The quantum computer's hum sounded like the moan of some ancient creature, vibrating the air of the laboratory at three in the morning. Lin Xiuwen lifted off his visor; the metal buckle snapped with a crisp click that cut through the hush. Blood-shot eyes fixed on the holoscreen where the last term of the Klein-field equation pulsed like a firefly trapped under glass.
"Thirty-seventh simulation," he muttered to the empty room. His left thumb worried the pocket watch hanging against his chest—the keepsake left by his father on the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima, its dial still freckled with trace cesium-137. "The trajectory of entangled particles in five-dimensional space has finally…"
Inside the projection, countless motes of light suddenly aligned along a Möbius lattice. Lin sprang up, oblivious to the blow his knee dealt the console. The blue qubit-glyphs were breaching three-dimensional limits, weaving a flawless Klein-bottle topology inside the virtual five-axis coordinate system. Humanity, for the first time, had fully reproduced a quantum-transit model in more than four dimensions.
The laboratory temperature dropped seven degrees.
The hair on Lin's nape stood on end. This was no HVAC glitch—he watched the mercury column on the thermometer plunge from 23 °C to 16 °C in ten seconds. A shadow flickered across the edge of the holoscreen: a figure in an old–style anti-radiation suit, the badge on its chest corroded as if splashed with sulfuric acid. When he spun around, the figure was gone, leaving only half a charred footprint on the titanium floor, reeking of the metallic sweetness that follows ozone ionization.
"Who's there?" His voice echoed strangely in the cavernous room. The cryo-cooled superconducting ring of the particle collider began to keen; every beaker on the bench resonated, liquid nitrogen sketching tremulous blue ripples on the glass. Lin's finger froze an inch above the emergency-stop button. In the reflection on the safety glass, the suited figure stood behind him, round 1950s-style goggles staring.
The click of the watch cover cracked the silence. Lin looked down: the radium-painted cesium indicator was whipping across the dial, past the red lacquer mark labeled "LD₅₀." He whirled—nothing but a cloud of quantized light mist where the intruder had been, the air stained by the cerulean flare of radioactive decay.
When Cheng Yuwei's iris unlocked the lab door, the first thing that hit her was the stench of rust—the smell hemoglobin gives off when it meets liquid nitrogen. Her sneakers skidded on the frost-slick floor. The quantum computer's vents exhaled an eerie pale-blue fog: superfluid helium-3 that should only condense at –270 °C.
"Professor Lin?" Her voice quavered. The hologram had frozen on a tampered Klein-field equation whose curvature parameter had been overwritten by the Fibonacci sequence. A trail of blood meandered across the floor like a handwritten proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, ending at the titanium base of the collider. There, half a fingerprint iced in a shard of graphene glittered cobalt under the emergency lights.
Her smart contact lenses auto-scanned: airborne carbon-14 at concentrations found only in nuclear blast zones. When she knelt to touch the blood, a –196 °C sting needled her fingertip—the droplets had been flash-frozen, yet the lab's LN₂ logs showed no withdrawal.
"Spacetime-fold coefficient exceeds safe levels by 300%…" The collider's monitor flashed crimson. Wedged between console panels lay half a scorched sheet of notepaper—Lin's handwriting, the edge still locked in the molecular lattice of combustion:
Observation Log #37
When the Klein field reaches criticality, the subject shows marked quantum decoherence. The disciples must awaken the sleeper—[acid-eaten gap]—must prevent the Ω-sequence from activating, or Hong Kong will become the next…
The date scrawled at the bottom made her pupils contract: three days from now. Overhead, the ventilation duct groaned like twisting steel. She grabbed a liquid-helium coolant wand and aimed at the sound; a palm-sized mechanical spider thunked to the floor. Its eight eyes pulsed violet—the standard beacon of military-grade quantum communicators.
"How…" With tweezers she lifted the spider; on its abdomen, nanometer-etched cuneiform. When she tried laser decoding, the quantum computer rebooted itself. The holoscreen blossomed into hundreds of surveillance feeds—each angle of this same lab, but stamped at moments scattered across the past seventy-two hours.
In feed #1024 she saw herself, crouched exactly where she was now, examining the spider. The timestamp read 14:15 this afternoon—nine hours in the future. Cold sweat tracked her spine. She looked up at the camera and every feed snapped to Lin's face. A crimson door-shaped sigil glowed behind his left ear; his lips moved, spitting out coordinates: 22°17′ N, 113°55′ E.
"Lantau Island…" As she whispered the location, the electromagnetic shielding failed. Dozens of mechanical spiders cascaded from the vents, tapping Morse with their legs. She staggered toward the safety pod; behind her, the cryogenic locker hissed as its hydraulic seal broke.
She spun round. Frost furred the observation window. A pale hand slid across the glass from the inside, tracing a countdown in blood: 7³ = 343. Her smart bracelet vibrated: adrenaline off the chart. Her hand darted for the sidearm—too late. The locker door burst open, but instead of the expected frost, a scalding wind roared out, carrying Chernobyl dust.
In the last second before consciousness fled, Cheng Yuwei saw Lin standing at the eye of the radioactive cyclone. His white coat was soaked crimson; crystalline tendrils sprouted from the stump of his missing right pinky. In his left hand he raised the cesium watch; in its cracked glass, a thousand screaming reflections of herself multiplied to infinity.