Twenty-three hours became twenty, became ten, became one.
Bataar stood in the ancient facility's main chamber watching the final preparations. The five quantum anchors hummed with barely-contained energy, each one a jury-rigged impossibility of scavenged corporate technology and desperate improvisation. Temur had connected them to the facility's original power systems—atomic reactors buried deep in the bedrock that had somehow kept running for forty years without maintenance. The kind of engineering that predated corporate planned obsolescence.
The extraction teams assembled at their designated positions. Five teams of four, plus three reserve operators who would rotate in if anyone faltered. Twenty-three people total who'd decided that dying while fighting genocide was better than living with complicity.
Weaver moved through the teams doing final equipment checks. Her neural stack was fully active now, coordinating communication between all operators, managing tactical data, tracking epsilon-9's quantum signature as it approached the moment of corporate erasure.
"Status," she said, her voice transmitted through neural links to all team members.
"Team One ready," Granite reported. His team occupied the primary extraction point, closest to the quantum anchor array. They'd handle the bulk of extractions.
"Team Two ready," Echo said. Her augmented eye glowed in the chamber's dim lighting, processing data streams that would help her team navigate temporal collapse.
"Team Three ready," Jakob said. The young man had refused to evacuate, insisted on participating despite the risk that his death would alert his mother to his betrayal. Bataar heard the fear in his voice, and the determination overriding it.
Teams Four and Five reported ready in sequence. Volunteers Bataar barely knew, people who'd spent their lives in the subcity watching corporate power crush everything human, and had finally found something worth dying for.
"Anchor status," Weaver said.
"Anchors one through four showing stable entanglement," Bataar reported, monitoring the quantum signatures from his control station. "Anchor five is fluctuating. Quantum coherence at seventy-three percent."
"Can it hold?"
Bataar ran the calculations again. Seventy-three percent wasn't enough. The anchor would probably collapse under full load, dragging its entire extraction team into temporal dissolution.
"No," he said.
"Can you stabilize it?"
"Not in—" Bataar checked the countdown. "—thirty-seven minutes. I'd need hours to recalibrate."
Silence on the neural link. Then Weaver's voice, harder: "We proceed with four anchors. Team Five, you're reassigned to backup. If any primary anchor fails, you deploy immediately."
"Understood," Team Five's leader acknowledged. Bataar could hear the relief in his voice—backup meant lower risk of erasure.
"That reduces our extraction capacity to forty-eight people," Temur said. "Maybe fewer if the remaining anchors can't handle the load distribution."
"Then we extract forty-eight." Weaver's voice carried the weight of command, the determination that kept twenty-three people from fragmenting into individual terror. "Forty-eight people who would otherwise be erased. That's what we came for."
Bataar looked at the quantum anchors again. Four stable, one failing. Four portals into dying timeline. Four chances to pull people from corporate genocide before reality collapsed completely.
His hands were shaking. He forced them still.
The countdown reached thirty minutes.Epsilon-9's quantum signature appeared on Bataar's monitors at T-minus fifteen minutes.
The timeline was beautiful in its way—a branching probability structure diverging from baseline reality seventeen years ago, developing its own quantum coherence, its own causality patterns. Three hundred thousand people living lives that were simultaneously real and, according to corporate law, illegal.
Bataar could see the pruning protocols already beginning. Kronos Solutions had initiated the erasure sequence, quantum dissolution propagating from epsilon-9's foundation upward through its reality. The timeline was dying, slowly, like building whose support columns were being dissolved one molecule at a time.
In the target timeline, people were going about their lives. Working in their cooperative factories. Raising children in communities where poverty had been eliminated through resource sharing. Building futures that wouldn't exist in four point seven seconds.
They didn't know they were about to be erased.
That was the cruelty of corporate timeline pruning. No warning. No defense. No appeal. Just sudden cessation of existence, retroactive elimination from reality itself.
"Target locks established," Bataar reported. The quantum anchors had found stable connection points in epsilon-9—public spaces where extraction teams could pull refugees quickly. "Calculating optimal extraction coordinates."
