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In 2035, in San Francisco, quantum physicist Arthur Crowder's wife was killed in a "perfect murder." There were no fingerprints, no witnesses—only half of a high-tech alloy button, clearly belonging to future technology. To uncover the truth, Arthur infiltrated his own creation, the "Novous Timefold Experiment," but a malfunction in the equipment threw him into parallel timelines. He gradually discovered that in each timeline, a different version of himself was enacting vengeance in various ways. All clues pointed to a more terrifying truth—the murderer was Raymond Stone, his mentor, who had "died" twenty years ago due to an experimental failure caused by Arthur himself. After crossing twelve timelines, Arthur was forced to choose between saving his wife and maintaining the stability of time itself. Ultimately, he uncovered an even darker conspiracy—the collective manipulation of human memories.

The Chrono's Redemption

Arthur's seventh activation of the time machine revealed his own dried bloodstains on the console—his body was exhibiting anti-temporal tissue rejection. He ingested sedatives extracted from Kate's corpse, only to taste the familiar bitterness of jasmine. Suddenly, Erin's final lip-synced words flashed before his eyes: "Find me in negative time."

This temporal leap landed him amidst a sulfurous atmosphere. Upon opening his eyes, the radiation-proof glass reflected twenty inverted images of himself suspended from the ceiling, each with wounds in different locations. The one on the far right had a mechanical limb dripping blue blood—the same hue he had noticed in his veins that morning.

"You're seven years late." A voice like sandpaper scraping bone sounded behind him. Turning, Arthur's pupils constricted violently: another version of himself was carving Erin's cervical vertebrae with a CR-2049 component, her skeletal eye sockets glowing with the eerie blue of a quantum computer.

The future Arthur's voice seemed ravaged by particle storms: "Raymond turned us into his memory carriers; every temporal murder is a side effect of consciousness overlay." He suddenly tore open his shirt, revealing twelve miniature cryogenic chambers embedded beneath his skin, each containing a brain slice of Erin at different ages.

An old-fashioned 1980s telephone rang suddenly in the laboratory. In a daze, Arthur answered, hearing the French lullaby Raymond had taught him as a child. During the song, the future Arthur's mechanical arm suddenly pierced his right lung, implanting a metal device into the wound.

"This is the CR-2049 calibrator." The future Arthur coughed up blue tissue fluid. "When your deaths across all timelines reach the quantum immortality threshold..."

Before he could finish, the entire radiation-proof glass wall shattered. Arthur plunged into the temporal turbulence, landing in the laboratory's third underground level—what should have been a parking garage now stood as Raymond's original 1985 lab.

Yellowed experiment logs flipped open in the quantum storm, forcibly scanning Arthur's irises:

[1985.10.25 03:15 Subject AC (Note: Arthur Claude) exhibits temporal dissociation symptoms. Recommend memory reconstruction surgery, implanting a fabricated "mentor suicide" scenario. Increase jasmine-scented neural stabilizer dosage to 900cc/hour.]

The ventilation ducts suddenly exploded, and dozens of Erin's corpses rained down. At the bottom of the pile, Arthur found a familiar wedding ring, but the inscription inside was not their vows; instead, it was spatiotemporal coordinates precise to the nanosecond—the exact time and place of his mother's car accident when he was seven.

As alarms blared, Arthur realized his right hand was holding a gun to his temple, while his left hand struggled to restrain his right wrist. In the shattered mirror fragments, two half-body shadows were battling: on the right was Raymond's aged face; on the left, Erin's decayed smile.

Quantum Doppelgänger