Chen Mo's fingers still hovered over his phone screen. The news about President Kennedy was an ice pick driving into the core of his perception of reality.
"This is impossible… I remember…"
Lin Zhan gave a cold laugh and pulled up his own photo gallery. "Look at this."
The photo showed a young woman, Lin Yu, nestled in the arms of a handsome man. They were smiling at each other in front of a library.
"My sister and her fiancé, Zhou Ming. Taken three months ago," Lin Zhan's voice was terrifyingly calm. "Now, tell me what you see."
Chen Mo held his breath. In the photo, Zhou Ming's outline was slowly fading, as if being erased by an invisible hand. Within seconds, he was gone completely. Lin Yu was left standing alone, her posture shifting from an embrace to a natural stance, the smile on her face unchanged.
"He was… erased?"
"'Never existed'," Lin Zhan corrected, putting the phone away. A suppressed fury burned in his eyes. "Three days ago, Lin Yu called me, crying, to tell me Zhou Ming had died in a car crash. Yesterday, she asked me why I never date. This morning, she had no memory of the man she loved for five years."
A scream from down the street cut their conversation short. People were scattering like frightened birds, but this time, they were staring at their own hands in horror, as if seeing them for the first time.
Turning the corner, Chen Mo gasped.
The survivors of a car crash were undergoing a grotesque transformation. One man's arm was branching like a tree, each new twig sprouting a perfect set of fingers. A young woman's face was duplicating itself symmetrically, a second mouth slowly forming on her forehead. But the most horrifying was the bus driver—his upper body had become a perfect geometric pattern, his flesh and blood rendered with the cold, sterile beauty of a mathematical equation.
"The Mandelbrot set…" Chen Mo whispered. "They're turning into living fractals."
Even more disturbing was the look on their faces. It was the pure, unadulterated joy of a mathematician solving an impossible problem—a look of sublime satisfaction that was utterly chilling.
Lin Zhan moved like a line of pure force, each step landing on a node of stable reality. He burst forward, his combat knife a blur.
"Get the ones who aren't infected!" he yelled.
Only then did Chen Mo realize that the fractal flesh was contagious. A woman who had tried to help the driver already had a leg twisting into a perfect Fibonacci spiral.
Lin Zhan's fighting style was breathtaking—it was beyond human. He moved with the clean, efficient grace of a computer deleting corrupted files, severing extending flesh-tendrils to clear a path for the trapped survivors.
Five of them scrambled over to Chen Mo. One, an art student, grabbed his arm. "Doctor, my hand!"
Chen Mo looked down. A complex mathematical formula was spreading across the man's palm like an ink stain.
"Don't touch him!" Lin Zhan warned.
Too late. A strange numbness spread from Chen Mo's fingertips as the mathematical symbols began to crawl onto his own skin.
Lin Zhan raised his knife to sever Chen Mo's hand, but Chen Mo jumped back. "Wait! Three seconds!"
He quickly scribbled a line of script over the infection—the reality-stabilizing formula he had decoded from the 3iAtlas's signals.
As he completed the formula, a cool sensation spread from the ink, like ice water on boiling reality. The spread of the symbols halted, then slowly receded.
"It can only stop it, not reverse it," Lin Zhan said, his eyes thoughtful.
The art student stared in horror at his now-permanent fractal hand. "This is strange… I can *understand* these patterns now. This spiral is the ultimate expression of the golden ratio, this set of curves is a projection from the fourth dimension…"
"Did you study advanced mathematics before?" Chen Mo asked.
"I'm an art student. I failed calculus. But this knowledge… it feels like it was always there."
Police sirens wailed to a halt a hundred yards away. The officers stood frozen, helpless in the face of the supernatural scene.
"The authorities have lost control," Lin Zhan said with a grim smile. "Let's go."
He led them to the basement of an old apartment building—a well-equipped safe house.
"I started preparing this the first time I noticed reality shifting," Lin Zhan said, handing out water. "But I never expected it to escalate this fast."
The other survivors were still in shock: a middle-aged couple, worrying about their daughter; a high school girl in a school uniform, constantly cleaning her glasses; a young man, repeatedly checking a delivery app on his phone.
"The entire city's delivery map… it's turned into a fractal pattern," the delivery guy said, his hands shaking as he showed them his phone.
The schoolgirl tried to reason it out. "According to the law of conservation of energy, this kind of transformation would require a massive energy source, but…"
Her words were cut off by a sob. The middle-aged woman grabbed Chen Mo's arm. "My little girl was on another bus. Is she going to turn into a monster?"
Lin Zhan's silence was the only answer she needed.
A communications device beeped. On the screen, a live feed from the International Space Station showed a colossal Mandelbrot set forming on the Earth's surface, rotating slowly.
"It's not just us," Lin Zhan said, switching the feed. Different fractal patterns were appearing over major population centers across the globe.
The safe house fell silent.
Just then, a heavy thud came from the door.
The metal doorframe began to warp. A viscous, slime-like substance seeped through the cracks, self-organizing into complex geometric structures the moment it hit the floor.
"They've found us," Lin Zhan said, grabbing a pistol from a weapons locker and handing it to Chen Mo. "Aim for their geometric center. That's the source of the replication command."
"How do you know?"
"I wasn't just cutting them up out there, Doctor. I was collecting data."
The door burst inward. In the doorway stood what was once Old Zhang, the building's janitor. He was now a three-dimensional Sierpinski tetrahedron, countless human faces appearing, screaming, and vanishing on its triangular surfaces.
"Don't look at the core!" Lin Zhan yelled. "It will accelerate the assimilation!"
The warning came too late. The middle-aged couple stared, mesmerized, at the rotating geometry. Their eyeballs began to dissolve and reform into miniature Mandelbrot sets.
"Shoot! Hit the singularity at its center!" Lin Zhan fired, each shot striking a critical node.
Chen Mo pulled the trigger, the recoil jarring his arm. For the second shot, he closed his eyes and aimed for the center.
When he opened them, the bullet was just piercing the geometric core. The fractal entity let out an inhuman shriek, its structure flickering and collapsing.
Under their combined fire, the entity dissolved into a pile of ash, in which mathematical symbols glowed and then faded.
Chen Mo was breathing heavily. "I killed Old Zhang…"
"You liberated him," Lin Zhan said, examining the ash. "Remember that. Or you won't survive this."
The three remaining survivors—the art student, the schoolgirl, and the delivery guy—were speechless with terror.
Lin Zhan began packing gear. "This location is compromised. We have to move. Doctor, do you have somewhere to go?"
Chen Mo thought of the unfinished decoding program in his lab. "My laboratory… the answer might be there."
"To the lab it is, then. But the world outside might already be…"
A ringing phone cut him off. Chen Mo pulled out his own phone and froze.
The screen read:
**Incoming Call: Zhou Ming**
*Last call: 5 years ago*
Lin Zhan's pistol came up in a flash, then slowly lowered. But his eyes were as sharp as knives, and his words were laced with ice.
"Dr. Chen. In my sister's memory, he never existed. In my investigation, every trace of his existence has been wiped. Right now, your phone is the only thing in the world that still displays his name."
His finger rested lightly on the trigger.
"You have ten seconds to explain. Or I'll arrange a reunion."