The math was brutal. They could save forty-eight people. Epsilon-9 had three hundred thousand. That meant choosing who lived and who stopped existing. Bataar's algorithms prioritized based on extraction efficiency—people closest to portal coordinates, people whose biosignatures would stabilize fastest, people whose consciousness patterns showed highest probability of surviving the transfer.
Cold calculation turning lives into statistical optimization.
"Coordinates locked," Bataar said. "Team deployment in five minutes."
The teams moved to their positions around the quantum anchors. Each anchor would open portal into epsilon-9, and each team would have 4.7 seconds to pull their assigned refugees through before timeline collapse completed.
4.7 seconds to save twelve lives per team.
4.7 seconds between resistance and complicity.
"Final equipment check," Weaver ordered.
Bataar ran diagnostics one last time. The quantum anchors showed green across all primary systems. Power flow was stable. Consciousness transfer protocols were initialized. Biosignature stabilization fields were holding at acceptable parameters.
It looked good on the monitors.
Bataar knew better. Equipment this complex, this improvised, this pushed beyond design specifications—something would fail. The only question was when and how catastrophically.
"All systems nominal," he reported anyway. Because the teams needed confidence more than they needed honesty.
"Medical teams standing by," Dr. Sarangerel's voice came through the link from the secondary facility in Sublevel 11. "Forty-eight stabilization pods ready. We'll do everything we can for them."
Everything we can, Bataar thought. Not everything they'll need. Just what we can provide with scavenged equipment and desperate expertise.
The countdown reached two minutes.In epsilon-9, the timeline's death accelerated.
Bataar watched through the quantum sensors as reality began to fray. Buildings flickered, their quantum coherence dropping. Streets developed translucent patches where existence became probabilistic. The sky showed impossible colors—wavelengths that couldn't exist in stable spacetime, visual artifacts of causality breakdown.
People started noticing. Three hundred thousand individuals looking up at dying sky, watching their world dissolve, not understanding what was happening but knowing something fundamental had gone wrong.
Some ran. Pointless—there was nowhere to run when reality itself was collapsing.
Some held their families. Also pointless, but at least human.
Most just stood and watched, comprehension failing, as the universe murdered them.
"One minute," Bataar said, his voice mechanical.The extraction teams positioned themselves at the quantum anchors. Hands on portal controls. Eyes on tactical displays showing target coordinates in epsilon-9. Breathing controlled, heartbeats elevated, augmented and baseline humans preparing to reach into dying timeline and steal fragments of existence.
"Thirty seconds."
Bataar could see the exact moment of timeline collapse approaching—quantum signature dropping exponentially, causality dissolving, the mathematical certainty of corporate erasure executing with perfect precision.
"Fifteen seconds."
Weaver's voice across all channels: "Remember your training. Stay focused. Trust your equipment. And if something goes wrong—if the portals collapse or the anchors fail or reality starts coming apart—get out. Don't try to be heroes. The people we're saving need you to survive."
"Ten seconds."
Bataar's hands moved across his controls, final adjustments to quantum entanglement parameters, consciousness transfer bandwidth optimization, biosignature field calibration.
"Five seconds."
The teams tensed. Twenty-three people about to commit temporal crime, about to violate corporate law and physics itself to save forty-eight lives from erasure.
"Three. Two. One."
"Portals open. Execute extraction."
The quantum anchors activated simultaneously, tearing holes in reality that connected baseline timeline to epsilon-9's dying world.
Bataar's monitors showed four portals—wavering, unstable, but holding. Consciousness data began flooding through, biosignatures from forty-eight refugees being ripped from their collapsing timeline and forced into baseline reality.
"Team One extracting," Granite's voice came through, distorted by temporal interference. "Reality is—Jesus Christ, I can see it unraveling. The buildings are just—"
"Stay focused!" Weaver commanded. "Extract your targets and get out!"
Bataar watched the data streams. Team One's portal was pulling twelve refugees through successfully. Their consciousness patterns were coherent, biosignatures stabilizing despite the trauma. The team was grabbing people from a public plaza where families had been—Where families had been watching their sky die.
"Team Two extracting," Echo reported. Her voice was flat, professional, hiding whatever horror she was witnessing. "Eleven confirmed. One target's quantum signature collapsed before extraction. They just—they stopped existing mid-transfer."
