Chapter 7
1803words
She stood in the wrecked pod, her gaze falling on her hands. Those hands were trembling, but the strangeness she felt wasn't just fear. A clear thought suddenly emerged from the depths of her mind—"Check the safety catch on the M4 rifle, ensure the firing pin is in the ready position." This thought was so specific, so professional, carrying the calm and muscle memory of someone battle-hardened. Yet she was a biologist; she knew nothing about firearms and had never used one.
This thought belonged to Michael.
She suddenly looked at Michael who was not far away, leaning against the cabin wall, breathing heavily with a vacant expression. In that instant, a flash of scorching desert, the rumbling of explosions, and the eyes of a comrade filled with shock before death crossed Emilia's mind. These were memories she had never experienced, yet they were branded into her consciousness like an imprint, so real that they made her want to vomit.
Immediately after, another stranger experience occurred. She looked at Whitney Lee, the young Chinese girl who was slumped in front of the console, her eyes vacant, unconsciously mumbling a series of data. Yet in Emilia's mind, a complex string of code spontaneously appeared, like an instinct. She knew that if given a terminal, she could immediately write a multi-dimensional data model to analyze the spatial disturbance they had just experienced. She could even intuitively "understand" the physical meaning behind those flashing, seemingly random codes on the console.
She had acquired Whitney Lee's skills.
"No..." Emilia groaned in pain, leaning against the wall, feeling her "self" being torn apart. Her memories, her knowledge, her fears, were no longer hers alone. They were like public property, flowing and sharing uncontrollably among team members. She could feel Michael's anger and despair, understand Xiao Wen's confusion and fear, and even touch those fragmented, warm family scenes in the mind of the engineer who had already gone mad.
Their personalities were merging.
"Everyone stop!"
An angry shout broke the eerie silence. It was Michael. He suddenly stood up straight, the gray-blue eyes once again ignited with flames, but it was a desperate anger mixed with fear. He pushed away the people beside him and rushed toward the equipment box.
"Captain, what are you doing?" someone instinctively asked.
"Doing what I have to do!" Michael shouted without looking back, as he dragged several packs of high-energy plastic explosives and detonators from the box. On the battlefield, when communication, command, and tactics all fail, there's one last option—overwhelming firepower. He didn't know what that thing was, nor did he want to understand it. He just wanted to destroy it, to use the most primitive, most direct violence to blast this twisted world back to normal.
"Michael, don't!" Emilia screamed, "You don't know the consequences of doing this!"
But it was already too late. Michael moved as fast as a cheetah. He installed the explosives at several structural nodes of the pod, set the shortest detonation time, then used all his strength to push everyone toward the pod's exit. "Get out now!" he roared.
Everyone was shocked by this sudden violence. They scrambled out of the pod, rolling and crawling back into that enormous space where geometric shapes floated. As soon as they steadied themselves, they heard a muffled explosion behind them, as if something had swallowed part of the blast.
The pod exploded into a twisted fireball. But the intense shock wave they had anticipated never came. The energy of the explosion seemed to be absorbed by the space itself. The fireball hung frozen in mid-air for a few seconds, then, like glass crushed by an invisible hand, it shattered in all directions into countless tiny, glowing spacetime fissures.
The entire space began to violently tremble. Those giant geometric shapes that were originally rotating slowly began to accelerate and collide, with each collision creating more fractures. The problem wasn't solved; instead, it was greatly exacerbated. Michael's explosives, like a massive boulder thrown into a calm lake, not only failed to fill the water but instead stirred up enormous waves capable of overturning everything.
*
Whitney Lee knelt on the crystal surface, her data terminal right beside her. The screen was frantically refreshing with data she couldn't read but somehow could "understand" in this moment. She didn't look at the catastrophic explosion; her attention was completely drawn to one reading on the terminal.
It was her personal life signal tracker. Everyone on the team wore this device so the main system could monitor their location and vital signs at all times. And at this moment, the screen showed that there were two green dots representing "Whitney Lee."
One was located exactly where she was now, in this enormous space four hundred meters underground.
The other suddenly appeared at the top of the model—above ground, in the data tent at the Antarctic camp.
Both signals were clear and stable, displaying identical vital signs. She existed simultaneously in two completely different spaces.
Xiaowen's mind went blank. She finally understood. All the physics she had learned previously was built on one foundation: an object can only exist in one place at the same time. But here, this most fundamental axiom had failed. "Existence" itself was no longer singular or absolute. It was like a file that could be copied and pasted. She was both experiencing the collapse of the world here and sitting safely in front of a computer there (or in another "possibility").
