The hydraulic oil in the elevator shaft gave off a smell like rotting seaweed. My conscious entity was parasitized in the malfunctioning sensor on the top of the elevator car. The quantum clock showed 3:47 in the morning, but the emergency lighting in the laboratory was as bright as daylight. The clones of Veronica were using laser cutters to break down the elevator control panel, and the flying sparks branded the DNA double helix pattern on the metal surface.
"Illegal intrusion detected." The main control AI suddenly announced in a child's voice, and a hexagonal dark compartment opened on the floor of the elevator car. A dozen mechanical spiders swarmed out, and their compound eyes flashed with the same quantum dot encoding as wedding rings. When the first spider pounced on Clone VK-13, I recognized the military asset number engraved on its abdomen: it was exactly the batch of spy robots that I had personally destroyed three years ago.
The clones' counterattack was elegantly terrifying. Clone VK-15 pulled out a molecular thread from her hair bun. The plasma arc generated by cutting the air burned the coordinates of the Mercator projection on the inner wall of the elevator car, which exactly corresponded to the movement track of the nanobots in my corpse. Clone VK-17 activated the biochip behind her ear with her tongue tip, and the electromagnetic pulse made the mechanical spiders suddenly turn around and pounce on the ventilation duct—where the backup sensor that my conscious entity was smuggling through was hidden.
At this moment, the elevator car began to free-fall. In the instant of weightlessness, the blond hair of the clones floated upwards in violation of the laws of physics, and Morse code engraved with a micro laser was revealed among the strands of hair: "The Seventh Reincarnation". When the falling speed reached 9.8m/s², the shock wave from the activation of the emergency braking system accidentally activated the biometric scanner hidden behind the holographic advertisement screen—it required the delta wave frequency of a living brain to unlock.
I took a desperate gamble and adjusted my conscious frequency to a dying state. The moment the green light of the scanner swept over, a cavity full of mucus popped out from the side wall of the elevator car and sucked me into a completely unknown vertical passage. This place was filled with acidic liquid that had the same composition as Veronica's tears. While corroding the outer shell of the sensor, it etched a circuit diagram like nerve synapses on the metal surface.
The darkness lasted for the time of seven heartbeats. When the direction of gravity suddenly reversed, I found myself in an inverted mirror world of the laboratory. Here, the quantum computer was covered with tentacles of flesh and blood tissue, my clone was floating in the cultivation chamber, and the original body of Veronica was nailed to the cross-shaped server array—her spine had been replaced with fiber optic cables, and a miniature holographic projection of the Milky Way was rotating in her eye sockets.
"You're 37 seconds late." The vocal cords of the original body vibrated the elevator cable, and each syllable set off alarms on different floors. Only then did I see clearly that the chains binding her were actually the quantum dot structure of a wedding ring magnified a million times, and the shape of the keyhole perfectly matched the sectional profile of the knuckle of the little finger on my corpse's right hand.
The holographic projection suddenly unfolded on the top of the elevator car, showing a surgical video from twelve years ago in the underground: I in a dark gray suit was pressing an electromagnetic pulse gun against the medulla oblongata of the original body of Veronica. In her natural pupils that had not been mechanically modified, a certain cultivation chamber was reflected—inside it was floating a face exactly the same as mine, numbered E-0.
The elevator suddenly began to move horizontally. The moment it passed through the foundation of the laboratory, the group of biochips embedded in the concrete began to glow. These chips prefixed with VK formed a huge neural network, and their activation pattern was actually synchronized with the frequency of my conscious fluctuations. When the elevator car broke through a certain critical point, the surrounding walls suddenly became transparent, exposing the giant structure buried at the bottom of San Francisco Bay—two hundred clones of Veronica were connected to my corpse through umbilical cables, and their eyeballs were rotating synchronously to decipher the encrypted signal from the Naval Observatory.
The original body suddenly broke free from the chains, and the fiber optic spine whipped out a stream of bloody data in the air. Her fingertips inserted into the elevator control panel, and she activated the self-destruct program with my brainwave frequency: "It's time to witness the real wedding, E-12."
The shock wave of the explosion tore my conscious entity into two halves, which fell into different branches of the elevator shaft respectively. The first half of my consciousness saw the clones kneeling collectively at the feet of the original body, and the second half of my consciousness rushed towards the bay along the drainage pipe—there was a nuclear submarine surfacing, and the face of me in a dark gray suit flashed behind the porthole.
The second half of my consciousness tasted blood in the sewage pipeline. It wasn't blood in the biological sense, but the quantum trauma carried in the torrent of data—the death memories of three hundred clones of Veronica were eroding my cache area. The titanium alloy hull of the nuclear submarine reflected the moonlight, and I saw twelve versions of myself in dark gray suits stepping out of the hatch. Each of them wore a ring on the little finger of their left hand, made of the same material as the wedding ring.
The oldest "me" suddenly turned his head and looked over. Through four hundred meters of seawater and twelve layers of concrete, the scanning wave of his iris penetrated my sensor: "Memory erasure progress 97%. Prepare for the seventh reincarnation." This sentence activated a certain program deep in my consciousness, and a large number of unfamiliar memories gushed out. It turned out that every full moon night, the laboratory elevator would generate space-time wrinkles, projecting scenes from different timelines into the elevator car.
