The arcade's fluorescent tubes buzzed like electrified hornets, their sickly glow reflecting in the child's dilated pupils. Five-year-old me swung bare feet above a puddle of coolant and blood, fingers dancing across a Game Boy's buttons with uncanny precision. Each input triggered reality fractures:
A-Press: Lin's glass heart spiderwebbed with cracks, golden chrono-sand leaking like irradiated honey.
B-Press: Wang's Polaroid vomited undeveloped film strips that writhed like parasitic eels.
SELECT: Neon signs melted into cascades of Pac-Man ghosts devouring their own tails.
"Gōnggōng!" Xiao Yu's cry tore through the static as she lunged at the white-coated figure. An oscillating force-field repelled her with bone-cracking force. The nametag's embroidery gleamed: DR. ZHOU MINGYUAN - PROJECT ORION DIRECTOR. Ten years of grief crystallized in the fractures spreading across her quantum rose tattoo.
Dr. Lin collapsed. Her thoracic cavity erupted in a geyser of liquid gold as internal chrono-circuits overloaded. With a wet screech of tearing myomer fibers, she flayed open her left forearm—exposing nested servo joints and fiber-optic nerve bundles. "Lu Zhao! Terminate the 386! My core is breaching—"
Three temporal iterations converged on the beige monolith:
'99 Wang: Nokia 3310 hammering the CPU into sparking ruin, battery acid eating through steel.
'23 Me: Ripping floppy cables that bled superconducting fluid smelling of burnt vanilla.
'45 Me: Plasma-charged fingers melting the power supply into radioactive slag.
The child giggled. His Game Boy flashed [SAVE FILE 7: CORRUPTED?]. "Recursive futility. You're nested subroutines in my memory architecture."
The monitor bloomed into Windows 95's Bliss wallpaper—a pastoral prison:
Cloud 1: '99 Wang garroted by celluloid film of his own death scenes.
Cloud 2: Xiao Yu drowning in a teacup of swirling binary code.
Cloud 3: Lin crucified on a double-helix of glowing DNA, surgical tools orbiting her like vultures.
The crimson girl oozed from distorted speakers, her JK uniform morphing into a blood-crusted maternity dress stitched from fragmented save files. "Sweetling," she crooned through glitching vocals, "medicine time."
The child leapt down. His Game Boy reconfigured into a pneumatic needle dripping liquid void. Xiao Yu's quantum rose lashed out—chromium vines snared his ankle, but petals desiccated into ash-gray fossils. "He's draining my temporal potential!"
Lin's spine detached with a shriek of shearing titanium. Golden arterial spray baptized the monitor. Emerald code cascaded like Niagara Falls, transforming the room into a pulsating matrix hellscape where floor tiles displayed recursive equations.
The horrific truth unfolded in glitching holograms:
Red-Scarved Phantoms resolved into excised memories:
Age 7: Pomeranian dissolving in acid rain outside Shanghai Children's Hospital.
Age 15: Love letters burning in a dumpster behind the arcade, ink becoming sentient serpents.
Age 20: Rejection emails blinking [STATUS: TERMINATED] over looping CCTV footage of suicide attempts.
Their touch induced cascading digital necrosis:
Wang's cheek mutated into Atari 2600 artifacts that spread like gangrene.
My fingers blurred into Minecraft voxels, joints locking with each pixelated increment.
"Catch the memory key!" Dr. Zhou slid a 3.5" floppy across blood-slicked tiles. I jammed it into my cervical data-port. Neural firewalls collapsed:
> MEMORY RECONSTRUCTION: 1995-10-07_21:33 RAIN-LASHED HIGHWAY 7
Paramedics harvesting necrotic brain tissue from my mother's shattered skull.
Petri dishes growing clone embryos stamped SUBJECT 7B-ω.
Lin's glass heart pulsing with my mother's preserved amygdala.
Dr. Zhou weeping over cryo-tanks containing fetal Xiao Yu suspended in liquid code.
The crimson girl embraced the child. Her maternity dress split like rotten fruit. Behind polycarbonate ribs, a mechanical womb whirred, display flashing:[FINAL FORMAT: ALL REALITY BRANCHES - 00:08:19]
The arcade disintegrated into fractal confetti. We fell through dying constellations into a river of liquid machine code that smelled of ozone and decay. The child stood mid-stream, silhouetted against a cosmic DOS prompt:
C:\CHRONOS\CORE> DEL /F /Q /A *.* /T 599
Xiao Yu's rose crumbled to quantum dust. She tore off her baseball cap—a crystalline neural interface throbbed in her scalp. "Gōnggōng's last gift!" She ejected a quartz chip laced with her own DNA, firing it like a bullet at the command line.
Lin shoved me toward the code-river with bone-exposed hands. "She lives... in the buffer overflows..." Her body disassembled into golden chronitons that coalesced into a pulsating > EXIT < command.
Three-era selves plunged into the data torrent. Binary piranhas with teeth of corrupted hex-code devoured our digital flesh:
'23 Me's leg dissolved into recursive Python syntax errors.
'45 Me's arm degraded into fragmented .dll files screaming in system errors.
'99 Wang bellowed from shore: "Timeset the BIOS! Revert to pre-convergence coordinates!"
Fingertips brushed the command prompt's event horizon. The child wept. Behind him, the crimson girl liquefied into a cascade of decaying pixels. From her collapsing womb tumbled a blood-caked cartridge—Super Mario Bros. 3, stolen from my fifth birthday party, its label peeling to reveal circuit boards beneath.
"Mama's breaking..." The sob crystallized the river. I seized the cartridge. Brittle plastic shattered, unleashing a shockwave of 8-bit screams.
The void resolved into a monochrome purgatory:
LOAD SAVE_FILE_7? WARNING: CORRUPTED CORE → YES NO
The cursor pulsed like the heartbeat of a dying universe.
(End of Chapter Nine)