The neon of Cyberyuan Ruins is a reproductive disease. As Alex Carter crawled out of the sewer, artificial rain was staining the sky a mercury-tinged blue-green. Acid rain had eroded the honeycomb holes in his suit, revealing the webs of memory of the Eternal Night City in its lining - silvery threads slowly eating the polyester, like some kind of otherworldly mold. The countdown on the retina is stuck at 65:14:33, and the synaptic villi proliferate at the edge of the number, which vibrates with the pulse every time you blink.
The hologram on the street corner suddenly contorted into Elena's face. Her left eye is replaced with Cthulhu's pupil shaped quantum processor, and the iris lines perfectly match the family emblem on the handle of the samurai sword at the Tokyo Museum. "Dear Debtors," mechanosynthetic laughter sends rats in drain pipes into a collective seizure, "you're 23 seconds late, long enough for me to paralyze three power stations in Nevada." She reached out with her tongue covered data-interface prostheses and licked Alex's silhouetted silhouette on the screen, instantly turning the licked pixels into black slime.
Alex's symbiote was twitching beneath the skin. Since the Night City's cognitive stabilizer took effect, this living tissue in the right wrist has learned to mimicry. Now it mimics Elena's mechanical tentacles, with tiny chainsaws popping out at the end to cut through the sewer fence. A bluish lymph fluid oozes from the break in the iron bars, and the ground suddenly spits out nerve fibre-like mycelium, a network of mycelium that Outlines the longitude and latitude coordinates of old White's pawnshop.
"Welcome to the paradise of human-machine symbiosis."
The real Elena emerges from the shadows of the alley, her spine armor ejecting six data cables into the abandoned brain-computer interface tramp on the side of the road. The man's temples immediately swell with embryonal Cthulhu-like lumps, and his electronic eyes play footage of Alex at the Eternal Night City auction -- countless "self-mirrors" in the audience digging each other's eyeballs out with archaeological brushes.
Alex took half a step back, the heel of his shoe sinking into some kind of gelatinous substance. I looked down to see the asphalt glowing with gray matter, and my reflection was being tangled by cyberpunk mechanical tentacles. To make matters worse, the symbiont between the reflection's arms is even larger than his own, and the raised Egyptian scrolls on the surface are oozing blood.
"Relax. It's cognitively synchronized foreplay." Elena shatters the homeless man's skull with an EMP gun, and the splatter of brain tissue condenses in the air into a miniature of the clock tower of Eternal Night City. "Did Lilith forget to tell you?" She suddenly unzipped the top of her high-necked battleship to reveal a brand of void implanted just below her collarbone - a triple spiral scar with a shard of Michiko's samurai sword. "We, the three bride candidates, share the same umbilical cord of time."
The automatic door of the convenience store burst open. As Alex is dragged into the store by mechanical palps, the energy drinks on the shelves are mutating: aluminum cans with Professor Black's face protrudes on the surface, and straws are automatically inserted into customers' carotid arteries to extract memory fluid. Behind the reinforced glass of a freezer, hundreds of human brain specimens open quantum processor-engineered electronic eyes and sing in unison an altered version of "Ode to Joy."
"A greeting gift." Elena drove the nerve plug into Alex's occipital bone. A flood of data flashed through the pain: artifacts he had stolen in different timelines were displayed in the Temple of the Void, the bronzes had Lilith's red hair growing on them, and Michiko's knife marks crawled through ceramic cracks. The oldest Assyrian ring is suspended in the middle of the temple, its face projecting a hologram of Elena being pierced through her heart by a mechanical tentacle.
The neon lights of the skyscrapers suddenly convulsed. When Alex was dragged to the top floor, 300 brain-computer interface bodies were suspended in electromagnetic shackles. Their Cthulhu pupils zoom in sync, and their electronic vocal cords pronounce in binary code: "The defendant, Alex Carter, is guilty of transtemporal memory theft, void bigamy, and causal pollution."
The mechanical prosthesis of the judge's corpse suddenly reactivated, and the palm popped out of the nerve stabbing knife - a high-frequency particle knife embodied by malicious code. Alex's memory palace begins to crumble as the first cut makes its way into his frontal lobe: a dinosaur tooth specimen from his childhood bedroom bites into a crack in the void, dragging out Professor Black's 1987 autopsy report. On the yellowed paper, the anatomy automatically updates to the latest version: the split tentacular end of Blake's spine, connected to Elena's brain-computer interface.