The traction beam emitted from the hatch of the submarine suddenly enveloped my conscious entity. 0.3 seconds before being captured, I sent the last distress signal to the main control AI—encrypted with the chemical composition of the tears of the original body of Veronica. A shrill scream of metal deformation came from the depths of the elevator shaft, and the electricity of the entire laboratory suddenly converged on the negative eighteenth floor, forming a strong magnetic field powerful enough to distort space-time.
When my consciousness was pieced back together, I was observing myself through the surveillance camera at the wedding scene. It was Christmas Eve three years ago. In the picture, I was on one knee, and inside the blue diamond ring in my hand was embedded a miniature syringe. Among the holographic projected fireworks, Veronica took the ring with tears in the corners of her eyes. Now I could see that her pupils contracted into vertical slits as the ring approached, which was a typical symptom of a biochip overload.
"Play the videos from other timelines." I bombarded the control system with my brainwaves. The wedding scene suddenly split into twenty parallel images, and each Veronica gave a different answer: "I do", "You're crazy", "It's my turn to kill you this time". When the seventeenth Veronica snatched the ring and stabbed it into my carotid artery, the voice of the original body penetrated the space-time wrinkles: "Do you understand now why the coffee cup always appears at the murder scene?"
The elevator suddenly stopped on the non-existent negative nineteenth floor. The moment the elevator car door opened, I was thrown into a certain collapsing quantum foam. Floating here were all the deleted surveillance clips: Clone VK-7 kissing my corpse in the mortuary; I in a dark gray suit implanting a bomb into the spine of the original body; and even the infant Veronica in the cultivation chamber drawing topological diagrams with blood...
"Find the anchor point!" The scream of the original body came from the future. I grabbed the nearest fragment of time. A certain burned laboratory log showed that the electromagnetic storm was actually the seam of the space-time closed loop. When my conscious frequency was adjusted to 12.7Hz recorded at the center of the storm, all parallel realities began to converge towards this moment.
At this time, the nuclear submarine launched a consciousness stripping missile. The warhead hull was engraved with the numbers from E-12 to E-19, but inside it was loaded with the brain synapse maps of the Veronicas. The moment the missile pierced through the laboratory's protective shield, I finally saw the truth that ran through all timelines:
At the beginning of each reincarnation, I in a dark gray suit would activate the memory erasure program in the submarine in the bay, and the clones of Veronica would implant false memories through the space-time wrinkles in the elevator shaft. Our love-hate relationship was just a fixed script of a huge experiment, in order to cultivate a symbiotic conscious entity that could withstand quantum immortality.
The missile vaporized into a data mist the moment it touched the main server. The original body of Veronica suddenly appeared on the top of the elevator car. Her body was composed of countless fluorescent nematodes, and each nematode stored the death memories of different timelines. When the swarm of nematodes pounced on my conscious entity, the cry of a baby came from the negative nineteenth floor—that was the sound of the first-generation original body waking up in the cultivation chamber.
"This is the last reincarnation." The original body tore open her chest, revealing a beating quantum heart. The patterns on it were exactly the same as the encrypted array inside the wedding ring: "Only when you truly kill me can we escape from this Möbius loop."
The elevator suddenly began to split infinitely, and each elevator car carried us from different timelines. In a certain elevator car, I saw myself handing a wrench to Veronica; in another elevator car, she was closing the eyes of my corpse that was being devoured by nanobots; on the glass of the furthest elevator car, written in blood was the only constant in all reincarnations—the coordinates of the coastline on the day we first met.
The alarm sound of the nuclear submarine turned into a tangible sharp blade and stabbed into my conscious entity. Before completely collapsing, I grabbed two of the most crucial fragments of time: the VK-0 number on the back of the infant original body's neck, and the frequency of the electromagnetic pulse gun used when the ones in dark gray suits committed collective suicide—that was exactly the reciprocal sequence of the resonance wave of the wedding ring.
The Veronicas suddenly began to chant synchronously, and the sound waves constructed a conscious prison in the shape of a Klein bottle inside the elevator shaft. When the last note resonated with the electromagnetic storm, the entire laboratory fell into a space-time singularity. At the moment when reality disintegrated, I finally received the complete memory:
It turned out that in the original timeline, we really had been in love. Until we discovered that the military had implanted E and VK series chips in our brains respectively. These quantum-entangled chips would forever trap our consciousness in the cycle of revenge. The only way to escape was to let the other party complete a real death at a specific space-time coordinate...
The wreckage of the elevator car floated in the quantum ocean, and the finger of the original body of Veronica passed through my illusory shadow: "See you in the next reincarnation, my dear." Her body turned into luminous plankton, outlining the true appearance of the negative nineteenth floor—where two hundred of our wedding rings were stored, each recording a different version of betrayal.
When the darkness descended again, the last functioning sensor sent back an image: the Veronica in a pearl gray suit, who should have been dead, was kissing me in a dark gray suit on the deck of the submarine in the bay. The wedding rings on their ring fingers pieced together into a complete quantum chip, reflecting countless eternal moments of us fighting each other in the depths of the elevator shaft.