The corpse was breathing in hexadecimal.
Elias Quantum's surgical scalpel passed through the cadaver's ribcage like light through a prism. On the stainless steel table before him, the John Doe's organs shimmered with unstable geometry—a heart tessellating into Klein bottles, lungs dissolving into ASCII confetti. The autopsy report on his tablet kept rewriting itself, final cause of death cycling between "existential recursion error" and "metaphorical cardiac arrest."
"Dr. Quantum?" The morgue intern's voice fragmented into dial-up tones. Her pupils dilated as mercury-like fluid began crawling up the walls in Fibonacci sequences. "Should I notify the... the..." Her lips shaped silent static where his name should have been.
Elias glanced at his fading fingertips. The digital clock above the door blinked 23:59:59 in seventeen languages, none human.
His quantum pager vibrated with crimson glyphs:
**COGNITOSIS EVENT - SECTOR 7**
**EROSION THRESHOLD: 97.3%**
Outside, Manhattan had become M.C. Escher's fever dream. Police cars melted across Broadway like wax sculptures, their sirens warping into Van Gogh's *Starry Night* swirls. Elias ran through collapsing spacetime—fire escapes twisted into Penrose stairs, billboards displaying ads for products that wouldn't be invented for centuries.
The quarantine zone pulsed ahead—a perfect crystalline cube where time had ossified. Inside, roses grew backward through bullet casings, their thorns dripping algebra instead of sap. At the epicenter knelt a woman forged from fractured light.
"Three minutes slower than my predictive models," she said, catching a falling surveillance drone like plucking an apple. The machine crumpled into origami in her palm. "Call me Lysandra Vox. You'll forget that name in thirteen seconds."
**[ENTITY IDENTIFIED: ANTI-MEME PATTERN]**
**[PARADOX LOAD CRITICAL: TERMINATE COGNITION]**
Elias' neural implant screamed warnings in dead languages. Her shadow didn't match her silhouette—it showed a cathedral of burning books.
"Charming little extinction you've cultivated." She stepped through a non-Euclidean shadow. "But when the Prismatic Veil ruptures next Thursday, I require you sufficiently coherent to—"
Gunfire. Screams. Then absolute silence as her words unraveled causality itself.
When SWAT teams breached the zone, they found only Elias clutching a scalpel made of crystallized contradictions—its blade healed where it cut. Bodycam footage showed him mouthing words that scrambled into prime numbers. By dawn, every frame containing Dr. Quantum had been replaced with white noise.
Except one timestamp at 00:00:07.
In that quantum glitch, the static coalesced into warnings carved in extinct tongues:
**SHE IS THE UNLEARNED EQUATION**
**YOU ARE THE DIVIDED BY ZERO**
Beneath the glyphs flickered a child's crayon drawing—a stick figure with translucent hands fighting tentacles that sprouted from a hospital bed labeled ∅. The wax scribble dated tomorrow's sunrise.
As NYPD psychiatrists administered memory purges, across town in Bellevue's pediatric ward, a boy with Cotard's delusion smiled at his latest artwork. Oliver Null's walls were papered with hundreds near-identical crayon prophecies, each signed with Elias' fading fingerprints.
The heart monitor beside him flatlined in perfect π decimals.