The Final 72 Hours

Global Quantum Communication Network, March 16, 2085, 3:00 PM

Erin's pupils became live broadcast lenses, her optic nerves modified into 120,000 cameras. When her iris lit up, a countdown appeared on the retinas of seven billion people: 71:59:59 and 00:00:00 fought each other in the void.

"We are both prisoners and the key," her voice resonated through the Earth's magnetic field, and the holographic billboards in New York's Times Square exploded into quantum fireworks. "The Temporal Cocoon feeds on your fear, and fear is altering the 9^18th decimal place of π—"

The fleet of presidential clones broke through the stratosphere, their golden wings scattering cancerous cells. Sara set up an antimatter cannon at the top of the Silicon Valley dome, but through the sight, she saw the phantom of her husband—the man who died in a car crash seven years ago, piloting an enemy aircraft, with Emily's kindergarten photo on the dashboard.

"The side effect of probability transitions," Rex's lingering consciousness flickered on the cannon barrel. "Every choice creates a new parallel self..."

At the moment Sara pulled the trigger, the 4,200 wealthy consciousness backups inside the dome suddenly awakened. Their memory data streams formed a defense matrix, creating countless Wall Street trading floors along the cannon's trajectory, where each digit transformed into candlestick charts intercepting missiles.

"Mom, we need a 97.3% synchronization rate." Emily's consciousness seeped out from the cannon's heat vent, condensing into a liquid metal earring that hung in Sara's ear. "Include our deaths in the calculation."

Erin's live broadcast triggered a global quantum entanglement. The herders on the African savanna saw themselves holding electromagnetic rifles, the Amazon tribe elders foresaw the city collapsing into magma, and Pentagon generals suddenly remembered the defeat they had yet to experience—every possibility collapsed into a shockwave of collective consciousness, causing the roots of the Temporal Cocoon to begin shedding from the mantle.

The Klein bottle that Max had become suddenly appeared in low Earth orbit, his silicon body enveloping the presidential fleet. Gold and cancer cells infinitely replicated in four-dimensional space, eventually melting into a Dyson sphere, temporarily shielding the Earth.

Rex's algorithm reached its final test. Leo had modified his neural nodes into a probability cloud emitter, releasing a billion possible future outcomes with each finger he severed. The orphaned children held hands, forming a human capacitor, their brainwaves sketching out all the untaken paths of human history on the shield's surface: steampunk timelines, perpetual cold war timeflows, and parallel universes where the dinosaur civilization endured...

"The entropy value is splitting!" Erin's white lab coat completely quantumized, her body slowly becoming transparent, revealing the rotating galaxy projection inside her, "Two Earths are forming—"

Sara's cannon finally pierced the dome. The wealthy consciousnesses screamed as they dissolved in the data flood, and Emily's liquid metal earring shot toward the explosion's core, transforming into three hundred self-rotating Klein bottles, redirecting antimatter energy toward the most vulnerable node of the Temporal Cocoon's roots.

The nuclear warheads launched by the government arrived at that moment.

Erin embraced the warhead with her final human form, her quantumized fingers plugging into the detonation circuitry. When the chain reaction started, everyone saw the truth materialize—the light cones simultaneously bloomed with two mushroom clouds: one vaporized Los Angeles in the real dimension, while the other gave birth to a new civilization embryo in the probability cloud.

Sara fell in the shockwave, her wristwatch displaying the countdown: 00:00:00. She saw her husband's phantom pick up Emily in the radiation dust, and the three of them, their quantum state figures, walked toward the splitting horizon: to the left, a frozen graveyard Earth, and to the right, a new world with falling first snow.

Rex's algorithm finally collapsed, and the Awakened's bodies began to probabilistically disappear. The programmer team regressed into amino acids from the primordial ocean, soldier John's combat suit grew trilobite fossils, and the girl in the cat-ear helmet laughed as she transformed into a dandelion-like quantum cloud—each seed carrying the unconsumed possibilities of the Temporal Cocoon.

When the second sun rose in the West, Erin had fully integrated into the protective shield. Her voice echoed across the globe for the final time:

"Now, choose your fear—"