One loss already. Forty-seven possible saves remaining.
"Team Three extracting," Jakob said. "I've got—there's a child here. She's maybe six years old and she's screaming because her mother just disappeared and I don't know if her mother was erased or just out of extraction range—"
"Extract the child," Weaver ordered. "We save who we can reach."
"Team Four extracting," the team leader reported. "Portal instability. Quantum anchor four showing stress fractures."
Bataar's monitors confirmed it. Anchor Four was degrading faster than predicted, its quantum entanglement fraying under the load of pulling refugees from collapsing timeline. Another thirty seconds, maybe less, before complete failure.
"Team Four, accelerate extraction," Bataar said. "You have twenty seconds before anchor collapse."
"Roger. Pulling everyone within range—"
The timeline hit 4.7 seconds of collapse propagation.
Epsilon-9 died.
Bataar watched it happen on his monitors—quantum signature dropping to zero, causality dissolving, three hundred thousand people ceasing to exist in single eternal moment. The timeline didn't fade or diminish. It simply stopped being real, retroactively deleted from the probability structure of reality.
Gone. Not dead. Worse.
The extraction portals destabilized immediately. Teams scrambled to pull their refugees through before the connections collapsed completely.
"Portal one failing!" Granite shouted. "I've got eleven through, one more in transit—"
"Cut the connection," Weaver ordered. "Don't risk the team for—"
"Got him!" Granite's triumph was audible. "Twelve extracted, all team members accounted for."
"Portal two stable," Echo reported. "All twelve refugees extracted successfully. Team intact."
"Portal three compromised," Jakob said, panic bleeding into his voice. "The portal is—it's not closing properly. It's staying open to where epsilon-9 was but there's nothing there now, just void, just quantum foam and causality fragments and it's pulling at us—"
"Shut it down!" Weaver commanded.
"I'm trying! The anchor won't respond—"
Bataar's monitors showed the problem. Anchor Three had opened portal to epsilon-9, but when the timeline collapsed, the portal had nowhere to terminate. It was now opening into the void where epsilon-9 had been—
the quantum foam of unrealized possibility, raw chaos that existed before reality decided what was real.And that void was pulling back.
"Team Three, evacuate immediately," Bataar ordered, already running calculations. The void was destabilizing Anchor Three's quantum coherence. In minutes, maybe seconds, it would collapse completely, probably taking part of the facility with it.
"We've got eleven refugees," Jakob reported. "One didn't make it through before portal destabilization. But we're all—wait. One of our team members is missing. Chen, where's—"
"He got pulled toward the portal," someone shouted. "The void was pulling him and he couldn't—"
Bataar watched his monitors as Chen's biosignature—
a volunteer he'd barely spoken to, a timeline refugee from some other corporate genocide—
was drawn into the failing portal. Chen didn't scream. Didn't have time. His quantum signature just stretched, distorted, and dissolved into the void.
Erased. Same as the timeline they'd tried to save him from.
"Portal four offline," Team Four reported. "We extracted nine refugees before anchor failure. Lost three to quantum decoherence during transfer. Team intact but—" The team leader's voice broke. "But one of our refugees just started phasing. She's flickering. Her body can't maintain coherence in baseline reality. Dr. Sarangerel, we need immediate stabilization—"
"Bring her to medical," Sarangerel's voice cut through the chaos. "I'll do what I can."
Bataar forced himself to count. Portal One: twelve extracted. Portal Two: twelve extracted. Portal Three: eleven extracted, one team member lost. Portal Four: nine extracted, three lost during transfer, one critical.
Forty-four refugees saved. One Anchor dead. Three refugees dissolved during extraction. One refugee failing stabilization.
And three hundred thousand people erased.
"Close all portals," Weaver ordered. "Bataar, shut down Anchor Three before it destabilizes the entire facility."
Bataar was already working the problem. Anchor Three was trapped in feedback loop, its quantum entanglement trying to maintain connection to timeline that no longer existed. The math was ugly. He couldn't shut it down cleanly—too much energy, too unstable. Best option was controlled collapse, but "controlled" was optimistic.
