The chalk snapped, its sharp crack a final protest against a world coming undone.
"They aren't disappearing randomly," Chen Mo said, his fingertips white from the pressure of writing the last few primes. "They're being rearranged. Some kind of intelligence is sorting through the universe's source code."
His assistant's face was a pale mask. "But the primes are the bedrock of mathematics…"
"Bedrock?" Chen Mo gave a humorless laugh. "When the bedrock starts to flow, the entire cathedral of mathematics collapses. Bank encryptions, quantum computing, missile launch codes—all built on the beautiful, stubborn uniqueness of primes. And now, they're being rewritten."
The lights flickered violently. Chen Mo looked up and saw the night sky torn open. It wasn't lightning, not an aurora, but a shifting geometric grid, a living mathematical proof performing itself across the heavens.
"God…" the assistant stammered, stumbling backward.
Chen Mo strode to the window. On the horizon, a colossal object was ascending. It had no fixed form, shifting fluidly between an icosahedron, a hyperbolic plane, and a Möbius strip. Its surface was a tapestry of infinitely complex fractal patterns, each detail breathing with repetition and mutation.
"3iAtlas." The name surfaced from the depths of his memory, unbidden, accompanied by a spike of pain behind his eyes. Fragments of a life he'd never lived flashed through his mind: an unfamiliar laboratory, figures in silver uniforms, the back of a woman's head. As she turned, the mole at the corner of her mouth was perfectly illuminated.
"I don't know where that name came from," Chen Mo said, pressing his temples. "But it's there."
---
Chaos had consumed the Pentagon's underground command center.
"All weapons systems are offline!" a colonel roared into a headset. "The target is continuously altering its geometric properties. We can't achieve a target lock!"
Secretary of Defense Richards stared, mesmerized, at the main screen. The object, 3iAtlas, drifted over Washington D.C., and reality warped in its wake. The Capitol Building's dome spontaneously fractured into a cascade of smaller, self-similar domes. The Washington Monument twisted into a perfect logarithmic spiral. The city's streets rearranged themselves into the pattern of a Koch snowflake.
"Deploy Delta Force," Richards commanded. "Ground approach. Visual assessment."
---
When Chen Mo was rushed into the command center, he arrived just in time to see the live feed from Delta Force's approach.
Twelve elite soldiers moved cautiously toward the floating anomaly. It was currently a rotating dodecahedron, its surface shimmering with the flowing patterns of the Mandelbrot set. The infinitely complex borders seemed to whisper the universe's secrets.
"Do not stare at the surface for extended periods," Chen Mo warned over the comms. "The fractal patterns will induce cortical overload—"
The warning came too late.
The team leader, Sergeant Carter, froze, his body beginning to twitch unnaturally.
"Sergeant Carter, report!" the command came.
"I see… all the possibilities…" Carter mumbled, his eyes locked on the shifting geometry.
Then, the replication began.
A second Carter appeared beside him—not an exact copy; this one had a scar beneath his left eye. Then a third, a fourth. Within ten seconds, dozens of variations of Sergeant Carter stood on the lawn: some older, some wearing different ranks, one with irises of a startling violet.
"Fractal replication," Chen Mo breathed, a cold horror gripping him. "It's iterating variations of the observer."
The command center was silent.
It got worse. The Carter-copies began to observe one another, to touch, and then, like theorems being disproven, they began to collapse out of existence. With each one that vanished, the remainder seemed to become more… real. More stable.
"An evolutionary algorithm," Chen Mo whispered. "It's searching for the optimal solution."
When only three Carters remained, the pattern on 3iAtlas's surface shifted, mutating from the Mandelbrot set to the even more complex Julia set. All three Carters screamed in unison. Their bodies began to distort, their bones taking on a pearlescent sheen as their limbs folded at impossible angles. Finally, they merged into a single, shifting geometric form: a weeping polyhedron of flesh and bone.
The monstrosity spoke with thirteen different mouths at once, its voice like the shattering of crystal lattices.
"*The solitude of the primes is ended… The eternity of geometry is at hand… Observer, do you hear it? The ratio of the circumference to the diameter is weeping…*"
Then, like a proven theorem, it simply ceased to exist.
---
A profound, abyssal silence fell over the command center.
Secretary Richards turned to Chen Mo, his voice like ice. "Explain."
