Rex's Algorithm

Underground Quantum Computing Array, Area 51, March 16, 2085, 2:17 PM

Rex's body floated in the liquid helium chamber, three hundred sixty data cables piercing his siliconized brain cortex. This was the remains of his body after his seventh death—each cycle stripped a portion of his consciousness, slowly transforming him into a living processor.

"We need to synchronize the quantum states of all the Awakened," Erin inserted Sara's neural interface into Rex's frontal lobe. The arcs of electricity that erupted in his gray matter wove a Riemann surface in the air. "It's like focusing a laser with a black hole's gravity."

Sara endured the excruciating pain as her consciousness was torn apart. Her memories were being dismantled into discrete particles: the tactical dagger her father had given her on her fifth birthday, the needle puncture on Emily's hand during chemotherapy, the recoil of killing a presidential clone on her seventh cycle... These fragments were reencoded by Rex's algorithm, forming a four-dimensional probability cloud matrix.

Suddenly, the silicon shell of Max trembled. A blood-red formula appeared on the screen embedded in his chest:P = ∏_(n=1 to ∞) (1 - 1/(2^n))."An infinite product approaches zero," Erin's pupils reflected the computational process. "Unless we show each Awakened a different future at the same time!"

When the blast doors to the underground lab were blown open, three hundred Awakened were using laser pointers to carve their wills onto the walls. Retired soldier John swallowed a photograph of his wife and child, while a group of programmers tattooed primes in binary onto their skin. The girl wearing the cat-ear helmet—the vessel for Emily's consciousness—was teaching orphaned children how to make Klein bottle-shaped grenades.

"Activate the phase array!" Erin connected the Plutonium-238 reactor to Rex's spine. The cooling liquid of the quantum computer instantly vaporized, and the Awakened's retinas displayed a honeycomb-like countdown: 00:07:12.

In the moment of consciousness fusion, Sara glimpsed the ultimate truth. The essence of the Temporal Cocoon's selection was not destruction, but trapping civilizations in an eternal tyranny of possibilities—every unchosen future collapsed into nourishment for the Cocoon. Rex's algorithm, however, was the reverse tyranny: making all possibilities coexist at once.

"You will forget how to die," Erin's final warning was swallowed by the quantum scream. As the Awakened's brainwave frequencies resonated with the algorithm, the basement space began to topologically fold: Max's silicon remains grew into a Möbius church, the graffiti of the orphaned children transformed into a dynamic proof of the Riemann hypothesis, and Sara's electromagnetic pistol bloomed into a reverse-entropy rose.

At that moment, the presidential clone army launched an assault. The time-anchor missiles they fired, however, quantumized before touching the Awakened. The warheads, preloaded with nuclear fuel, turned into cherry blossom specimens from the 1945 Hiroshima blast site. The Walker clones began to self-combust, and beneath their skin, the larval forms of the Silent Ones emerged—these parasites were devouring the hosts' spacetime continuity.

"Now!" Erin severed Rex's brainstem connection. The moment the algorithm was activated, all the Awakened saw two Earths seventy-two hours into the future: one withering into a black hole under the Temporal Cocoon's consumption, while the other showed real snow falling on the streets of Los Angeles.

The cost became immediately apparent. Programmer Leo's left hand suddenly degenerated into a fetal state, retired nurse Maria's retina displayed images of the cosmic heat death, and Sara found a wedding ring in the pocket of her combat suit—one from a parallel self awakened by the algorithm.

Emily's consciousness passed through the quantum storm, carving the algorithm's core into Earth's magnetic field. Suddenly, the aurora over the Pacific materialized, forming a global Klein shield. The roots of the Temporal Cocoon began to wither as they touched the shield—they could no longer absorb the deterministic future.

"We need to split up." Sara loaded an antimatter warhead into her backpack, catching a glimpse of Erin's white lab coat, where the honeycomb pattern of the Temporal Cocoon had begun to seep through—she was becoming the new probability anchor.

As the Awakened rushed out of the basement, metal rain began to fall from the sky. Melting satellite debris intertwined with the remnants of the Temporal Cocoon's roots, forming the snow of the apocalypse. Each Awakened's wristwatch displayed the same final countdown:

00:00:00.