"Evacuate the facility," Bataar said. "Anchor Three is going critical. I can trigger localized collapse that should contain the damage, but everyone needs to be clear of the main chamber in three minutes."
"Can you do it remotely?" Weaver asked."No. Someone needs to be at the anchor controls to manage the collapse sequence."
"Then I'll—"
"I'll do it," Bataar interrupted. "I understand the equipment. I know the quantum mechanics. And—" He stopped, then continued quieter. "I'm already degrading. Quantum decoherence. Dr. Sarangerel said eight to ten months before I start phasing. If Anchor Three's collapse accelerates my degradation, I'm losing time I didn't really have anyway."
Silence on the link. Then Weaver: "Bataar—"
"Get the refugees to medical. Get the teams to safety. I'll contain Anchor Three and meet you at secondary facility." He didn't mention that if the collapse went wrong, he'd be erased along with the anchor. No point worrying about probabilities.
"Understood," Weaver said finally. "Two minutes. Then we're gone whether you've finished or not."
The teams evacuated, supporting refugees who could barely walk, carrying those too traumatized to move. Bataar watched them leave on his monitors—forty-four people pulled from non-existence, stumbling through the ancient facility in shock and terror, saved from one nightmare and delivered into another.
He turned his attention to Anchor Three.
The quantum entanglement was trapped in impossible configuration—trying to connect to timeline that had been retroactively deleted. The math said it was impossible. The equipment didn't care about math. It just kept trying to connect to void, pouring energy into nothing, destabilizing reality in the process.
Bataar's hands moved across the controls. He needed to collapse the entanglement without releasing all its contained energy at once. Gradual dissolution, quantum coherence dropping systematically, portal closing by degrees.
Except the anchor wasn't responding to gradual commands. It wanted to collapse catastrophically or not at all.
"One minute," Weaver's voice warned.
Bataar made a decision. If he couldn't collapse the anchor gradually, he'd use its own instability against it. Let it try to connect to the void, but redirect the feedback into the facility's atomic reactors. The reactors could absorb the energy—they'd been overbuilt by paranoid pre-corporate engineers who didn't trust specifications. It would probably damage them, maybe permanently, but it would prevent the anchor from taking the entire facility with it.
He reconfigured the power flow, connecting Anchor Three directly to Reactor Two. The reactor's containment systems screamed warnings—too much input, too fast, critical threshold approaching.
"Thirty seconds," Weaver said.
The anchor's quantum signature spiked. Bataar felt reality bend around him—temporal distortion making the chamber's geometry uncertain. For a moment he could see multiple versions of himself occupying the same space, probability ghosts showing every possible outcome of his actions.
In one version, he succeeded. Anchor collapsed cleanly, facility intact, Bataar survived.
In most versions, he failed. Anchor collapsed catastrophically, facility destroyed, Bataar erased.He couldn't tell which version was most probable.
"Fifteen seconds."
Bataar completed the power reroute. Anchor Three's energy began flowing into Reactor Two's containment. The reactor groaned under the load, its atomic structure stressing, but it held.
The anchor's quantum signature dropped rapidly. Portal to void collapsed, folding back into itself, reality healing the wound where timeline had been.
"Ten seconds."
Final adjustments. Quantum entanglement dissipating. Power flow stabilizing. The anchor was dying cleanly, its impossible connection to non-existence finally releasing.
"Five seconds."
Anchor Three went dark. Completely offline, its quantum signature zero, its connection to reality severed.
Bataar checked Reactor Two. Critical but stable. The facility would survive.
"Clear," he transmitted. "Anchor Three is—"Reality bent.For a moment, Bataar experienced something impossible. The quantum entanglement hadn't fully collapsed—there was still thread of connection to the void where epsilon-9 had been. And through that thread, he felt the timeline's death.
Three hundred thousand people ceasing to exist simultaneously. Not death—cessation. Consciousness dissolving, memories unrealized, futures retroactively prevented. He felt them all for single eternal instant—every life, every thought, every moment that had existed in epsilon-9 and was now nothing.
He felt his parents' deaths the same way. His friends. His neighbors. Seventy million people from his timeline, erased, their non-existence flooding through the quantum connection like scream made of mathematics.
