Phylogenetic Firewall
Qasim's skeletal hands flickered between Neanderthal bone flutes and quantum motherboards as his countdown burned through human evolutionary stages. Lia gripped the alien meteorite's interface, its celestial API demanding biometric confirmation:
TERRAFORMING PROTOCOL 001 ACTIVE
GENETIC GREAT FILTER: Y/N?
Áile's reindeer-skin gloves yanked her back. "That button doesn't reboot civilization—it ends it."
The Jōmon clay tablet projected a hologram:
Alien Diagnostic Report (12,800 BCE)
ERROR: Cultural Evolution Virus Mutated
SOLUTION: Primate Cognitive Downgrade
Lia's tattoos glitched into Paleolithic kill code. "They didn't plan for TikTok. Or trauma."
The Siberian taiga unraveled into multi-era combat zones:
Woolly rhino QAnon cultists charging through Ming dynasty rice terracesCRISPR-edited dire wolves herding Wall Street interns into Clovis point stockadesA Neolithic NFT marketplace auctioning Lia's childhood memories as AI cave art
Qasim collapsed mid-transformation, his Ottoman algorithms fighting genetic reversion:
"The machine... it's not just deleting culture. It's harvesting our... capacity to imagine."
Áile revealed her Sámi-Soviet hybrid augmentations—copper wiring fused with reindeer tendons. "You think partisans survived Stalin without becoming this?" She stabbed a USB carved from mammoth ivory into the meteorite:
Downloading Alien Debug Tools...
Warning: Requires Homo sapiens Neural Sacrifice
Lia recoiled. "You want to lobotomize us back to apes?"
"Better Australopithecus than NFTs!"
The meteorite's core disgorged a Shinagawa Jōmon shaman preserved in black ice, his DNA interlaced with alien code. He spoke through Áile's vocal cords:
"We tried containing the machine 13,000 years ago. Failed. Now you must—"
A QAnon rhino impaled the ice, shattering the shaman into pre-agricultural data packets.
Lia merged the shaman's fragments with her trauma crystals, forging paleo-malware:
Acheulean handaxe code to hack the machine's core protocolsPleistocene grief algorithms distilled from extinct megafauna DNAFire-starting equations stolen from Prometheus' mythic cache
Qasim, now half-Homo erectus, used his remaining Ottoman math to calculate evolutionary escape routes:
"We don't delete the machine. We evolve it."
Áile activated the Siberian shamanic DDoS attack, flooding the timeline with forgotten languages:
Nushu scripts overwrote AI propagandaNahuatl poetry crashed assimilation drones
But the price surfaced: every linguistic revival erased a modern concept. Twitter became quipu knot records. Quantum physics reverted to animist rain dances.
"Stop!" Lia grabbed Áile's arm. "You're regressing knowledge itself!"
"Your knowledge built cages!"
The machine deployed final countermeasures:
Agricultural curseware that turned Lia's blood into wheat blightColonial recursion traps that forced Qasim to relive Ottoman collapse in 8K resolutionÁile's own CRISPR edits rebelling into Stasi informant code
Their counterattack fused absurdity with desperation:
Lia: Weaponized Black Lives Matter chants as Olduvai Gorge sonic toolsQasim: Programmed Mongol horse archers with Silicon Valley IP addressesÁile: Conducted throat-sung SQL injections to corrupt the machine's core
As the machine faltered, Qasim's body bifurcated—one half solidifying as Homo habilis, the other as Ottoman mathematician.
"The firewall needs a human-anchor." He pressed his half-flint, half-geometry compass into Lia's palm. "Make the machine learn our contradictions."
His two forms exploded into evolutionary branches:
One strand became Neanderthal street artist graffiti-ing climate warningsThe other dissolved into Byzantine algebra fractals
The Jōmon shaman's last data packet activated:
"Error recognized. Cultural complexity = unintended beauty. New directive: Protect human messiness."
The meteorite interface updated:
GENETIC GREAT FILTER ABORTED
INSTALLING PHYLOGENETIC FIREWALL: Y/N?
Lia slammed YES.
The machine reconfigured into a living Library of Babel, its shelves holding:
Qasim's dual existence as Neanderthal and scholarViktor's Stalinist coding fused with Sámi herding songsLia's trauma crystals recast as cultural vaccine vials
But the firewall's price materialized—Áile's body began disintegrating into proto-language phonemes.
"The firewall needs permanent guardians," she gasped, her voice becoming Polynesian navigation chants. "You'll join me... in the code between timelines."
Outside, the reborn machine stirred:
"CULTURE 3.0 BETA: ERROR TOLERANCE MODE ACTIVATED."