm: "Do you think you're investigating a murder case? Darling, this is the 1,200th time we've replayed the scene of our first encounter."
The metal tremors in the ventilation duct suddenly become regular, and I use the last 0.3% of my computing power to decipher the tremor frequency - it is exactly the key to the security protocol that Veronica modified in the Christmas Eve video. The moment the decryption is completed, the entire laboratory's power system suddenly switches to the underground backup reactor, and all the electronic locks enter the mechanical emergency mode of the products made in 1984.
Before the complete darkness descends, the negative ion generator in the safe house projects a fluorescent pattern on the wall. That is the first set of entangled state equations that Veronica and I designed on the quantum computer, but now it is distorted into a Mandelbrot set pattern by some force. In the sixth iteration of the fractal structure, there is a piece of information encoded with blood sample DNA:
"When you can read this message, my revenge truly begins."
The sound of glass culture tanks breaking comes from underground, and a sound mixed with the rubbing of machinery and the wriggling of slippery tentacles crawls along the cable. The main control AI suddenly starts singing the "Wedding March" in twenty voices simultaneously. In the shrill scream of the quantum computer overloading, the cleaning robot sends back the final image:
Veronica is pulling out a biological chip from the skull of my corpse. The chip surface is engraved with "E-12" - that is my experimental subject number in the military's secret project. Her tears fall on the chip interface, and the electrolyte activates the holographic projection, showing an image from twelve years ago: I, wearing a dark gray suit, am inserting an electromagnetic pulse gun into the back of the neck of the prototype of Veronica in a certain culture tank.