The quantum projection of the Nobel Prize award ceremony hovered beneath the laboratory dome, my holographic image delivering a speech in Stockholm. Veronica leaned against the coffee machine, the lightning-shaped scar on her nape glowing faintly with fluorescent blue light—whenever there was a disturbance in the timeline, this scar would seep recursive code imbued with Father's essence.
"...The mystery of quantum entanglement lies in our inability to observe it alone..." The speech suddenly stuttered, and the dome projection erupted into eerie snow-like static. I turned to the data panel and noticed my lips moving two extra frames in the hologram—a sign that the time anchor was loosening.
Veronica suddenly smashed the coffee cup, the brown liquid coalescing into a Möbius strip on the floor. Her mechanical limb plunged into the lab's main console, forcibly terminating the live broadcast of the award ceremony: "The cake box at the bottom of the sea has started fermenting."
The surveillance footage switched to the base of Pier 722, where the previously dormant cake box was now oozing nacreous mucus. On the seabed covered by the viscous liquid, a mycelium-like substance was growing in defiance of fluid mechanics, forming the outline of a massive mechanical clock. When the minute hand swept past the Roman numeral VII, the electronic clock in our lab suddenly rewound by seven minutes.
"It's Father's mold clock," I pulled up the sonar map of the seabed, "each mycelial node is a miniature time amber."
The scar on Veronica's nape suddenly burst open, fluorescent blue code crawling up her spine like vines. She gritted her teeth, severed the pain receptors in her mechanical limb, and thrust the bloodied interface into the main control system: "Use my recursive contamination to trace back..."
The lab plunged into absolute darkness, the only light coming from the green glow of the coffee machine's display. When the emergency lights flickered on, all the equipment surfaces were overrun with fungal filaments from the mold clock, and the lab rats in their containment pods were writing recursive equations with their tails.
"He's rewriting the fundamental units of time," I tore at the fungal threads on the wall, the mucus crystallizing into tiny clocks in my palm, "every tick-tock is..."
An explosion erupted from the seabed, the shockwave tilting the lab by fifteen degrees. In the surveillance footage, the minute hand of the mold clock had reached XII, and the entire seabed swelled into a colossal dial. As the cake box dissolved completely, a small figure in a diving suit emerged from the fungal tangle—my six-year-old self again, this time wearing a pocket watch modified from a Nobel medal.
"Daddy says it's time for a new game," the boy's voice carried through the water medium, "this time it's hide-and-seek with clocks."
Veronica suddenly began coughing violently, her spattered blood forming a countdown in midair. When the droplets fell, the fungal filaments in the lab suddenly activated, wrapping around her mechanical limb and hoisting her to the ceiling. I drew my laser cutter, but the filaments absorbed its energy to grow faster.
"Forget about me!" she struggled in the air, "go to the bottom of the sea and destroy the central axis of the clock face!"
The submarine's autopilot system had already been overtaken by the fungal filaments, forcing me to manually pilot a deep-sea submersible from twenty years ago. As the hatch sealed shut, the Nobel acceptance speech suddenly replayed in my earpiece: "...the observer themselves... are the greatest variable..."
The sight underwater was suffocating. The second hand of the mold clock stretched three hundred meters long, each swing triggering localized time loops. I saw schools of mechanical jellyfish gliding across the clock face, each containing a version of Veronica from a different timeline. As the submersible grazed past the VI mark, a soggy cake box suddenly appeared inside the cabin—the very one Father had carried during the Normandy landings.
The cake box popped open automatically, revealing Mother's relic floating in moldy frosting: the obstetric forceps she had used to cut the umbilical cord. When my fingers touched the rust, the submersible was suddenly sucked into a time amber, frozen at a specific moment of the 1943 Normandy invasion.
Father, dressed in military uniform, was smoking a cigar on deck, his pocket watch chain strung together from seven hundred twenty wedding rings. When he noticed the submersible, the cigar smoke rings suddenly quantumized, piercing the hull and wrapping around my neck.