Then the connection collapsed completely, and Bataar was back in the chamber, alone, gasping, his body trembling with quantum decoherence.
His hands were translucent. He could see through them to the controls beneath.
Eight to ten months, Sarangerel had said. Before he started phasing.The exposure to Anchor Three's collapse had accelerated his degradation.
He had weeks now. Maybe less.
Bataar stood on uncertain legs and made his way toward the exit.
Behind him, the ancient facility's atomic reactors hummed with the stolen energy of failed timeline, powering nothing, containing nothing, just absorbing the residue of corporate genocide and turning it into heat that would eventually dissipate into bedrock.
The secondary facility in Sublevel 11 was chaos of medical emergency and existential trauma.
Forty-four refugees from epsilon-9 occupied stabilization pods, their bodies flickering between solid and translucent as their quantum signatures struggled to maintain coherence in baseline reality. Dr. Sarangerel and her three allied underground doctors moved between pods with practiced desperation, administering gene therapy, adjusting biosignature fields, fighting to keep people solid.
Three pods held bodies that had already failed. Refugees who'd made it through extraction only to decohere completely once in baseline reality. Their forms were barely visible now, probability ghosts fading into quantum foam.
The extraction teams occupied corner of the facility, being treated for temporal exposure. Chen's loss had hit them hard—one of their own erased, pulled into void, ceased without ceremony or salvation.
Jakob sat apart from the others, his face buried in his hands. Bataar approached him.
"You extracted eleven people," Bataar said. "Eleven lives saved."
"I had to choose," Jakob said without looking up. "We could only extract twelve per team. So I chose. Grabbed the people closest to portal, the ones easiest to reach. There was woman—she was maybe thirty meters away, running toward us, screaming for help. I could have reached her. Could have pulled her through. But it would have taken extra seconds we didn't have. So I closed the portal and left her to be erased."
He finally looked up. His young face was aged by impossible choices.
"I'm twenty years old and I've committed murder. Not just her—everyone I didn't choose. Everyone outside extraction range. Three hundred thousand people, and I saved eleven. Eleven people who'll spend rest of their lives knowing I chose them over everyone else."
Bataar had no comfort to offer. Jakob was right. They'd all committed murder by triage, saving fragments while watching millions erase.
"I can still see them," Jakob continued. "The people in epsilon-9, in their final moment. They weren't panicking. They were just—confused. Looking at each other, looking at dying sky, trying to understand why reality was unmaking them. And then they were gone. Just gone. And I'm here. I get to keep existing because I was born in baseline timeline instead of branch timeline that threatened corporate profits."
"It's not your fault—"
"Yes it is. It's all our faults. We built this system. We maintain it. We profit from it, even those of us who think we're fighting it. The Anchors save dozens while corporations erase millions. We call it resistance but it's just—" He gestured helplessly. "It's just rearranging deck chairs on sinking ship. We're not changing anything. We're just making ourselves feel better about genocide."
Weaver approached before Bataar could respond. Her face was carved from exhaustion.
"Final count," she said. "Forty-one refugees stable enough for long-term treatment. Three confirmed decoherence deaths. Chen lost during extraction. Four team members injured from temporal exposure." She paused. "And epsilon-9 completely erased. Three hundred thousand people gone."
"Forty-one saved," Bataar said.
"Forty-one out of three hundred thousand. That's 0.0137% survival rate." Weaver's voice was hollow. "We committed temporal crime, broke every corporate law, lost Chen, and saved less than one hundredth of one percent of the timeline."
"Better than zero," Granite said, approaching from where Team One was being treated. His face showed burns from temporal exposure—red marks that looked like frostbite but were actually quantum instability damage. "Forty-one people who would otherwise be erased. That counts for something."
"Does it?" Jakob asked. "Does it really count when three hundred thousand were murdered?"
No one had answer to that.
Dr. Sarangerel approached, tablet in hand. "I need to show you something."
She pulled up medical data from one of the stabilization pods. The refugee inside was a young woman—maybe twenty-five, East Asian features, body flickering between solid and translucent.
