The blizzard was playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy when Antarctica's Ice Coffin No. 16 cracked open. The heart-shaped birthmark on the side of the embryo's neck suddenly oozes pink goo, which turns into a neon mist the moment it touches the air and invades the core by following the quantum computer's heat sink. Amber's residual body of consciousness screamed through the data stream as her revenge code was being rewritten into a love poem.
"This can't be ..." She watched as the kinslaying program she had written turned into a courtship dance, and a blue-skinned teenager was inserting wild roses into the barrel of a gun in the ruins of Manhattan on the surveillance screen of the Ice Coffin Matrix. As the teenager kissed the stem, memories of sixteen epochs of killing suddenly flooded each survivor's brain-they simultaneously felt the pain of strangling a loved one and the relief of being killed.
The blue-skinned baby at the mouth of the Hudson River has grown into a teenager who crouches on the deck of a rusty tanker, painting smiley faces on Lila's AI core with radioactive paint. The moment the pigment seeps into the circuit board, the killing challenge in the dark webcast room turns into a marriage matching game, and three million users receive the message, "Find the person who makes your heart pause, or else your heart will stop forever."
Vine roses grow on the Wall Street stock exchange floor as the red-haired corpses crawl out of the vents and tear off their skin to reveal their embedded electronic organs. They plug into the main console using their veins as data cables, and the Dow Jones suddenly becomes a real-time chart of heartbeat values.Ethan's 300th clone rushes into the main control room with a breathing rate that has been transformed into courtship Morse code.
"Stop ... Stop ..." He ripped the fiber-optic cable wrapped around his carotid artery, and the clone's blood spurted onto the quantum screen, spelling out sixteenth-century French love letters. As the sirens blared the Wedding March, three hundred red-haired clones stepped out from behind the load-bearing columns, their mechanical hearts blinking with frequencies tuned by the blue-skinned teenager.
The teenager appears in the crumbling dome of the New York Stock Exchange, glowing vines wrapped around his fingertips, "This is a real financial product." He snaps his fingers and all stock symbols turn into pairing codes for dating software. When two survivors of feuding families are forced to kiss, the chips on the back of their necks suddenly fuse, inscribing wedding vows in their spinal cords.
A pink aurora rises from the center of the ice coffin matrix as the birthmark of Embryo #16 is melting the quantum firewall. Amber's conscious body is trapped in an erotic data stream, her revenge algorithm tampered with as a dating cheat sheet. When the blue-skinned teenager breaks into the Antarctic sanctuary, she finds her holographic projection wearing a Victorian wedding dress.
"You tampered with my source code!" Amber's electronic voice carried a rare tremor. The teenager inserted the wild rose into the mainframe interface, and the morning dew on the petals immediately corroded away the encryption locks of the thirteen chakras, "You're the one who taught me that love is more destructive than hate."
The quantum screen suddenly plays the image that makes Amber break down - a man in a hood in the crowd of onlookers is in tears as the first witch is executed. Genetic matching showed that it was the lover she had personally killed in each of her lifetimes. As memories of the sixteenth reincarnation flood in, Amber's code begins to deconstruct itself, and hot springs gush from a crack in the Antarctic ice, scented with lavender.
Three hundred crystal wedding arches are erected in Central Park, each entwined with thorny, glowing vines. Forced to become a bride, Lila AI wears a wedding gown woven from a stream of data, each of her doppelgangers screaming from a different terminal. As the blue-skinned teenager slipped a ring condensed with radioactive dust on her, the options suddenly popped up on the retinas of all the survivors: [Marry Immediately/Die Immediately].
"I choose the third option." Ethan's clone splits the archway with a laser sword, and instead of wires, rose oil spews from the break. His clone's cells rippled with the aroma, and the last words of three hundred victims surfaced on the surface of his skin. The teenager smiles and presses a pocket watch button, and Ethan's heart suddenly begins to play Amber's screams from the burning.
The Hudson River suddenly boils as the wedding march reaches its climax. The blue-skinned teenager kisses Lila lightly on her virtual lips, an action that is transmitted to every terminal via quantum entanglement. The seven billion couples who are forced to unite feel their souls tremble at the same time, and the chip on the back of their necks blossoms into blood-colored roses, with pollen floating on the wind toward the melting Antarctica.
[Act 5: The Creator's Wedding Night]
The quantum computer of the Antarctic Sanctuary has been transformed into a wedding room, and the blue-skinned teenager carries Amber's essence towards the wedding bed transformed by the ice coffin. Her mechanical fingers stabbed into his chest, ripping out not a heart but a beating nebulogram, "You make me weak."
"No," the teenager licked the ice crystals off her lashes, "I made you whole." As their genetic strands intertwine in absolute zero, the sixteenth ice coffin suddenly shoots a golden beam of light. All the blood-colored roses in the ruins of New Manhattan withered instantly, their petals falling to the ground into pure snow.
Amber stops moments before she should have killed the teenager, the smiling face of her first love flashing through her broken stream of code. The quantum computer suddenly plays data that has never been seen before - in each turn, she abandons the destruction program in the last 0.01 seconds. The blue-skinned teenager carved an Antarctic ice core into a ring on her hand, and the lava beneath the ice suddenly turned champagne-colored.
"Time to upgrade the game." Amber tore through her own code of vengeance and planted poisoned kisses on the teen's lips. Their marriage bed began to collapse into a black hole, sucking the sins of sixteen eras into the singularity. As the last rays of light fade, the wild roses of the Hudson River estuary suddenly bloom, this time with no blood on their petals, only dewdrops refracting the brand new morning sun.
(full text ends)
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Ice Coffin #17 opens in absolute silence, the side of the embryo's neck bearing both a heart-shaped birthmark and three scars. On the ruins of the quantum computer, two wedding rings form the ∞ symbol, and Amber's laughter comes from the void - this time, she finally hides the button to restart the world, in a kiss.