My consciousness drifted between servers, like a wisp of smoke trapped within circuits.
The main control AI's voice sounded again, this time laced with faint electrical static: "Warning. Quantum state stability has dropped to 59%. Memory fragment reassembly failed. Storage node 14 is damaged."
The laboratory's surveillance system should have been my eyes, but now they were all blind. All footage after 23:47:08 was lost, leaving only static snow and intermittent audio.
I forced myself to trace back through earlier records.
23:30:00
The surveillance showed me standing in front of the main console, fingers dancing over a holographic keyboard. Veronica was three feet behind me, her projection blurry, as if the signal was being disrupted.
Strangely, her shadow lagged by 0.3 seconds under the light.
23:42:17
I approached the isolation chamber, and Veronica handed me a cup of coffee. The surveillance clearly captured me taking a sip, but when I zoomed in on the footage, I noticed the liquid in the cup took on an unnatural metallic sheen the moment it touched my lips.
23:46:55
This was the last clear image. I pressed the initiation key for consciousness upload, and Veronica suddenly leaned in, her lips brushing my earlobe. The surveillance audio picked up her whisper: "Remember level eighteen underground."
Then the footage cut out.
I attempted to access the lab's backup systems, only to find that all data related to level eighteen underground was encrypted, requiring biometric identification. And my corpse was currently lying in the morgue's freezer.
Suddenly, the surveillance system rebooted automatically.
A new image emerged from the static snow—a scene from 04:23:11 this morning, showing Veronica returning to the lab. She had changed clothes, but the blue diamond necklace still hung around her neck.
She walked to the main console and inserted a black data chip. A red warning flashed across the screen:
"VK series clone neural synchronization rate has exceeded critical threshold. Immediate destruction recommended."
Veronica's finger hovered over the confirmation key, then she suddenly turned to look directly at the surveillance camera.
Her eyes glowed with an eerie blue light in the darkness.
"Elias," she said to the empty lab, "if you're watching, remember where we first met."
The image vanished again.
My quantum processor overloaded from the information, and the edges of my consciousness began to degrade. Our first meeting? It was at a university New Year's party—she wore a deep blue dress and smiled at me beside the champagne tower.
But when I tried to retrieve that memory, severe digital noise distorted the image. The champagne tower morphed into the lab's quantum computer, and her dress became a white lab coat.
The memory had been tampered with.
The main control AI suddenly emitted a piercing alarm: "External intrusion detected!"
All screens in the lab lit up simultaneously, displaying a surveillance recording I'd never seen before—
The elevator doors on level eighteen underground opened, and Veronica stepped inside. Amid flickering lights, at least seven identical figures stood at the end of the corridor, all wearing the same lab coats and the same blue diamond necklaces.
The footage ended with a freeze frame on a mirror. In the reflection, Veronica raised a wrench, while in reality, her hands were empty.
Then all systems shut down at once, and my consciousness was hurled into a dark quantum void.
In the final second before complete disconnection, I caught a faint signal emanating from the undersea cable relay station in San Francisco Bay.
The signal contained only three letters:
VK-7