The screams of the crowd were laced with a deeper dissonance—the sound of space itself groaning as it was torn apart. Chen Mo felt his eardrums vibrating across multiple timelines at once. One moment, he heard the traffic of yesterday; the next, the sirens of tomorrow; the next, the deafening roar of an explosion that had never happened.
"Clear the area! Military jurisdiction!" Lin Zhan shoved his way through the terrified crowd, but froze mid-motion.
Chen Mo followed his gaze, and the bedrock of his reality crumbled.
The car crash site had become a showroom for a quantum nightmare. Around the overturned sedan, reality had fractured into a kaleidoscope of parallel possibilities. In some fragments, a rescue was underway. In others, death had already claimed the victims. In still others, the crash had never occurred at all.
The most sickening sight was the victims themselves, trapped between these realities.
A young girl's upper body was crying for help, while her lower half lay still and lifeless in an adjacent fragment. A paramedic's left hand was lifting a stretcher, while his right, in another reality, was answering his phone. An old woman's head was weeping, her torso was shopping for groceries, and her legs were lying in a hospital bed.
"My God…" Chen Mo whispered. A chill crawled up his spine, not from fear of the unknown, but from the cold, stark impotence of mathematics in the face of such a visceral violation of logic.
Lin Zhan grabbed a fleeing police officer. "What the hell happened here?"
The officer's face was a mask of cognitive dissonance. "They're… they're in all states at once! Alive and dead, here and not here…"
Chen Mo's attention was drawn to the edge of the fractured zone. Several people were trapped in their cars, their bodies flickering between states. One of them, a man in a lab coat, had an institute ID badge clipped to his pocket.
"Professor Li Mingyuan, from the National Quantum Institute!" Chen Mo recognized the face that was blinking in and out of existence. "I just saw him at a conference last week!"
A sharp light glinted in Lin Zhan's eyes. "The entire Quantum Institute went missing three days ago. The official story was a classified research retreat out west."
A sense of dread washed over Chen Mo. "But you're seeing them right there, trapped in… whatever the hell that is."
"Can you explain it?" Lin Zhan's voice held a strange note of expectation.
Chen Mo studied the fragments, noticing they weren't entirely random. They were following the mathematical laws of quantum superposition.
"Macroscopic quantum decoherence failure," Chen Mo breathed. "It's like Schrödinger's box was forced open, but the state of being both alive and dead was frozen into reality."
In the distance, Professor Li's body began to flicker more violently, his expression shifting from agony to a bizarre, unnerving calm.
"We have to get them out," Chen Mo said suddenly.
Lin Zhan looked at him in disbelief. "Are you insane? How?"
"In theory, with precise quantum resonance and a collective observer effect, we could collapse the system into a single, desired outcome," Chen Mo's mind was racing. "But it would require perfect control. One mistake, and we could lock in the worst possible reality."
Lin Zhan stared at him for a few seconds. "What do you need?"
"A public address system that can cover the entire area, and…" Chen Mo's gaze fell on a music store on the corner. "A piano."
"A piano?" Lin Zhan's eyebrows shot up.
"Trust me, Colonel," Chen Mo's eyes were unnervingly focused. "Or at the very least, trust the wave function."
Five minutes later, Lin Zhan had somehow procured a PA system, and Chen Mo was sitting at a grand piano in the middle of the street.
"You're sure about this?" Lin Zhan asked, watching the increasingly unstable reality fragments.
Chen Mo placed his hands on the keys. "The music is just a medium. The key is to create a quantum resonance field using precisely calculated vibration frequencies."
He began to play. It wasn't a melody, but a series of precise, resonant tones, each note corresponding to an eigenfrequency of the Schrödinger equation.
Then, he spoke into the microphone, his voice booming across the area.
"Focus on the people who are trapped. Observe them. In your minds, define their state: alive, whole, and safe."
A few people in the crowd snickered. "Is this guy crazy? Saving people with a piano?"
Lin Zhan fired a shot into the air. "Do as the doctor says! That's a military order!"
Fear proved more effective than reason. The hesitant crowd began to focus, though many still looked on with skepticism. It was this state of half-belief that, ironically, created the perfect "weak measurement" environment.
Miraculously, the spatial fragments around Professor Li began to vibrate, then popped like soap bubbles, leaving behind a single, stable reality. The professor was lying on a stretcher, injured but alive.
"It's working!" Lin Zhan commanded. "Everyone, focus on the other victims!"
