The alarm sounded like a dull knife, slowly sawing through my consciousness.
Red light flickered within the data stream, each pulse accompanied by a sharp electronic noise, like the dying gasp of some failing system. I tried to open my eyes, but there was no optical signal feedback on my retinas—I no longer had eyes.
"System self-check complete. Welcome back, Dr. Elias."
The voice of the main control AI crackled like a radio disrupted by static, each syllable fracturing. My thoughts were reconstructing within the quantum matrix, simulated neural signals prickling a body that no longer existed.
"Current consciousness integrity at 62%. Remaining time for quantum entanglement state maintenance: 71 hours."
A holographic projection unfolded within my awareness—not as vision, but as direct data input. The laboratory's surveillance footage surfaced in my mind with suffocating clarity.
On the anti-static floor, my corpse lay supine, dark red liquid seeping from the metallic interface at my temple, snaking into the floor's crevices like a tiny serpent.
Veronica knelt beside it, a silver wrench slipping from her fingers and clattering to the ground with a dull thud.
Her breathing was rapid, chest heaving violently, tiny droplets of blood clinging to her lashes. I recognized the necklace—a blue diamond set in a platinum chain, which I had personally placed around her neck on the night of our engagement.
The timestamp on the surveillance footage froze at 23:47:08.
Memory retrieval triggered automatically, pulling my thoughts back seven minutes via the neural simulator.
Inside the isolation chamber, the oscilloscope's waveform danced wildly, the air thick with the scent of marzipan and the burnt odor of overloaded circuits. Veronica pushed the door open, her deep red lipstick gleaming under cold light like an open wound.
"Ten minutes left," she whispered, her fingers gliding over the console as she entered the final segment of the encryption key.
I nodded, lifting the coffee cup, traces of her lipstick still lingering on the rim.
"Don't worry," she smiled, her fingertips brushing my wrist. "When you wake up, everything will be different."
The memory abruptly fractured.
The quantum processor yanked my consciousness back, resuming the playback of the lab's surveillance footage.
Veronica stood, drops of blood from the wrench forming small circular stains on the floor. Her movements were slow, as though every step fought against some invisible resistance.
Then, she turned to face the glass of the biosafety cabinet.
In the reflection, a man stood in the surveillance camera's blind spot.
Dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, his stern profile sharp, fingers tapping lightly at his side—military-grade Morse code.
My quantum consciousness instantly decoded the signal:
Target eliminated.
The ventilation system roared to life, liquid nitrogen mist erupting from the ceiling, plunging the lab temperature into a sudden freeze. My consciousness was forcibly ejected, data streams leaping between servers like a ghost trapped in a labyrinth.
Amidst a 0.37-second fluctuation in the qubit array caused by the extreme cold, an encrypted log forcibly wrote itself into my memory cache:
"March 14, 2085, 23:52:17 – Primary consciousness migration successful. Backup clone VK-7 achieved critical neural synchronization…"
Outside the glass wall, the waters of San Francisco Bay boiled without warning.
Twelve lightning bolts struck simultaneously, blinding blue light tearing through the night sky, reducing the Golden Gate Bridge to a black silhouette against the glare.
Veronica raised her left hand, blood dripping from her fingertips onto the gene-lock identification panel.
System recognition confirmed.
Retinal match. Voiceprint verification complete.
She walked toward the elevator, pressing the button for the eighteenth sublevel.
And I, a consciousness without a body, could only watch helplessly as the elevator doors closed, swallowing her into darkness.