The searchlight of the nuclear submarine pierces through the thick fog in the bay, and my conscious entity flees among the cables in the ruins of the laboratory. The quantum entanglement effect makes the vibration frequency of the wedding ring stronger and stronger. Each resonance is like a bone saw cutting through the remaining data stream. The warning from the prototype of Veronica echoes deep in the sea of consciousness: when the wedding ring is completely synchronized, the memory erasure program of those in dark gray suits will complete the final loading.
I parasitize on a cleaning robot in the ruins, and the sensor lens is stained with carbonized blood. When passing through the collapsed gene lock gate, the fluorescent marks flashing on the metal debris guide the way — it is exactly the trajectory map drawn by the nanobots in the spinal cord of the corpse. The rupture in the liquid helium storage tank on the seventh underground floor forms a whirlpool of ice crystals. In the center of the whirlpool, half of a tattered laboratory white coat is floating, and there is a laser mark of "E-12" engraved on the cufflink.
"Quantum homologous entity detected." The main control AI suddenly revives from the ruins, and its voice is a mixture of the voices of the prototype of Veronica and myself in the dark gray suit. A holographic projection constructs a model of a panopticon prison in the ice mist, and each cell holds us from different timelines. When I notice that the little fingers on the left hands of all Elias are missing, the roller of the cleaning robot suddenly runs over something soft — it is the severed palm of the Veronica clone VK-19, and the wedding ring on the ring finger is melting and reorganizing, forming the prototype of a miniature quantum computer.
The rumble of mechanical operation comes from underground, and I am forced to switch my perspective to the miniature camera in the ventilation duct. Five Veronica clones are cutting the floor with lasers, and their tears crystallize into storage chips in the air. VK-23 suddenly looks up, and bloody tears flow from her right eye that has not been mechanically modified: "You always show your flaw at the seventh heartbeat." This sentence activates the memory shackles deep in my consciousness, and a large number of tampered images gush out: it turns out that at the beginning of each cycle, I would personally put on the wedding rings for the clones in the submarine.
The resonance frequency of the wedding ring breaks through the critical value at this moment. The metal debris in the ruins begins to levitate, forming the molecular arrangement of the Maxwell's demon model. The moment the arrangement is completed, I see the projection of the laboratory before it was destroyed: the living me is injecting liquid nitrogen into the wedding ring, and a biological chip interface identical to the one on the back of my neck is inserted into the temple of the prototype of Veronica.
"Read the internal cache of the ring." I send a forced command to the main control AI, but accidentally trigger the self-destruction protocol. The last image sent back before the cleaning robot explodes into pieces: at the bottom of the sea, 300 meters deep, the nuclear submarine is extending its mechanical tentacles to connect to the ruins of the laboratory, and the suckers on the surface of the tentacles are all quantum communicators transformed from wedding rings.
The conscious entity flees into the emergency server on the ninth underground floor, where the time flow rate is 12.7 times slower than that outside. Among the fragments of the holographic log, I discover the true function of the wedding rings — they are a pair of quantum immortality anchor points. When both wearers die at the same time, their consciousness will be uploaded to the scene of their first encounter and start over. But all log records end at an abnormal parameter: the prototype of Veronica has never been detected to be brain-dead.
Seawater suddenly rushes into the ventilation duct, and there are fluorescent flickers in the black tide composed of nanobots. I adjust the spectral analyzer and clearly see that what is floating in the tide are the decomposed fragments of the wedding ring, and they arrange into fragments of the highest military confidential document: "Project VK-E" aims to cultivate time-space agents through infinite cycles...
The seawater suddenly withdraws from the ventilation duct like an ebb tide, and a force beyond the laws of physics is reshaping the structure of the laboratory. I parasitize on the cooling fan of the emergency server and watch as the metal floor grows circuits like neural dendrites. The severed palm of Veronica VK-23 suddenly grabs the fan blade and melts and reorganizes into a miniature holographic projector — showing the scene of me being tied to the operating table in the submarine twelve years ago.
The "me" in the dark gray suit and white coat is injecting purple liquid into my cerebellum, and the label on the syringe reads "VK-E Symbiote No. 7". The moment the liquid contacts the neurons, the monitoring screen of the operating table shows that my brain waves are completely synchronized with those of the prototype of Veronica in a certain cultivation chamber. This is conclusive evidence of memory implantation: it turns out that the scene of our first encounter is just a romantic virus program pre-installed in our brains by the military.
The resonance of the wedding ring suddenly stops, and the ruins fall into a deathly silence. This kind of silence is more terrifying than an alarm — it usually only appears in the absolute zero field before a time-space jump. I frantically scan the electromagnetic spectrum and capture an abnormal signal in the terahertz band: two hundred wedding rings are forming a circular antenna array at the bottom of the sea, sending a quantum foam data packet to the secret base on the far side of the moon.