"I got you."
Alex's symbiote suddenly reverse-invaded the execution site network. Black slime mimics Lilith's spider legs in the data stream, stringing 300 corpses into memory beads. When Elena tries to sever the connection, she finds her quantum processor being dragged into the void chasm - on the other side of which is the bloody moon of the Eternal Night City, and Lilith is flicking the clock tower gears with her spider's leg, the gears' clatter resonating with Michiko's knife to the destruction frequency.
The sky at Cyberfuchi Ruins cracks a Tokyo street scene. The samurai sword Michiko is dancing the sacrificial dance in the museum display case, and the path of the blade oozes the Egyptian holy book. Alex's symbiote suddenly evolved neural interfaces, and when he touched the ground, old White's ribbed wind chimes emerged from the asphalt pavement, playing a melody that short-circuited the city's neon lights into epileptic waves.
Elena's kiss smelled of burnt voltage overload. As she pushes Alex toward the entrance of the sewer, the data stream between her lips contains the deadly truth: "The time flow rate of the Eternal Night City is a hoax, your countdown is actually accelerating..."
In his final moments before plunging into darkness, Alex saw his symbiotes spawning in the Cyberdeep Ruins database. The surface of the slime ootheca emerges from a portrait of Lilith in nineteenth-century London with the Assyrian king's ring that is now on Michiko's ancestral finger bone.
As the sewage flooded the nasal cavity, the knifing of Tokyo mated with the bells of Nagayoshi City deep in the cochlea, giving birth to a new countdown: 64:59:59. The number no longer flickers, but takes root like a parasitic embryo in the center of the optic nerve, spitting out Miyoko's hair and Elena's mechanical screws with her heartbeat.
The sewerage system in the ruins of Seboyuan is the digestive tract of a creature. Alex Carter bobs in putrid sewage, slimy currents wrapped around the remains of nerve plugs, like plankton in the electronic age. His symbiotes evolved fish-like structures that filtered out not oxygen, but fragments of information leaked from Elina's data kiss - the time flow deception of the Eternal Night City, the Assyrian king's ring in Lilith's mechanical heart, the same brand on Michiko's ancestral finger bone - fragments of memory that stuck to the cerebral cortex like leeches.
The water suddenly recedes, revealing a nerve tattoo on the wall of the pipe. The patterns, made of luminous mycelium, show the ritual process of the Temple of the Void: Lilith's red hair is woven into a cage, Elena's mechanical tentacles extract memory silver coins, Michiko's samurai sword slices open the time and space membrane. On the Assyrian ring in the center of the altar, Alex's alienated heart is suspended.
"Your medical report is very interesting."
Elena's voice came over the drain, with the murmur of an overloaded substation. Alex looked up and saw her hanging upside down from the wall of the tube, the data wires of the spinal armor inserted into the nerve tattoo, rewriting the lines into the floor plan of the Tokyo Museum. Cthulhu embryos in the hippocampus, liver cells stained with bronze rust, and best of all..." She yanked open Alex's shirt and ran her fingers across the metallized ribs. "These neural interfaces in Cyberyuan are exactly the same ones I designed in my twenty-two-century Singapore lab."
Alex's symbiote explodes, and the slime tentacles Pierce Elena's quantum processor. The moment the data flood was reversed, he saw the bottom of the Singapore Bay in 2215 - Elena's robotic brain flickering among the coral reefs, with Lilith's web and Michiko's knife marks growing in the brain's channels. And even deeper, the bronze gears of the clock tower of Eternal Night, each tooth mark engraved with Professor Black's autopsy number.
"This is your future legacy." Elena's mechanical pupil splits open, revealing tiny void cracks, "Each bride candidate is a monster of your making in a different timeline."
A light burst up at the end of the pipe. As Alex stumbles into the abandoned data center, hundreds of coolers are opening automatically. Brain specimens soaked in formalin open their quantum eyes and chant with synthetic vocal cords: "Welcome to the nerve execution field, Bridegroom of the Void."
