After returning from the Nevada Test Site, the fusion symptoms between Ethan and Mason grew more severe.
Not only were they sharing memories now—sometimes they shared physical sensations too. When Ethan was eating in the cafeteria, he could taste the pasta that Mason was having for lunch. When Mason was in a meeting, he would suddenly feel the sensation of Ethan's fingers tapping away at a keyboard.
Even more terrifying was that they were starting to "predict" each other's actions. It wasn't telepathy—it was something far more fundamental. Their brains were beginning to process information in exactly the same way, leading them to make identical decisions.
"We have to figure out what made 1993 and 1999 so special," Dr. Zhou said during an emergency meeting. "Why did these two years produce more divergences than any other time? What made them different from all the other nuclear detonation dates?"
The investigation team combed through every piece of relevant data from around the world. In addition to the Soviet nuclear warhead incident in 1993, another event caught their attention: The U.S. Superconducting Super Collider project was canceled by Congress that same year, while construction began on the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. That same year, the global internet bubble reached its peak, and the amount of digital information exceeded the volume of physical information for the first time in human history.
"It wasn't nuclear energy," a young researcher proposed a new theory. "It was information. 1993 and 1999 were critical turning points in the explosion of human information."
He pulled up a graph showing the growth of global information volume over time. The curve began to rise sharply around 1993, with a steep inflection point appearing in 1999.
"Perhaps timeline divergence requires more than just energy," the researcher continued. "It also requires... observers. Or rather, consciousness. When a sufficient number of conscious beings focus their attention on the same event, the 'possibilities' of that event become solidified, splitting into multiple versions."
Ethan suddenly realized what this meant. "The internet... By 1999, hundreds of millions of people around the world were online simultaneously. For any major event, there were tens of thousands of people paying attention, discussing it, remembering it."
"Memories create reality," Mason added. "If the parallel universe theory is correct, then the consciousness of the observers is the key factor that determines 'which world becomes reality'. When too many observers focus their attention on the same event at once, reality simply... can't bear the strain."
A heavy silence fell over the conference room.
If this theory was correct, then the mirror crisis was unsolvable. As long as humans possessed consciousness, as long as major events captured people's attention, time would continue to split into diverging paths. And the current fusion taking place across the globe might just be... a reckoning.