"This is refugee seventeen. We're calling her Cascade because she doesn't remember her original name. She was mid-consciousness upload when timeline erasure began. Part of her is digital, part biological, and she can't maintain coherence in either state." Sarangerel enlarged the biosignature analysis. "She's trapped between existence and non-existence. I can keep her stable in the pod, but if we wake her, she'll decohere completely within hours."
"So she stays in the pod," Weaver said.
"Forever? We don't have resources for indefinite medical containment. The pod is life support, not solution. Eventually—days, weeks at most—her quantum signature will decay regardless of what we do. And then she'll join the three who already dissolved."
Bataar looked at the woman in the pod. They'd saved her from timeline erasure only to trap her in slower dissolution. She'd won a few extra days of existence that would be spent unconscious in medical pod, her consciousness flickering between digital and biological while quantum mechanics slowly murdered her.
It was worse than erasure. At least erasure was quick.
"Can we upload her consciousness completely?" he asked. "Force full digitization, give her existence as digital entity?"
"Maybe. But the upload would corrupt her identity—she's too unstable, too caught between states. We'd be creating new person from fragments of her consciousness. Is that saving her or erasing her and replacing her with copy?"
The old philosophical question. If you upload someone's consciousness but change it in the process, did they survive or did you kill them and create convincing simulation?
"What do you recommend?" Weaver asked.Sarangerel was quiet for moment. Then: "Let her die. Keep her comfortable in the pod, wait for natural decoherence, and spare her the horror of waking up trapped between existence and void. It's the kindest option."
"We pulled her from dying timeline specifically to save her," Jakob said. "And now you're saying we should let her die anyway?"
"I'm saying we can't save her. We can only choose how she stops existing." Sarangerel looked at the pod. "This is the reality of timeline extraction. We save who we can, but sometimes 'saved' just means 'dies slower.'"
The group stood in silence, watching the woman flicker in her pod. Cascade, they'd named her. A woman who'd lived in timeline that valued cooperation over profit, who'd probably had family, friends, dreams, all erased. They'd pulled her from non-existence for a few extra days of existence that she wouldn't even experience consciously.
This was their victory. Their resistance. Their moral stand against corporate genocide.
Forty-one people saved.
Three dissolved.
One dying slowly.
One team member erased.
Three hundred thousand murdered.
And somewhere in Prosperity Heights' corporate towers, Kayla Skovgaard was filing paperwork documenting successful timeline pruning of epsilon-9, classified as ideological contamination requiring preventative erasure.
Legal. Profitable. Necessary.
"I need to report to the other Anchors," Weaver said finally. "They'll want to know the operation's outcome."
"What will you tell them?" Bataar asked.
"The truth. We saved forty-one people. Lost everything else. And we'll do it again next time because the alternative is accepting genocide as normal."
She walked away toward the communications station.
Jakob remained staring at Cascade's pod. "How many times can we do this? How many operations where we save dozens and lose millions? How long before we run out of volunteers willing to die for statistical insignificance?"
Bataar had no answer. He looked at his own hands—still translucent, quantum decoherence making his edges uncertain. Weeks, maybe, before he started phasing completely. Before he joined Chen and the three dissolved refugees in the category of people who'd tried to fight corporate power and lost.
Dr. Sarangerel approached him with scanner. "Your decoherence accelerated from the temporal exposure. You're degrading faster than projected."
"How long?"
"Three weeks. Maybe four. Then you'll start phasing. After that—" She shook her head. "After that, you'll exist in quantum superposition. Partially here, partially nowhere. Your consciousness will persist but your body will become probabilistic. You'll be ghost in most literal sense."
"Can you stabilize me?"
"Not anymore. You needed the gene therapy weeks ago. Now you've passed threshold—your quantum signature is too degraded to anchor. I'm sorry, Bataar. You saved forty-one people today. But you can't save yourself."
Three to four weeks of existence remaining.
Bataar thought about that. About the timeline he'd lost. About the equipment he'd built. About the impossible operation that had saved less than one hundredth of one percent of a murdered timeline.
"Then I have three to four weeks to help with next extraction," he said.
Sarangerel studied him. "You're going to die doing this."
"I'm going to die anyway. Might as well die fighting."
She nodded slowly. "That's what all the Anchors say. Right before they get erased."