On their third day in Berlin, Ethan began to have nightmares.
Not ordinary nightmares—these were memories from the other world forcing their way into his mind. He dreamed of going to NYU in 1999, pulling all-nighters editing videos in his dorm room, crying his eyes out at his graduation ceremony, trembling with nervousness at his first photography exhibition.
When he woke up, his pillow was soaked with sweat. Glancing over at the bed opposite his, he saw that Mason was also lying awake, staring at the ceiling.
"You dreamed it too, didn't you?" Mason asked.
Ethan nodded. "I was writing code in Harborview, working the 996 grind, failing three blind dates in a row, spending my thirtieth birthday all alone."
"Those are my memories too," Mason said. "In my world, though, they're the possibilities that never came to pass."
They both realized the same terrifying truth at that moment: If the fusion continued, they wouldn't end up as "one person with two sets of memories"—they would become "a single person with fragmented, conflicting memories trapped in a state of mental fragmentation". Because the two sets of memories would constantly battle for dominance, each trying to prove that its version of events was the "real" one.
This wasn't a physical fusion—it was a war being waged on the battlefield of memory.
Worse still, this war was breaking out on a global scale. Social media was flooded with desperate posts from people experiencing "memory confusion": Someone would suddenly remember being married when they'd actually been single their entire life; another would recall dying in a car accident years ago; still others would remember being a completely different person living in a foreign country.
A report from the World Health Organization revealed that over 200 million people worldwide were now suffering from varying degrees of memory disorder symptoms.
"The fusion process is irreversible," Dr. Zhou announced the team's latest research findings during an emergency meeting. "Once two parallel universes come into contact, they will merge together like two black holes, eventually forming a single, larger entity. The only thing we can do is control how this fusion takes place."
"How?" someone asked.
"Select one timeline to serve as the 'prime timeline', and force all other timelines to align with it. This will require... an enormous consensus of consciousness."
"How can we achieve that?"
Dr. Zhou pulled up an interface on the screen. "The internet. There are still four billion internet users online worldwide. If we can get a sufficient number of people to focus their consciousness on the same version of history at the exact same moment, that version will gain 'reality weight' and become the dominant timeline after the fusion is complete."
The plan was code-named "Memory Vote".