The Entropy Trap

Geostationary Orbit, March 16, 2085, 1:30 PM

Max's silicon-based right hand pierced his spacesuit, engraving the formula for the apocalypse onto the spacecraft's hull:S=k·lnΩ+Σ[c̅_(i) δτ]The arrow at the end of the formula pointed to Earth—at that moment, the Pacific Ocean was crystallizing into an ice matrix, while the grains of the Sahara Desert floated into a Dyson Sphere structure.

"The Temporal Cocoon is forcibly accelerating the heat death process," Erin observed through her quantum vision, where Earth had transformed into a demonstration model of entropy increase: city traffic reversed into Brownian motion, the trees of the Amazon rainforest disintegrated into basic particle clouds. "It wants to turn us into a counterexample in a thermodynamics textbook."

Sara grabbed a drifting piece of metal, realizing it was the black box from the president's aircraft. The playback showed that Walker's last words, spoken 0.3 seconds before the nuclear explosion, were a repetitive binary scream—exactly matching the Σ frequency hidden in Max's engraved formula.

Suddenly, Rex's residual consciousness materialized from the spaceship's computer. His projection was assembled from radiation warning symbols:"The roots of the Temporal Cocoon are creating vacuum decay bubbles. In seven minutes, Earth will degrade into a quark soup!"

The three of them rushed to the observation window and witnessed the collapse of physical laws:

Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, seawater began violating surface tension, forming an inverse waterfall 300 kilometers in diameter, shooting into space. The Tokyo Tower collapsed into neutron star debris as the strong nuclear force failed. Max's completely siliconized body started glowing, and his vocal cords emitted two voices:"Throw me into the decay bubble... My molecular structure can carry the reverse entropy algorithm..."

Sara modified her electromagnetic pistol into a quantum injector and injected Emily's consciousness data into Max's core. As Max's silicon body fell toward the vacuum decay bubble, Erin saw an eerie form of salvation in space—each of Max's atoms unfolded into a four-dimensional structure, nested with every mathematical proof of human civilization, locking the decay expansion with non-Euclidean geometry.

"He's become a living Klein bottle," Rex's projection began to fade. "Enough to trap the vacuum decay for twelve minutes..."

Suddenly, the president's fleet of clones appeared from the shadowed area of the Moon. These replicas of Walker piloted ships fused from gold and cancerous tissues, launching not missiles, but compressed time-loop bubbles—objects struck by them would endlessly repeat the moment of pain: soldiers endlessly reassembling their bodies after explosions, space station fuel tanks repeating cycles of leakage and repair.

Sara activated the spacecraft's self-destruct sequence, tuning the antimatter reactor to Emily's brainwave frequency. In the photon torrent of the explosion, Erin saw the shocking truth: The roots of the Temporal Cocoon weren't rooted on Earth—they pierced the same coordinates of countless parallel universes, with each Earth staging its own selection trial.

"Entropy increase is a lie!" she broadcasted to all of humanity through the electromagnetic pulse. "The Temporal Cocoon is devouring the energy of all possible universes—we grow stronger the more we resist it..."

The chart sent by Rex with his final energy confirmed this: The Temporal Cocoon's roots connected nine million Earths in eleven-dimensional space, each on the brink of extinction. The energy humanity could summon was but a bud on this cosmic bloodsucking vine.

Erin's protective suit began to crystallize, and her retina's countdown synchronized with all electronic devices: 00:04:11. Suddenly, Sara grabbed her shoulder and pointed to the wormhole-like distorted space—there, Emily's full consciousness was floating, being carried toward other universes by the Temporal Cocoon's roots.

"We need three synchronized singularities." Sara pulled out a neural interface and plugged it into the spacecraft's wreckage. "You create the vacuum decay, I'll trigger the wormhole, and Emily..."

Her voice was shredded by the gravitational tides of parallel universes. Just before Erin's consciousness faded, she suddenly understood the true motives of the Silent Ones: The scars on the juvenile bodies were not left by selection, but were self-mutilation rituals to resist higher civilizations.

When the countdown reached zero, the Klein bottle that had been Max finally ruptured. The expansion of the vacuum decay bubble swallowed 75% of the Temporal Cocoon's roots, and the spacecraft wreckage Sara was on turned into a quantum torpedo, carrying Emily's consciousness toward the core of the Temporal Cocoon.

Earth gasped in the pause between entropy increase, while Erin floated in the wreckage, holding the last piece of information peeled from Max's silicon-based body—etched onto a single layer of graphene using carbon nanotubes, it was a prophecy:

"When the selectors pity the specimens, the hunter becomes the prey."