Chen Mo's face was pale. "It's not attacking. It's demonstrating. It's using reality as a canvas to prove a mathematical truth. Like Euclid proving a theorem, but with the world as its slate."
"Demonstrating?" Richards was practically roaring. "It just turned my best soldier into a… a talking geometry lesson!"
"Not killed. Transformed," Chen Mo corrected, his mind instinctively running through the primes—2, 3, 5, 7, 11… a calming ritual even in the face of terror. "It made Carter part of the proof. That polyhedron… I feel like I've seen it before…"
The headache returned, sharper this time. The memory was clearer: he was in a bright classroom, a professor drawing polyhedra on a blackboard. A gentle female voice explained, "There are only five Platonic solids, because space itself only permits these five perfect symmetries…"
The professor turned. It was the woman from his vision, the mole near her lips accentuating her smile.
"Professor Su…" Chen Mo whispered, unaware he'd spoken aloud.
Richards frowned. "What did you say?"
Chen Mo snapped back to the present. "Nothing. Secretary, we have to stop the armed response. It's communicating in the language of mathematics. Our weapons are just childish scribbles to it."
Just then, a technician cried out. "Sir, look!"
On the main screen, a colossal mathematical formula had appeared on the surface of 3iAtlas, an equation written in three-dimensional light and shadow.
"That's… the mathematics of spacetime curvature," Chen Mo recognized the symbols. "Riemannian tensors…"
Suddenly, the entire command center was plunged into absolute darkness. Every piece of equipment died. Only Chen Mo's tablet remained lit, a single line of text glowing on its screen:
*The primes have returned to zero. Geometry will be whole again. Observer Chen Mo, you are the key to the proof.*
In the darkness, Richards's voice was a cold threat. "Dr. Chen. It knows you."
Chen Mo didn't answer. Another memory was flooding his senses.
He was standing before a massive, ring-shaped device. Professor Su was holding his hand. "Chen Mo, if the prime sequence resets, it means the barrier has been breached. 3iAtlas will come for you. It needs an observer to complete its proof."
"What proof?" his younger self asked.
"The proof of existence itself," she said, her eyes filled with tears. "We made a terrible mistake. We thought mathematics was a tool we invented. But it's the consciousness of the universe. We are just the eyes through which it observes itself."
"I don't understand…"
"You will," she said, stroking his face. "When the geometry begins to weep. Find me… at the end of the fractal iteration."
The memory shattered.
When the lights returned, every eye in the room was on Chen Mo, filled with suspicion.
Richards slowly drew his sidearm. "Dr. Chen, I think you have some explaining to do."
Chen Mo looked calmly at the barrel of the gun. "Secretary, are you sure that's still a pistol? In a Riemannian manifold, even a straight line is curved."
Richards looked down. To his horror, the barrel of his gun was slowly, impossibly, bending like melting wax.
Two soldiers seized Chen Mo's arms. As they dragged him away, the power failed again. In the pitch black, a cold hand grasped his wrist, and a familiar female voice whispered in his ear.
"Chen Mo, come with me. There isn't much time. The weeping of geometry only lasts for one prime interval."
It was Professor Su.
When the lights came back on, Chen Mo was gone.
---
In a small grove of trees outside the base, Chen Mo stared at the impossibly young woman before him. The same face from his memories, the same mole, the same eyes that seemed to see through time itself.
"Professor Su… you're supposed to be…"
"Dead?" She smiled. "In Euclidean geometry, perhaps. But in the new geometry 3iAtlas brings, life and death are merely different topological states."
She held out her hand, a rotating fractal pattern blooming in her palm.
"Come, Chen Mo. The primes are dead, and we have to find a way to stop it before the new mathematics is born. If we fail, when the last prime vanishes, reality itself will be remade. And that will be the end of everything."
Chen Mo looked at her hand, knowing his choice would change the world. Behind him, the alarms of the military base screamed. Before him, a ghost from his past and a future he couldn't comprehend.
He chose the future.
The moment he took that step, the world dissolved into lines of force and function. The trees became Fourier series, the sky a spectrum of color-coded equations. This wasn't a journey. It was an awakening.
Professor Su's voice echoed through the mathematized spacetime. "Welcome to the real world, Chen Mo. Here, we are all part of the proof."