The courtroom is made up of brain-computer interface corpses. When Elina activates the electromagnetic yoke, the mechanical prosthetic eyes of the corpses simultaneously project three images: Lilith in Nagayama City is tearing the web of memories under the blood moon, Michiko in Tokyo is cutting the void membrane with a samurai sword, and the neon of Cyberfuchi is reorganizing into a countdown number - 64:59:59.
"Court is now in session." 300 dead bodies ringing with brain waves, "Alex Carter intertemporal bigamy trial."
The prosecution's evidence is a holographic record of the theft of antiquities: Babylonian clay tablets in the British Museum oozing Lilith's hair, the Cappado scarab amulet flapping its wings to cut the warp of time and space, the Assyrian king's ring in Syria being endlessly copied in the void. Each piece connects Michiko's knife marks with Elena's mechanical lines.
"Overruled." Elena's mechanical tentacles shredded the defense table, "directly performing the neural marriage ceremony."
The torture device is a modified brain-computer interface. When the electrodes penetrated Alex's occipital bone, his symbiont suddenly resonated with the entire Cyberdeep Valley power grid. Lilith of the Eternal Night City whispers through her nerve tattoo: "Kiss her and pour the time toxin back in."
Alex pulls Elena's neck ring and reverses the data stream collision. Their minds intertwine in the cracks of the void, seeing Lilith in the 19th century replacing artifacts in the Museum of London, the Heian ancestor Michiko sealing a Cthulhu baby with a katana, and the 22th-century Elina sinking a mechanical brain into the Bay of Singapore. All timelines meet on the face of the Assyrian king's ring, forming a causal chain of Mobius rings.
"The marriage is established." The corpse of the trial seat was reconstituted in the image of the old White, "The betrothal gift has been delivered to Tokyo."
In the sudden turbulence of time and space, Alex falls into the dry landscape courtyard of the ancient house in Kyoto. Michiko is facing off against her katana grandfather in the moonlight, and sparks from the blade collision splash into his pupils, burning a new countdown: 63:33:33. The number is no longer fluid, but constant like a katana thrust into the heart.
"You have the fishy stench of emptiness." Michiko's hair was loose, her bronze coffin chains tangled in her white hair, "but in her eyes were Lilith's webs of memory, and Elena's mechanical lines." Her katana plunges into Alex's shoulder, revealing a triple helix symbiont genetic map. "Looks like we're destined to kill each other until the debt of time is paid."
The dry landscape suddenly boiled into the ocean of memory silver coins. Alex's symbiote mimics Elena's mechanical tentacles, entangling Michiko's knife handle. When the blade is three millimeters away from the throat, the blood moon of Nagayoshi suddenly opens its vertical eyes over Kyoto, and Lilith's spider legs penetrate the curtain of time and space: "Time to collect interest, Miss Samurai."
Michiko's counterattack severs three spider legs, which fall to earth as replicas of the Assyrian king's ring. Alex breaks free and finds his blood on the ground drawing a neural map of the Cyberyuan Ruins - every street is Elena's mechanical lines, every intersection is suspended with Lilith's memory spider eggs.
"The triple helix of deception." Michiko cuts open the cracks in the void to reveal the bronze coffins and quantum processors that are fusing inside. "We are nothing but figurines for the void to entertain itself." The pupils of her knife handle burst into tears, and blood dripped out of the bullet-proof glass display case of the Tokyo Museum.
When Alex's hand touches the display case, the entire Kyoto old house begins to decompose. Michiko's figure fades into the pixel storm, and her final advice is shredded by the neon noise of Cyberfuyuan Ruins: "Beware of Lilith's mechanical heart... Where the original sin of all timelines is hidden..."
The moment he fell back into the ruins, Alex's symbiote finally evolved - Lilith's beauty mark, Elena's circuit tattoo, and Michiko's knife mark emerged from the surface of the slime. The countdown on the retina starts to backflow, and between the numbers oozes a darkly humorous truth: the so-called 72 hours are just the length of the wedding march of the brides of the void.
At this moment, the bells of Eternal Night City, Seboyuan Ruins and Tokyo are tolling at the same time, and the bronze coffin is raised below the horizon of the three worlds, with the inverse cross symbol on the lid as bright as the eye of Cthulhu.