The Chrono Cocoon

Las Vegas, Nevada, March 14, 2085, 9:42 AM

Eileen buried three cesium atomic clocks in lead boxes three meters underground at the research institute.

"If this is a time loop," she said into the communicator, "these clocks will display anomalous entropy values upon reset."

Max's voice, mixed with the desert wind, came through: "I've buried a set at a gas station 15 kilometers away and bought the 'Doomsday Special'—half price, because the cashier insists that the day after tomorrow is the end of the world."

Eileen looked toward the parking lot. The ambulance that had taken Joe to the hospital hadn't returned, but everyone at the institute was working as usual, as if the man's convulsing pupils and screams had never existed. She pulled up Joe's medical report: quantum decoherence in the hippocampus; neuronal synaptic qubits were drifting outside the spacetime continuum in the form of probability clouds. In simple terms, his memories were escaping time.

The surveillance footage Max brought back confirmed a deeper fear.

"Look at this." He projected the footage onto the laboratory wall. At 3:29 AM, Joe drove the cleaning vehicle toward the desert but suddenly disappeared 1.6 kilometers from the institute. 0.3 seconds later, the same vehicle appeared from the opposite direction, with a new dent on the front bumper. "GPS shows he appeared at two coordinates simultaneously," Max tapped the pause button, "like a bug caught between two consecutive frames."

The alarm sounded again, tearing through the silence. This time, it was from the Las Vegas Police Department.

In the surveillance footage from Fifth Avenue downtown, a tattooed homeless man was spray-painting on the bank's exterior wall. He wasn't painting skulls or curses but a precise set of Lorenz equations, with a countdown beside them: 71:58:33. When the police tried to arrest him, the man roared with a burnt-out voice: "You'll be dissolved into bones by acid rain on the seventh loop! Blue truck! Blue truck!"

When Eileen and Max arrived at the police station, they only saw palm prints on the interrogation room glass—the man had scratched six nested Fibonacci spirals with his nails before being injected with a tranquilizer, with a small line of text at the center: March 17, Los Angeles, magnitude 7.2.

"He said this is the seventh time he's repeated this sentence," the sheriff wiped the glass, "but the FBI took over the case ten minutes ago, and even the surveillance hard drives have been melted."

Back at the institute, the cesium atomic clock data left everyone breathless.

The clocks in the underground lead boxes showed 72 hours had passed, while the surface clocks had only ticked for 9 hours. More bizarrely, the clock Max buried at the gas station had completely stopped—some force was preventing humans from observing the loop's boundary.

"Einstein said God doesn't play dice," Max tugged at his collar, revealing hives on his neck from pressure, "but now it seems God not only plays dice... but also stuffs them into our skulls."

Eileen silently pulled up the global earthquake monitoring network data.

The Pacific Plate had accumulated abnormal stress in the past three hours, with the epicenter pointing to the San Andreas Fault beneath Los Angeles. The supercomputer's simulation predicted the eruption time to be... March 17, 2085, 11:07 AM.

She suddenly remembered the electronic tattoo on Joe's arm.

March 17.