Dr. Yamazaki's office was a museum to humanity's last days. Screens covered every wall, some showing data streams, others playing loops of Earth as it was—blue and green and achingly beautiful. A shelf held physical books, their pages yellow but intact. Coffee mugs with faded slogans sat next to scientific awards from universities that no longer existed.
"Tea?" she offered, gesturing to a service that looked fresh despite the impossibility. "I know it's ridiculous, but rituals help maintain identity coherence."
"Identity coherence?" Mayfell asked, not touching the offered cup.
"The challenge of synthetic consciousness. Without biological imperatives, the mind tends to... drift. Become something other than human." She sipped her own tea with mechanical precision. "Hence why we maintain routines. Why I still drink tea I can't taste. Why Dr. Sato insists on wearing that lab coat despite no longer having skin that needs protection."
"You're fighting to stay human," Ren realized.
"Fighting. Failing. The distinction blurs after ten thousand years." She set down her cup with a click. "But you're not here for philosophical discussions about the nature of consciousness. You're here because the dimensional anchors are failing."
"You know about that?"
"We built them." She gestured to the screens. "Project Neither was humanity's last desperate attempt to survive our own stupidity. We'd poisoned the Earth, exhausted resources, pushed climate past every tipping point. But instead of fixing our problems, we decided to run."
A screen shifted to show schematics Ren couldn't understand but recognized the shape of—dimensional diagrams, anchor points, and something labeled PROTOCOL SEVEN.
"Dimensional travel," Mayfell breathed. "You actually achieved it."
"Achieved. Botched. The terminology depends on perspective." Dr. Yamazaki stood, moving to the screens with too-fluid grace. "The plan was elegant. Open portals to parallel Earths. Evacuate populations to pristine worlds. Leave our mistakes behind."
"Let me guess," Ren said. "It went wrong."
"Catastrophically. We didn't account for the Neither—the space between dimensions. It's not empty. It's hungry. And when we punched holes through reality, we rang a dinner bell."
The screens showed footage that made Ren's stomach drop. Purple mist pouring through dimensional rifts. Cities dissolving. People screaming as they were unmade.
"The first breach was in Tokyo," Dr. Yamazaki continued clinically. "Your home, Ren. Gone in six hours. Then New York. London. Beijing. The mist spread faster than information. By the time we understood what we'd unleashed, half the world was gone."
"So you built shelters," Elanil said, voice tight with controlled anger.
"Twelve facilities. Each designed to house ten thousand." Her expression didn't change. "Do the math. Twelve facilities, ten thousand each. Seven billion people. We saved less than 0.002% of the population."
"The rich. The powerful. The connected." Ren felt sick. "Let me guess—lottery tickets cost more than most people's lifetime earnings?"
"There was no lottery. Selection was based on genetic diversity, skill sets, and yes—ability to fund the project." She turned back to them. "I'm not defending it. I'm stating facts. We chose who would live and let the rest die."
"But the shelters failed," Mayfell observed. "The people in them..."
"Became us. Uploaded consciousness was meant to be temporary—inhabit synthetic bodies until the danger passed, then download back to cloned flesh. But the danger never passed. The mist kept spreading. The dimensional cascade continued. And we discovered that consciousness, once digitized, doesn't want to go back."
She touched a panel, and the room shifted. Suddenly they stood in a holographic Tokyo, circa 2029. People walked through them, ghostly and unaware. Ren recognized the district—he'd bought his last cup ramen two blocks from here.
"This is what we preserve," Dr. Yamazaki said. "Memories. Data. The shape of what was lost. We're humanity's black box, recording everything for a future that will never come."
"Why tell us this?" Elanil demanded. "Why help?"
"Because Subject Zero represents something we didn't account for." She looked at Ren with eyes that held ten thousand years of regret. "A pure human. Unmodified. Unoptimized. Exactly what we were before we tried to become more."
"I'm nothing special. Just lucky. Or unlucky, depending on perspective."
"You're wrong." She pulled up new data—genetic sequences, probability calculations, charts that meant nothing to him. "When the mist came, it targeted human DNA specifically. But not yours. You're an anomaly. A statistical impossibility. The one human it couldn't touch."
"Why?"
"We didn't know. Until you arrived and we scanned you." She smiled that almost-human smile. "Your grandmother. Dr. Ren Tanaka. She was very clever."
Rating: 11/10 for plot twists, 0/10 for my emotional stability.