Chapter 14: Timeless Wood Grain 

The chronological grain suddenly began to rotate in reverse as Adam's lignified palm plunged into the Capitol Hill wall. He saw the Memphis Lorraine Motel of April 3, 1968 emerge in the wood grain, the smell of rotting mahogany mixing with tear gas as the fuse for the temporal rift.

When a wooden fingertip touches Martin Luther King Jr. in a parallel dimension, Adam realizes that the famously worn suit has a miniature titanium chip sewn into the lining. It's Dr. King's final speech, recorded the night before the Alpine Address, and the title reveals itself to be "A Crack in the Binary Chain". The recording is interspersed with a mechanical hum that doesn't belong in 1968 - the trademarked sound waves of Blackstone's predecessor, the Iron Foundation.

"They want to turn us into human QR codes." Parallel Time's Dr. King says on the recording that the background sound is that of an early computer perforator, "but remember, every perforated card releases free ashes when it burns." Adam suddenly realizes that the bullet shot into Dr. King's jaw in 1968 was actually a miniature EMP device used to destroy the evidence he had in his possession of the U.S. Army's AI slavery program.

As the chip is inserted into the Pentagon's top secret terminal, the holographic projection explodes into millions of brain scans of black slaves. Each packet is labeled "1968 Civilian Version", but is actually a neural network prototype of Vietnam War military AI. Victor realized that the coordinates of King's assassination were a perfect mirror image of the latitude and longitude of Ravenlock Prison - the yin and yang of the digital slavery system.

"Look at this!" Adam's wooden palm oozes turpentine, solidifying into a 3D version of the missing Section 24.7 of the Civil Rights Act: the permission to convert protesters' brainwaves into bitcoin-mining machine computing power. The lower right corner of the projection is signed by Emily NO.01, inked with shredded chain mixed with smallpox pus.

When the recording of King's speech reaches "I have reached the top of the mountain", the cloning pods in the Capitol underground burst into flames. Thousands of clones fused with Dr. King's DNA emerge, their vocal cords vibrating at a frequency synchronized with the blockchain nodes, crashing Blackstone's servers for 0.7 seconds with each "I have a dream".

Emily NO.01's ribbed bell-tongue begins to rust, and her smallpox virus degrades into harmless cowpox before Kim's brain scan data. Victor takes the opportunity to brand the reverse barcode onto the Liberty Bell, and the bronze cracks spew out unexploded tear gas from 1968 - filled with nano-antibodies to decode the slave algorithm.

Before Adam's wooden palm completely carbonizes, he grabs something even more deadly in parallel time: the portable printer Dr. King used that night, with The Forty Algorithms to End Racial Capitalism left on the rollers. As these algorithms were fed into the quantum computer of the Department of Defense, all the cloned soldiers suddenly began to sing the Negro Spirituals, their presidential gene chains snapping section by section as they did so.

"Now, let freedom rise from the blockchain's grave!" Victor burns the last of the Blackstone Group's vault hard drives, and a hologram of King suddenly envelops Washington. This time his "I Have a Dream" speech carries the frequency of a laser weapon, sweeping across the landscape as the reclaimed parasites of the founding fathers spontaneously combust into the ashes of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.