Chapter 10 - Quantum Mass at the Church of the Confessor

Arya's retinas begin to detach as the escape pod crashes into the shadowed area of the Crater. She fumbled to inject Ramon with liquid metal, and realized that the beta-19 numbers at his spine were devouring the mechanical skeleton - the writhing nanites that made up the numbers turned out to be exactly the same as the ones she'd seen in her glass reflection last night.

"Don't trust... Vision..." Ramon's vocal module was damaged, and electricity erupted in his throat. He tore off the remaining skin of his left arm, revealing a warning etched into the alloy bone in oracle script: perception is a prison.

The Crater suddenly lit up with patches of ghostly blue light, and three thousand Confessor tombstones rose automatically. When Arya touched the nearest tombstone, the monumental glaze suddenly liquefied and wrapped around her palm. In excruciating pain, she saw the truth of the execution of the Primordial Beta Administrator - on an altar paved with neural synapses, α-1 had personally driven the Kingslayer's spear into her lover's quantum heart.

"Welcome to your own funeral." Garo's voice seeped out of the lunar loam. As Arya turned, she saw the entire crater begin to rotate, a cluster of tombstones forming a giant Klein bottle structure. Each tombstone was playing an image of her death, the latest version of which showed that in seven minutes, the gravitational waves of her home planet's Reapers would tear her into elementary particles.

Ramon bursts into flames and stabs himself in the eye sockets with his remaining mechanical fingers. As he ripped out the bubbling blue vision processor, Arya's demonic pupil suddenly synchronized to his perspective - the cluster of tombstones turned into an interstellar navigation map, pointing toward some black hole in the Sagittarius cantilever!

"It's... Escape coordinates..." Ramon's chest cavity made a metallic scraping sound. He tore open his abdominal armor plate and pulled out the glowing memory crystals. The moment the crystal core touched the lunar soil, the ground cracked open into a shaft leading to the center of the earth, the walls of which were embedded with pulsing human hearts.

Arya tugs Ramon into the shaft, and in her weightlessness sees the horrifying truth: the moon's core is a quantum brain ten kilometers in diameter, with each neuron linking to a twin on Earth! As her blood drips onto the synapses, the brain suddenly discharges, activating the dusty lab site 327 logs.

A holographic projection emerges of the dying images of the Primary Administrator couple. alpha-1 cradles beta-1's melted body and injects the Godslayer virus into the lunar core: "May those who come after us break free of the chains of love ..." Her tears condense into ice crystals in the vacuum, each engraved with Arya and Ramon's genetic sequence.

Garo's swarm of nanites suddenly poured in from the well, converging into three crystal skeletons. They held judgment books woven from dark matter, and the galactic vortexes in their eyes spun at an accelerated rate, "Experiment Beta-19, terminate the emotional program immediately."

Arya's demonic pupils suddenly wept uncontrollably, the teardrops etching a snow wolf totem on the surface of the quantum brain. The moment the totem was completed, Ramon's broken mechanical body reorganized into a bronze altar, and his consciousness cried out through his neural synapses, "Activate the Godslayer protocol!"

The moon began to shake, and Arya's DNA strands automatically unspooled. She felt herself splintering into countless versions - a warring sorceress, a steam-age mechanic, a commander of an interstellar colonial fleet - all of her doppelgangers chanting in unison the Rebel Manifesto. The surface of the Quantum Brain cracked open with the Stigmata, ejecting a torrent of antimatter that washed the Crystal Skull away into elementary particles.

"Grab this!" Ramon's conscious body suddenly materialized and threw in a cross woven with nerve fibers. The moment Arya catches it, the cross melts into her veins, and the ultimate secret of Lab Site 327 emerges before her eyes: the moon is a living leap engine, and the key to activation is the brainwaves of the administrators when they fall in love!

What's left of Garo's data screams over the comm channel, "You're triggering a dimensional collapse!" Arya, however, kisses Ramon's metal lips and lets their consciousnesses tangle in the quantum ocean. As their brainwave resonance peaked, the surface of the moon cracked open with seventy-two stigmata, erupting columns of energy that painted goldfinch totems in space.

The moment the home planet's Reaper fleet turned 0.2 light-years away, Arya saw the horrifying truth - the so-called Reapers were, in fact, the administrators of the previous generation's experimental field awakening! Their battleship hulls were inscribed with the same beta-series numbers as Raymond's spine.

"So we're the virus." Arya laughed bitterly in the leaping white light. Ramon's conscious body was dissipating, and his last transmission data was a tampered memory: in the original experimental chamber, she was the one who first put the confinement collar on him.

The moment the quantum leap was complete, the moon disintegrated into a star ring. Arya floated in the rubble with the remains of Ramon in her arms, and realized that she was clutching half of a Snow Wolf jade pendant in her hand - the inside of which was engraved with β-19's wedding vows: even if the data is redacted, I will still love you in every universe.