"13% of the data packet content has been deciphered." The mechanical voice of the main control AI is hoarse with metal fatigue, "It contains the death memories of all timelines, and..." The sudden insertion of a baby's cry covers the second half of the sentence. I switch to the infrared perspective and see that the cultivation chamber groups on the nineteenth underground floor are seeping out milky white liquid, and these liquids converge in the ruins to form the structure of the gyri of my brain.
The prototype of Veronica slowly rises from the liquid brain. Her body is constructed from luminous plankton, and each organism stores the wedding ring data of different timelines. When her finger touches the frontal lobe of the liquid brain, the entire ruins suddenly play the superimposed images of all our "first encounters": the coffee spill at the technology summit, the passing by in the laboratory corridor, and even the fleeting glance behind the submarine hatch — in each scene, my iris is flashing with the control code of the military.
"This is the real wedding invitation." The prototype tears open her chest, and the pattern of the quantum heart perfectly matches the circular antenna at the bottom of the sea. She throws a melted wedding ring, and the liquid metal reorganizes into the shape of a key in the air, which just fits into the memory shackles deep in my conscious entity.
The unlocked flood of memories almost tears apart the form of my quantum state existence. I see myself in a dark gray suit implanting embryos into two hundred cultivation chambers at the lunar base — each embryo carries the mixed DNA of me and Veronica. The label of the cultivation chamber reads "VK-E The 7th Generation Symbiote", and the monitoring screen shows that the whole experiment has been repeated six thousand four hundred times.
An infrasonic wail suddenly comes from the bottom of the sea. The mechanical tentacles of the nuclear submarine pierce through the foundation of the laboratory, and the wedding ring quantum communicators at the ends of the tentacles begin to broadcast: this is a marriage proposal oath that has lasted for twelve years, and each word corresponds to the death code of a different timeline. When the oath reaches "in sickness and in health", all the metals in the ruins begin to secrete black mucus — this is exactly the biological circuit material used by the Veronica clones.
I am forced to make the last conscious jump and parasitize in the quantum bits of the wedding ring itself. Here, time presents the structure of a Möbius strip, and each atom records the trauma of the cycle. The moment I switch my perspective to the inside of the ring, I finally understand all the truths:
Those carefully designed betrayals and revenges are just experimental parameters to maintain quantum entanglement. Every time I press the electromagnetic pulse gun against the prototype of Veronica, I am strengthening the entanglement intensity of the wedding ring; the death of each clone is accumulating energy for the time-space jump. And what the circular antenna at the bottom of the sea truly transmits is the entropy reduction data condensed from our six thousand four hundred lives — the military is using our pain to power the interstellar colonization spaceship.
The prototype suddenly appears in the quantum realm. Her finger passes through the atomic gaps of the wedding ring and pulls out a glowing chromosome: "This is the genetic code of the first-generation embryo, hiding the method to end the cycle." The chromosome sequence burns in the air, and the ashes form the singularity coordinates of the Mandelbrot set — which are exactly the latitude and longitude of the coffee shop where we first met, but the timestamp shows 1943 during World War II.
The ruins begin quantum tunneling, and the laboratory debris and the nuclear submarine merge in time and space. I see myself in the dark gray suit standing on the bridge of the ship, inputting the final command into the wedding ring. The moment I press the confirmation button, all the Veronica clones suddenly stop moving. They raise their left hands, and the wedding rings piece together into a giant energy matrix — folding the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a microscopic quantum foam.
0.3 seconds before the collapse of reality, I seize two possibilities of reversal: the resonance frequency of the prototype's quantum heart, and the telomere length of the gene chain of the first-generation embryo. When these two parameters are modulated with the Hubble constant, a crack appears in the quantum entanglement field of the wedding ring.
The voice of the prototype of Veronica penetrates all dimensions: "Now, choose your reality." Her body decomposes into elementary particles and constructs two paths in the crack: on the left is the reset button for the scene of our first encounter in the coffee shop, and on the right is the detonation switch for the six thousand four hundred cultivation chambers at the lunar base. Each choice corresponds to another decoding of the encrypted message inside the wedding ring — "The one who kills you first is the real me" or "The last one to be killed can save us".
The circular antenna at the bottom of the sea overloads at this moment, and the most primitive recorded image emerges in the strong light: the prototype of Veronica without mechanical modification is crying in the cultivation chamber while holding the first-generation embryo. Her tears corrode an escape route map on the wall of the chamber, and the gene sequence of that embryo shows — it is our daughter.
When the conscious entity finally rushes into the quantum crack, the resonance wave of the wedding ring is suddenly tuned to the frequency of a baby's cry. At the end of time and space, I hold the newborn composed of metal and flesh, and see all the versions of me in dark gray suits dissolving collectively. The wedding rings on the little fingers of their left hands turn into stardust, spelling out the final message:
"Love is the only ray that can pierce through the quantum cage."