The Billionaire's Time Insurance

Silicon Valley "Eternal Dome" Underground City, March 16, 2085, 03:17

Irene's retinal projection displayed the countdown — 23:11:29. She curled up inside a liquid nitrogen tank transporting quantum servers, listening to the clattering of the Dome guards' boots on the titanium alloy floor.

"In the 7th cycle, they executed me here." Rex's neural signal vibrated in her cochlea. "Remember, the vault's laser grid uses Bayesian algorithms to predict intruders. Walking along a Fermat spiral path will reduce the probability to…"

The alarm suddenly blasted.

Inside the 30-meter-high spherical space, 4,200 cryo-chambers floated in Klein ring orbits, each containing a consciousness backup of a Silicon Valley mogul. Sara shattered the biological lock on the central control console with her electromagnetic gun, and the splattered DNA authentication fluid swirled with encrypted stock codes.

"More greedy than Noah's Ark." Max activated the data siphon, and the flowing memory files on the holographic screen suffocated everyone — the billionaires weren't just backing up their consciousness; they were manipulating the loop records. One tech mogul's 9,000th-cycle log showed how he earned 7,000 tons of gold by predicting earthquakes, and these gold bars were being stacked to form a fortress against lava.

Irene froze. From deep within the quantum server array came the sound of children laughing, with a frequency perfectly matching the brainwaves of Sara's daughter, Emily. She followed the sound through the maze walls generated by blockchain, and in an absolute-zero chamber, she witnessed a nightmare:

Three hundred clones of Emily floated in liquid helium, each body's nape embedded with the honeycomb-shaped interface of the time cocoon. The holographic log showed that the billionaires had used neural maps extracted from Sara's daughter to cultivate "living antennas" capable of predicting the actions of the time cocoon.

"They even named the products." Rex's code stream froze in the cold. "They're called 'Time Cocoon Girl Versions 1.0 to 3.0'."

Sara's gun was aimed at the control valve of the liquid nitrogen tank, her breath freezing into crystals on the mask. "I should have done this in the 7th cycle." Her finger tightened on the trigger, but she saw the nearest clone suddenly open its eyes — within those irises, a star map of the galaxy swirled.

The choir of the clones came through quantum entanglement: "Mom, we are waiting for you outside of time."

The alarm system evolved at that moment. The laser grid was no longer physical rays but now directly burned into the invader's timeline. Max's left arm vanished, its severed end showing the scars of a childhood car accident; Rex's neural interface rewound to a 1947 vacuum tube computer, and the sparking cables ignited the data cables.

Irene dashed to the central hub and plugged the plutonium-238 container into the main server. The radiation stream reversed the memory database, causing the billionaires' manipulated history to fade like a photo in developing liquid: the suppressed slum massacre from a previous cycle, the deliberate nuclear leak to extend the reset cycle, and the original signed copy of President Walker's "Human Civilization Selection Agreement"...

"Get out!" Rex transmitted his final message in Morse code. "The Dome's self-destruction program is linked to the time cocoon roots!"

As the group fled, Sara looked back at the exploding cloning chambers. Molten gold erupted from the cracks, and the Emilys' bodies danced in the molten flow. Their voices pierced physical laws and streamed into every electronic device:

"The selectors will eventually become specimens—"

As the shockwave overturned the blast-proof doors, Irene saw the inscription on the Dome's outer wall: "Time is the most expensive currency." The words twisted into a new prophecy in the quantum flames: "Currency is the most fleeting time."

Max raised the radiation counter, and the vibrations from the surface were not from an earthquake — the entire Silicon Valley was sinking into the Earth's crust, the billionaires' golden fortress becoming the sacrificial offering to the time cocoon.