"You've inherited her stupidity," Father tapped the glass of his pocket watch, which imprisoned an infant version of me, "to think love could stand against mathematics."
The forceps suddenly grew hot, Mother's DNA activating a hidden program within the relic. The submersible's dashboard burst into 1943 radio waves, disrupting Father's temporal anchor. As his military uniform began to fade, I seized the chance to plunge the forceps into the chain of wedding rings.
Seven hundred twenty rings shattered simultaneously, and the infant's cry transformed into a shockwave that shattered the time amber. The submersible plummeted back to the real seabed just as the minute and hour hands of the mold clock overlapped, the center of the dial opening a massive mechanical eye.
"The submersible is the bomb!" Veronica's voice suddenly crackled over the communicator, laced with metallic friction, "Stuff the ring I gave you into the propulsion system!"
I removed the ring I'd always worn, the blue diamond inside pulsing with her recursive code. The instant the ring locked into the fuel chamber, the submersible transformed into a quantum bomb capable of crossing time. Just before the countdown hit zero, I saw Veronica's face flash between the gears of the mold clock—she was being assimilated into the pendulum.
The blinding light of the explosion consumed the seabed, the minute hand of the mold clock pointing to VIII just before melting down. When consciousness returned from the quantum oscillation, I found myself slumped over the podium of the award ceremony, my trembling voice trailing off in the microphone: "...the observer... must remain conscious..."
Amidst thunderous applause, I saw Veronica sitting in the front row, her mechanical limb gleaming as if new. But when the camera panned over her, the lightning scar on her nape twitched, and fungal tendrils crept out from beneath her collar.
The champagne tower at the victory banquet suddenly quantumized, each glass reflecting a different disaster scene. Pretending to be drunk, I leaned close to Veronica and whispered in her ear: "When did you first become parasitized?"
Her pupils split into mechanical eyes: "From the moment you altered the birthday cake."
The banquet hall plunged into darkness, fungal filaments erupting from every orifice of the guests. Veronica's mechanical limb locked around my throat, pressing my forehead against the champagne tower. In the mirrored surface of the liquid, I saw the real her trapped in the heart of the underwater clock, while the "Veronica" before me bore the inscription VK-722 on her nape.
"Father evolved," the clone licked the blood from my forehead, "now we're symbiotic recursive equations..."
I bit through her necklace, and the quantum code inside the blue diamond suddenly activated. As the code pierced her mechanical interface, the fungal filaments throughout the banquet hall collectively spasmed. Seizing the fleeting gap, I shattered the floor-to-ceiling window and leapt into the bay.
In the icy seawater, the wreckage of the mold clock still pulsed. Among the rusted gears, I found Veronica—half her body fused with the bronze pendulum, her eyes transformed into ticking dials.
"Kill me..." her voice mingled with the grinding of gears, "use the forceps to sever..."
I raised Mother's relic, only to find the forceps had long since been welded to the wreckage of the submersible. At that moment, the fungal filaments on the seabed suddenly formed Father's shadow, a key made from all timelines clutched in his hand.
"Farewell, observer." The key inserted into Veronica's back, "Now she's my pendulum..."
As the pendulum began to swing, the flow of time in the entire bay descended into chaos. I watched helplessly as my own hand alternated between the tender flesh of an infant and bare bones. In the final fragments of time, Veronica transmitted a message in Morse code through her gear-like pupils: "Love is the only non-recursive function..."
Suddenly, the forceps were swept up by the ocean current, striking precisely into the lock of the winding key. Father's face froze in astonishment as Veronica used her last ounce of energy to push me out of the temporal vortex. When I awoke on the laboratory floor, the digital clock on the wall displayed the time before the explosion, and my palm clenched half a piece of moldy cake.
The coffee machine suddenly spat out a note, its ink carrying the briny scent of the sea: "Find me on the seven hundred twenty-first heartbeat."