Chen Mo continued to play and guide them, his voice calm and authoritative.
"A quantum system requires an observer to choose its reality. Right now, you are the observers. Reject all other possibilities. Accept only this one."
One by one, the fragments collapsed, the multiple states of the victims merging into one. The entire process was like a bizarre scientific ritual, with Chen Mo as both its high priest and its chief engineer.
When the last victim was freed, the crowd erupted in cheers. But Chen Mo's brow was furrowed.
"It was too easy…" he whispered. "A quantum system shouldn't be this easy to influence, unless…"
He was interrupted by Professor Li, who was limping toward him. The professor's face was bloody, but his eyes shone with an excited light.
"Brilliant! Using the observer effect to guide macroscopic quantum state collapse!" Li grabbed Chen Mo's hand. "I never imagined such a thing could be applied in the real world!"
Chen Mo stared at him. "Professor, what were you doing here? The official report said you were out west."
Li's smile vanished, replaced by a strange mix of fear and excitement. "We were supposed to be out west… but the promise… the barrier has…"
Suddenly, the professor's expression went blank. "What am I saying? Of course we were out west…"
Lin Zhan stepped forward. "You just said 'barrier.' What barrier?"
Li blinked, confused. "Barrier? What barrier?" He looked around, his expression growing more bewildered. "Wait, why are we here?"
A chill ran down Chen Mo's spine. The memory erasure was accelerating.
Paramedics came to take Professor Li to an ambulance. As he was being led away, he suddenly grabbed Chen Mo's arm, his eyes momentarily clearing with a look of stark terror. He spoke in a low, rapid whisper.
"Be careful of the voices, Chen Mo. They're not from outside. They're from beneath the sea of probability… from the abyss of the quantum vacuum…"
As soon as he finished, his eyes went blank again.
"Beneath the sea of probability?" Lin Zhan frowned.
Chen Mo didn't answer. His attention was captured by a news alert on his phone:
*Breaking News: Massive Hollow Structure Detected Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet*
The accompanying image showed a colossal metal structure on the Antarctic plain, its surface impossibly smooth. Most disturbingly, its shape was strikingly similar to the mysterious geometric patterns that had appeared all over the world.
Chen Mo clicked for details. A video clip made him gasp. On the structure's surface, flowing patterns of light formed a familiar word:
"3iAtlas"
The characters were constantly shifting, sometimes resembling ancient cuneiform, sometimes a quantum circuit diagram, as if the name itself were a living concept.
"Colonel…" Chen Mo's voice was dry. "I think I know what he meant by 'beneath'."
Just then, his phone rang. It was an unknown number. He answered.
"Dr. Chen?" a woman's voice, urgent and frightened. "This is Zhou Lin, Zhou Ming's sister. My brother… he did exist, didn't he? Please, tell me I'm not going crazy…"
Chen Mo's heart sank. Someone was starting to remember the people and events that had "never existed."
"Ms. Zhou, where are you? I need to see you," Chen Mo said, giving Lin Zhan a meaningful look.
"I'm at home, but I feel like someone is watching me… wait, someone's at the door…" He heard footsteps, the sound of a door opening, and then a sharp, terrified gasp from Zhou Lin.
"Who are you? What do you want—?" The line went dead.
Chen Mo immediately redialed, only to get a recorded message: "The number you have dialed does not exist."
Lin Zhan was already mobilizing his resources. "I want Zhou Lin's address, now!"
Chen Mo looked at the departing ambulance, then at the news from Antarctica, then at the non-existent phone number.
The pieces were swirling in his mind: superimposed realities, erased existences, the structure in Antarctica, and now, people who remembered what was never supposed to have been.
"Colonel," Chen Mo said slowly. "Zhou Lin could be the key. After reality was rewritten, she still remembered. That means she's immune to the effect."
In the distance, the ambulance siren faded. Inside that ambulance, Professor Li was speaking in a voice that was not his own, whispering to the empty air.
"Target has made contact with a 'Rememberer.' Proceeding to the next phase."
Then, he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. When he awoke, he was once again a simple physicist who only remembered being at a conference out west.
Across the city, in front of an open apartment door, Zhou Lin's shattered phone lay on the ground. The apartment was empty. The only movement was the curtains, fluttering in the breeze from the open window, as if its owner had just been erased from reality itself.
And Chen Mo didn't yet know that the rescue he thought he had orchestrated was just one more step in *their* plan.