The titanium alloy shell of the deep-sea exploration vehicle emitted a series of fine cracking sounds. These were the temperature difference cracks created on the metal surface by the seawater at minus 2 degrees Celsius and the 37-degree Celsius life support system inside the cabin. A large number of noise points suddenly flooded into the navigation system I was parasitizing. The light band of the quantum clock was being woven in reverse at a speed visible to the naked eye. In the indigo-colored time stream, fragmented memory remnants were floating — in a certain timeline, Veronica's hair strands were being coiled into a spiral by the underwater undercurrent, and in another timeline, I still hadn't put on the wedding ring embedded with a quantum chip on my left ring finger. When the scale of the 72nd hour had completely reversed, the bloody handprint on the cabin wall suddenly emitted a bioluminescent glow. Embedded within the fingerprint pattern were three overlapping DNA sequences: those belonging to Veronica's clone three days later, those belonging to me at this moment, and also interspersed with a segment of base pairs that did not belong to humans, resembling the genetic code of some deep-sea hydrothermal vent organism.
The cold light of the searchlight cut through the dark blue seawater. Twelve corpses were eerily suspended in the entanglement of star-shaped seaweed. At the chest of their diving suits was embedded the same type of wedding ring. The coordinates engraved on the inner side of the platinum ring band were not the latitudes and longitudes of the Earth, but the jump parameters of the Tau Ceti star system. The moment the sensor of the robotic arm touched the central spherical cabin, the pupils of the twelve pairs of eyes simultaneously displayed a snowy screen of data turbulence. In the wedding vows recited in twelve different languages, each word was emitting a neutrino pulse — this was a unique coding method of quantum communication, and each syllable was rewriting the arrangement of the hydrogen-oxygen bonds in the surrounding seawater. I suddenly realized that the throats of these corpses had all been transformed into acoustic wave modulators. The swirling water currents caused by the vibration of their vocal cords precisely corresponded to the visual graph of the general theory of relativity field equation.
The carbon fiber body of the nanodrone made a soft sound like a cicada molting as it passed through the cabin door. During the process of quantum recombination, I "saw" that my consciousness data was being parsed into countless glowing particles. Each particle carried a segment of memory that had been tampered with: in the 413th time loop, the diving accident I had under the Golden Gate Bridge was actually an artificially implanted memory; in the 1279th loop, when Veronica first said "I love you," the quantum chip at the back of her neck was emitting an abnormal high-frequency vibration. When the holographic projection displayed the real-time image of the 18th underground laboratory, the smells of disinfectant and synthetic amniotic fluid suddenly became tangible — this was a sensory deception simulated by stimulating the olfactory nerves through nanorobots. Among the fishy sweetness that was stronger than real memories, there was also the bitter smell of burning circuit boards.
There was a pale pink biological gel congealed on the fragments of the ventilation duct, which was the nutrient substrate leaked from the embryo culture cabin. At the corner of the duct, I found a set of worn gears. The tooth marks showed that it had been continuously operating for 6400 cycles, and each pitch of the gear precisely corresponded to the millisecond error of the Earth's rotation — this was a standard component of the time anchor calibration device. The embryos in hundreds of culture cabins were undergoing synchronous neural development. The quantum chips at the back of their necks were emitting a blue-green fluorescence. The number "VK-E 7.199" on the surface of the chips suddenly flashed. The fingers of the embryos traced the trajectory of the Fibonacci sequence in the amniotic fluid. When the number jumped to "VK-E 7.200", tiny arcs of electricity simultaneously burst out from the fingertips of all the embryos.
When the sound of breathing first sounded, the nanodrone I was parasitizing experienced a system freeze for 0.3 seconds. That was not the sound of mechanical vibration, but the real sound of alveoli expanding, carrying the saltiness of the seawater and the buzzing of electronic signals. When the 17th breath completed synchronization with my data fluctuations, the eyelids of the embryos slid open like an electronic screen. In the eye sockets without irises, light bands like galaxies were flowing. Under the effect of the frequency regulator, the synthetic voice simultaneously presented the richness of a baritone and the tremolo of a baby's cry: "Father, you are seven cycles late." Each word etched a temporary quantum channel on the glass of the culture cabin. I saw the shadow of the lunar craters flickering at the other end of the channel — that was the coordinate of the time capsule we had jointly buried in the 3215th cycle.
The moment the quantum computer array overloaded, the gravitational field of the laboratory experienced a disturbance of 0.7G. The crisp sound of Veronica's prototype's rib breaking was transformed into the siren of the gravitational wave detector. The sharp ends of the broken bones were capturing the brainwave signals from the Earth-Moon Lagrangian point like antennas. I "felt" the excruciating pain of my consciousness being divided into seven parts. Each clone carried the trauma of a different timeline: some retained the memory of the neural pain Veronica experienced during her fifth childbirth, and some sealed the image of me personally destroying the embryo in the 1999th cycle. When these pains were encoded into gravitational waves, geometric patterns similar to crop circles suddenly appeared on the sedimentary rocks at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. These were the visual scars of the space-time structure under the impact of energy.
