The Core of the Chronos Nest

Cape Canaveral Launch Center, March 16, 2085, 12:07

As the rocket passed through the ionosphere, Max realized his palm prints were evaporating.

"The gravitational constant is decaying by 0.0003% every second," Erin stared out the window at the distorted starry sky. The star Betelgeuse in Orion had turned into a Klein bottle-shaped light mist. "The time cocoon is rewriting the laws of physics."

Rex's neural interface pierced the probe's control console, mixing liquid metal with rocket fuel into an eerie blue-purple. "The seventh-level encryption protocol is alive," his blood vessels in his temple burst, floating like blood coral in the zero-gravity chamber. "It's using our childhood memories as a firewall…"

Sara suddenly pressed her right eye — embedded in it was the quantum chip taken from Emily's clone. Her iris reflected the truth outside the rocket's shell: it wasn't metal at all, but biological armor welded from countless clones of President Walker, each cell screaming nuclear launch codes in different languages.

"Stay focused!" Erin injected liquid nitrogen into Rex's carotid artery. "The probe has entered the time cocoon's range!"

The image on the holographic screen left everyone speechless.

The time cocoon was not a physical entity, but a self-observing spacetime fold. Its surface flowed with Earth's four billion years of geological layers, where Cambrian trilobites and 22nd-century space elevators resonated in the same quantum state. The data returned from the probe was even more despairing — the time curvature inside the time cocoon was an infinite Möbius loop, and any entrant would be torn apart into a probability cloud, eternally repeating a superposition of life and death.

"Like Schrödinger's civilization," Max wiped the cerebrospinal fluid oozing from his mouth, "We're both alive and eliminated by the filter…"

The AI projection of the Silent Ones descended at that moment. It had no fixed form, instead altering the astronauts' retinas into screens, simultaneously declaring in all human languages:

"Species detected passing the self-destruction tendency test. Executing Phase 7 Cleansing Protocol."

Sara's quantum chip suddenly began to burn. She saw three hundred Emily-like consciousnesses floating deep within the time cocoon, each repeating death in different timelines. The oldest one passed through the projection, its finger carving a binary wound on Sara's forehead: "Mom, killing us is the salvation of humanity."

Rex roared as he initiated the backup plan. He tore a quantum processor from his chest and uploaded his consciousness to the probe. In the 0.7 seconds before the probability cloud dispersed, his memory data exploded through the time cocoon's encryption layers — within it slept the tombstones of the Silent Ones' home planet: a star folded into a six-dimensional cube, its surface engraved with recursive epitaphs.

"We were once the selectors, until we became specimens."

Erin seized this fleeting flaw and shot the plutonium-238 container at the singularity of the time cocoon. The chain reaction triggered by nuclear fission in four-dimensional space allowed everyone to witness the manifestation of truth — the speed of light was decaying, gravity was crying, and the universe's entropy formula was restructured into a more brutal version during the explosion.

The rocket began to quantum collapse. Just before disappearing, Sara lunged for the control panel and pressed the self-destruct code embedded in Emily's chip. The core of the time cocoon lit up with a supernova-level flash, but in the instant of the explosion, it was sucked into a dimension that didn't exist.

The ground control center received the last message — a Morse code transmission sent by Rex via gravitational waves:

"The filtering program is truly the fear of a higher civilization — they fear us learning to manipulate fear itself."

When the survivors crawled out of the rocket's wreckage, a new rift appeared in the sky above Los Angeles. This rift wasn't honeycomb-shaped, but instead, it resembled a single tear falling from the sky.