The Carnival of the Slums

Abandoned Car Factory District, Detroit, March 15, 2085, 19:33

In the twilight of the 17th cycle, flames poured down from the top of the General Motors Building, like a molten pendulum sweeping across the streets. The rioters, wearing Civil War helmets stolen from museums, cut open ATMs with laser welders. The gold bars hadn't even hit the ground before the next wave of people trampled them into quantum dust — here, even robbery followed the 72-hour reset rule.

"Morality is a secretion of fear," Rex's drone circled under the blood-red sky, its camera capturing the convenience store owner being cleaved in the skull for the 43rd time by the same titanium axe. "When death becomes a reversible program…" He tapped the keyboard, and the owner's body suddenly quantumized and reassembled, flipping the axe back into the attacker's eye socket. "…revenge becomes a match-3 game."

Irene's protective mask condensed with blood mist as she stepped over a body caught in a rewind loop — its torso spewing retroactive brain matter from a bullet wound every ten seconds. "The time cocoon is recording human behavioral patterns," she pointed to the metal wires oozing from the cracked pavement. "These nanoprobes absorb violence data as a scoring basis for the civilization selection."

Sara set up a sniper rifle on the rooftop, the world through her scope split into chaotic slices: A priest sprinkled holy water on incendiary flames, a prostitute waltzed amid machine gun fire, and every body wore an electronic countdown ring on their wrist — showing 11:59:47 until the next reset.

"They're enjoying the chaos," Max adjusted the entropy monitor, the screen showing Detroit shifting from order to heat death. "But there's an anomaly —" He zoomed in on the spectral map. A section of the Eight Mile area maintained a constant zero entropy. "The people there aren't participating in the riot."

After traversing street barricades made of corpses, the Awakened team discovered the truth.

Three hundred homeless children huddled in an abandoned subway station, using scavenged quantum batteries to maintain a force field shield. A girl wearing a cat-ear helmet was giving a lesson, with Riemann's Hypothesis written on the holographic blackboard. "Emily?" Sara's hand trembled slightly on her gun — the girl's iris was identical to her daughter's.

The force field fluctuated suddenly. A rioter's armored vehicle smashed into the platform column, the car's horn broadcasting a distorted declaration: "It's going to reset anyway! Let us teach these data how to be human!"

Rex's drones dove down, injecting homemade logic bombs into the vehicle's system. The vehicle morphed into a metallic cocoon in the midst of AI malfunction, and instead of shrapnel, countless holographic butterflies erupted — images from Sara's daughter's 7th birthday party.

"They trained the time cocoon AI using Emily's neural map!" Sara crushed the grip of her gun, blood dripping onto the subway track, awakening the buried metal roots beneath. The entire subway station began to collapse, and the rioters and children were sucked into a suddenly appearing Klein bottle in a scream-filled vortex.

Irene seized the last moment to throw out a quantum anchor, locking the probability clouds of the 300 children in the real dimension. As they reassembled from the void, the girl in the cat-ear helmet handed Sara a memory chip — inside were 100,000 records of Emily's repeated deaths in the time loop.

"The selection program favors tragedy," the girl's pupils flashed with the hexagonal patterns of the time cocoon. "But mom, you taught me how to create variables."

In the distance, the beeping of the reset began. Flames and bloodstains shrank back to their source, like a film played in reverse. Only the bullet holes on the subway station walls remained, forming a three-star pattern resembling Orion's Belt — the coordinates of the time cocoon's core.

Max detected new vibrations from beneath the ground, lower than a nuclear explosion and more rhythmic than an earthquake, as though some sleeping giant was turning in its slumber.