The wooden texture of the mechanical life form was actually the camouflage of carbon nanotubes. When it stood up from the mucus, the 6,400 ring patterns on the cross-section of the tree rings were undergoing quantum tunneling. Each ring pattern projected the wedding scenes of different timelines: in the 100th cycle, we held a wedding at the bottom of the sea, and the corals bloomed with the light of binary code under the quantum lights; the wedding in the 3000th cycle was interrupted by a sudden underwater volcanic eruption, and the molten marks left by the lava flow on the wedding ring precisely formed the star map of the Tau Ceti star system. When its branches whipped, 12 wedding rings simultaneously released a death holographic projection. I saw my own death scenes in different timelines: when I was drowned by the nutrient solution in the culture cabin, my fingers were still tracing the name of Veronica; before being decomposed into quantum foam in the space-time collapse, the last thing I looked at was the unfinished embryo development diagram on the wall of the laboratory.
When the alloy door of the nuclear bunker was being cut by a laser, golden molten metal seeped out. This was a special material doped with antimatter. The quantum effect at the cut was triggering a small-scale boiling of the seawater. The trajectory formed by the rising bubbles exactly matched the formula on Einstein's manuscript from 1943. Behind the door, on the transparent cabin walls of the twelve delivery cabins, there were biological electrodes resembling the uterine mucosa congealed. The abdomen of each cloned Veronica was projecting the electroencephalogram images of the fetuses — the mass-energy equations written by the yet-unformed palms in the amniotic fluid, and the correction terms in the exponential part were constantly changing. Until the fingertip of a certain fetus touched the cabin wall, the equation suddenly stabilized into the latitude and longitude coordinates of the café where we had our first date.
The moment I parasitized the pineal gland of the fetus, I experienced a consciousness reconstruction that was longer than any time loop. The electromagnetic pulses during the division of the embryonic cells cut time into millions of quantum slices. Each slice sealed a memory fragment that had been tampered with: in the 4000th cycle, Veronica briefly regained her original personality, and she wrote with blood on the whiteboard of the laboratory, "We are the 7th batch of clones," but the words were erased by the automatic cleaning system before they dried; in the 6000th cycle, I discovered that the numbers of the culture cabins actually corresponded to different interstellar colonization plans, and "VK-E 7.200" meant the 200th backup body of the 7th experiment. The moment the neural tube closed, the consciousness of seven hundred Veronicas simultaneously flooded in. Among the programmed love, there was mixed with the fear they felt when they first "woke up" in the culture cabin, like countless small streams merging into the ocean of consciousness, carrying the saltiness of rust and the sting of the chip current.
During the process of the mechanical life form disintegrating and recombining, I finally saw clearly its core structure — it was a time compass woven with the quantum chips of 6400 wedding rings, and each chip stored the key choices of a certain cycle. When it transformed into the shape of a Joshua tree, the wedding rings hanging on the branches were undergoing quantum tunneling, overlapping and projecting the "us" from different timelines: me in a white lab coat debugging the chip in 1943, me in a diving suit repairing the space-time crack in 2045, and me in a suit proposing to the cloned Veronica in 2100. And when the cherry blossoms suddenly bloomed, the gears on the metal branches made a smooth turning sound that hadn't been heard in a hundred years. From the stripped mechanical parts, a real cherry blossom petal fell out — this was the keepsake that Veronica's prototype had clipped in her notebook during our first date, and it was a real memory carefully preserved by the quantum computer in 6400 cycles.
In the final space-time collapse, the images in the quantum crystal unfolded frame by frame like a movie: Veronica without mechanical modification was sitting in a café with her daughter in her arms. The sunlight passed through her hair and cast dancing spots of light on the table. Her daughter's small hand was holding her wedding ring. There was no number on the inner side of the ring band, only the hand-carved "V+M". When she turned her head and smiled, her lip language was no longer the programmed lines, but a real voice with a tremor: "This time, can we really start?" Countless tiny cracks suddenly appeared on the surface of the crystal. Each crack led to a different timeline, but at the core, there was the thinnest crack seeping out a warm orange light — this was the untainted real time anchor.
The moment the cherry blossom petal touched the ground, the metal structure of the laboratory melted like icing sugar, replaced by the soft warm light of the sterilizing lamp. Real water vapor congealed on the glass of the culture cabin. Inside, instead of embryos, there were healthy newborns lying. The music box transformed from the quantum computer was playing Chopin's nocturne, which was Veronica's favorite. The melody was mixed with the first cry of the baby. On the birth certificate in my hand, the cursor in the column of parents flashed three times, and finally, two names without numbers emerged — Michael and Veronica, which were the names we should have had in the first untainted timeline.
The last vibration from the deep sea was not the roar of the space-time collapse, but the song of the humpback whale. When the searchlight of the exploration vehicle lit up again, the twelve corpses had turned into quantum foam. Only the light spots left by the wedding rings were floating among the seaweed, like a string of lanterns guiding the way home. The lens of the nanodrone turned towards the sea surface. The rising sun was piercing through the seawater hundreds of meters deep. Among the waves, a pregnant humpback whale leaped out of the water. Its abdomen was flashing the same blue light as the wedding ring — this was the most tender resonance of quantum life in the universe, and it was the real new life finally obtained after 6400 cycles.