"We... are a set of variables." She murmured, tears flowing uncontrollably. Not out of fear, but from a complete sense of powerlessness after touching the ultimate truth. Their existence, their struggles, to whatever created this space, were perhaps nothing more than parameters that could be arbitrarily modified in a simulation.
*
While everyone else was being devoured by the chaos of the explosion and the spatial-temporal rifts, Emilia experienced an entirely different storm. She didn't try to avoid the flying debris but stood quietly in place and closed her eyes. When physical resistance proved futile, she chose the only option she had left—to understand.
She abandoned thought, emptied her consciousness, and completely exposed herself to the will of this space. She no longer tried to analyze with human logic but became like a blank hard drive, waiting to be written with data.
Then, "contact" happened.
It wasn't a sound, nor was it an image, but rather a pure, massive flow of information that surged into her mind in an instant. She "saw" the essence of this space. It wasn't a location, but a huge, living "equation." Those floating geometric shapes were the basic axioms and constants in this equation. And they, the intruders, were the "anomalous variables" that had accidentally entered the calculation.
She understood immediately. That entity... that "reality editor," had no malice. Malice itself was a human concept based on survival competition and emotional judgment. This entity had no "emotions" at all, only "logic." What it was doing wasn't attacking or destroying, but conducting a... "reality reconstruction."
Just like a programmer who discovers an unexpected BUG in the code, their first reaction isn't to "hate" this BUG, but to try to understand it, analyze it, and then integrate it into the existing code framework, or modify the entire framework to accommodate this BUG.
They were that BUG.
This entity was attempting to "understand" them. It parsed their memories, replicated their skills, disrupted their perception of time—not as torture, but as its only means of "learning." And now, after Michael's explosion had introduced a more uncontrollable violent variable, this massive equation seemed to have triggered an ultimate command—forced integration.
Since it could not comprehend these chaotic variables, it would transform them into parts of the equation itself.
*
Integration began with the weakest link. The combat engineer who had been unconscious since receiving the sedative suddenly began to turn semi-transparent. Everyone watched in horror as his outline slowly faded in the air until completely disappearing. But he hadn't truly vanished. Emilia could "sense" that his consciousness, his simple memories about family, beer and barbecue, like a small warm packet of data, had been absorbed into a massive dodecahedron surrounding them.
Then it was Whitney Lee. She remained kneeling on the ground, staring blankly at her splitting life signals. Her body also began to blur, and the terminal slipped from her hand. She didn't resist, just closed her eyes, with a resigned calmness on her face. The final shared perception she left for Emilia was a reference to the ancient Chinese story of "Zhuangzi Dreams of a Butterfly"—was it I who dreamed of being a butterfly, or the butterfly who dreamed of being me?
Next was Michael. Having witnessed it all, this man of steel finally broke down. He dropped the detonator in his hand, fell to his knees, and let out a bestial roar. But even his strong body couldn't resist this integration. His anger, his trauma, his heavy sense of responsibility—all were absorbed into a twisted Möbius strip.
Finally, it was Emilia's turn.
She waited calmly. She had understood the essence of it all, her fear had sublimated into something approaching sacred awe. She felt her body becoming lighter, her consciousness being drawn out from this physical shell. Her childhood fear of avalanches, her lifelong dedication to science, her longing for her parents... everything that constituted her "self" was like stardust, being pulled toward the giant octahedron at the center of space that governed everything.
But integration was not complete annihilation.
In the final moment before being completely absorbed, Emilia discovered that she still retained a thread of independent consciousness belonging to "Emilia Clark." This thread of consciousness was like an observer trapped in amber, imprisoned inside that enormous, cold entity composed of pure logic.
She could sense Michael's presence, not as a person, but as a logical module that encapsulated the concepts of "anger" and "protection." She could also sense Xiao Wen, who was a stream of consciousness representing "calculation" and "confusion." They were both still "there," but they were no longer themselves. They had become parts of this enormous deity, like installed plugins, running forever, experiencing an indescribable, painful dual existence.
Emilia "looked" at her own hand, that hand of a biologist who had once dissected countless lives, now floating in the void, transformed into a string of symbols made of geometric lines. She wanted to withdraw her hand, but what drove it was no longer her brain, but a "thought" from this enormous being.
She knew that "she" was already dead. But "Emilia" would live forever here.
