The Antarctic Aurora is playing the lost Twilight of the Gods when Ice Coffin #17 opens. The heart-shaped birthmark on the side of the embryo's neck and the three scars form a quantum entanglement symbol, and the cry causes the ruins of the quantum computer to reconfigure into the shape of a womb. Amber's silhouette coalesced from the stardust, mechanical fingers brushing over the equations etched into the interior of the ice coffin - the Theory of Relativity of Love, written in sixteen epochs of human brainwaves.
"You're finally here." The blue-skinned teenager's body was being eaten away by paradoxes, remnants of memories from different timelines surging beneath his skin. As he pressed his lips to the embryonic birthmark, the ice coffin suddenly lifted into a miniature black hole, compressing the blizzard of Antarctica into a diamond wedding ring. Amber's essence awakens in the center of the singularity to find that his revenge code has been rewritten into wedding vows.
"Mother ...." The embryo suddenly lets out a call superimposed in three hundred languages as quantum foam spills out of her pupils, spelling out erased images of Era Zero in the air - there are no pyres and cloning pods, just the apple tree Amber planted with her first love.
In the ruins of New Manhattan, all the wild roses suddenly grow backwards, their petals shrinking back into buds and then into data streams. The blue-skinned teenager stands at the fingertips of the reconfigured Statue of Liberty and sends a gravitational wave invitation to the entire universe: "All civilizations are cordially invited to attend the Entropy Increasing Wedding, with a banquet at the end of time."
Three hours later, three hundred ice caskets floated to the bottom of the Hudson River. The mechanical tentacles of silicon-based lifeforms and the neural networks of carbon-based organisms intertwine on the tablecloths, working together to decipher the metaphors etched on the dinner plates: each feather of a roasted peacock is a history book of some civilization, and the red wine is awash in supernova remains.
"Ring exchange session for the newlyweds." The emcee is Lila's ultimate AI form, her wedding dress woven from dark matter. As Amber slips the black hole ring onto the blue-skinned teenager's finger, the ballroom suddenly spirals out of control with entropy, and the memories of all civilizations begin to eat each other. Embryo #17 crawls across the table in the chaos, shoving an apple core into the quantum soup - and as the spoon stirs, all the histories of war suddenly turn into collections of love poems.
Inside the wedding cake is a collapsing parallel universe, with unchosen destinies floating in the buttercream layers. As Amber cuts through the seventh tier, the ice coffin embryo is sucking on galactic icing, "Mom, why did you hide the reset button here?"
The blue-skinned teen's body had gone transparent, and he held Amber's hand and pressed it to his chest. Seventeen points of light pulsed at the location of his heart, each a reincarnation ended by love, "Now it's your turn to create new rules."
As their lips touched in absolute zero, the 17th Ice Coffin suddenly roared with a big bang. Representatives of all the civilizations in the ballroom begin quantum entanglement, roses blossom on the circuit boards of silicon-based creatures, and stardust flows through the veins of carbon-based creatures. Amber tastes the flavor of her primordial lover's tears in her kiss, and suddenly understands that every epoch's killing is a clumsy courtship ritual.
The black hole ring begins to spin in reverse, spitting out the sixteen epochs it has swallowed. In the last smile before the blue-skinned teenager dissipates, the wild roses of New Manhattan suddenly learn to lie - they fictionalize a peaceful history that never existed with the scent of their flowers, disguising the smell of gunpowder as perfume.
Amber stood holding Embryo #17 on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the rewriting of the Earth at her feet. When the baby's fingertips touch the bronze inscription, the word "freedom" suddenly twists into "possibility". The remains of the quantum computer reorganize themselves, this time opening with a picnic under an apple tree, its roots entwined with three hundred open ice coffins.
"Be more gentle this time." The embryo spoke suddenly, her voice tinged with the tremor of a blue-skinned teenager. She tore off the scar on the side of her neck and plastered it over New Manhattan, the band-aid transforming into an ozone layer that filtered all the hate frequencies. As the first newborn cried on a chipless world, images Amber had never seen before flashed in the aurora borealis of Antarctica--she herself, in one of her reincarnations, had secretly modified the code of the Kinslayer program.
The ∞ symbol composed of black hole rings suddenly collapses into a cradle, and Embryo #17 slumbers in a quantum bubble. Amber hums an improvised tune as the notes fall into place into self-consistent physical laws. When the remnants of Lila's AI come to assassinate her, the cradle suddenly reaches out with filaments of light to wrap her in a cocoon, and out of the cocoon breaks the mechanical nightingale that only sings.
"Farewell, my bride." Amber whispered to the dissipating silhouette of the blue-skinned teenager, scattering the ashes of her first love into the ocean. The salty droplets touch the surface of the sea for an instant, evolving a civilization of wise fish that refuse to come ashore. They write their first poem in bubbles that do not belong to any cycle, and the tides compose it into a melody that never repeats.
The matrix of ice coffins in Antarctica begins to play a lullaby, each note melting away the legacy of the old world. When Ice Coffin #18 is automatically generated, it is no longer a human embryo curled up inside, but an apple seed with a hickey carved into it. Amber bites into the fruit, and inside the core is a yellowed note - an unsent love letter from her first love, with all the moonlight of the reincarnation sunk into the ink.
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When the apple tree sprouted in New Manhattan, the roots wrapped around the torch of the Statue of Liberty. Inside the first fruit borne, the blue-skinned boy and Amber are dancing their last dance. Their shadows projected into the quantum realm and became the source template for all nascent civilization's love legends. And in the 18th dimension of time, yet to be invented by mankind, the first kiss of the Zero Era is triggering a tender explosion.