The chalk snapped between Chen Mo's fingers.
It wasn't the pressure. As he was about to write the key derivation, the equation itself began to vanish from the blackboard. It wasn't being erased; each symbol was self-negating, a mirror of the 3iAtlas's self-referential loop in the sky. He knew what he had been trying to prove, but the memory was being meticulously unstitched from the fabric of time.
"Doctor?" his assistant's voice sounded distant. "You were saying the 3iAtlas was demonstrating its own incompleteness, and then…?"
Chen Mo opened his mouth, but the thoughts on Gödel's theorem and self-referential paradoxes were now just a faint outline. Non-Euclidean formulas bloomed in his mind like fireworks, overwriting his train of thought. This wasn't forgetting; it was a surgical excision, a precise removal of a dangerous idea.
"I… need a break," he said, rubbing his temples. His fingertips felt cold.
As he left the institute, Chen Mo noticed his reflection in the metal doorframe was slightly distorted. He blinked, and the image corrected itself. A trick of the light.
The streets were chaos. Cars choked every artery, and panicked crowds dragged suitcases toward the city limits. Above it all, the 3iAtlas continued its slow, hypnotic rotation, its self-referential geometry a dizzying spectacle.
"Out of the way!" a large man shoved him aside.
Chen Mo stumbled, catching himself on a lamppost. The moment his hand touched the cool metal, a memory fragment surged back—the very calculation he had been trying to write. But this time, it came with a bizarre visual hallucination: the lamppost bent at an impossible angle, obeying the laws of a non-Euclidean world.
"Interesting," a low voice said from behind him.
Chen Mo spun around to see a middle-aged man in black tactical gear leaning against a wall. He was about forty, with a lean, powerful build and sharp eyes. A faint scar traced a line down his left cheek.
"You're documenting," the man said, nodding at the formulas Chen Mo had unconsciously scribbled on his own arm. "You've noticed it too, haven't you?"
Chen Mo backed away warily. "Noticed what?"
"Lin Zhan. Former Navy SEAL." The man took a step forward. "Three days ago, I was part of a special operations team at the Pentagon, tasked with rescuing the President from the White House."
"Why should I believe you?"
"Because of this." Lin Zhan produced a small device and, before Chen Mo could react, touched it to his arm.
A sharp sting, and the formulas he'd been struggling to recall flooded his mind, clearer than ever before.
"Believe me now?" Lin Zhan pocketed the device. "The memory loss is tied to cognitive intensity. The harder we try to understand that thing," he gestured to the sky, "the faster we forget. But pain… pain slows the process down."
Chen Mo was stunned. "How do you know this?"
"I was the sole survivor of an IED blast in Baghdad," Lin Zhan said, rubbing a scar on his wrist. "Not because of my training, but because I noticed the dust wasn't falling right. I have that same intuition now. I can *feel* which thoughts are 'dangerous'."
A sudden realization hit Chen Mo. "So the 3iAtlas is targeting… creative thought?"
"Smart man," Lin Zhan said, scanning the street. "We need to talk somewhere secure. I have a temporary base nearby."
---
Lin Zhan's base was in a cognitive neuroscience lab at Princeton University. In stark contrast to the chaos outside, the lab was a pocket of uncanny order.
"This is one of the few places that's still functional," Lin Zhan explained. "I've gathered a few people who are resistant to the memory effect."
There were about twenty people in the lab, each wearing a simple electrical stimulation device on their wrist. Chen Mo noticed a white-haired professor drawing a complex circuit diagram on a whiteboard.
"Dr. Chen Mo!" the professor recognized him. "I'm Howard, from the physics department. We're trying to improve the 'reality anchor'."
"Reality anchor?"
Lin Zhan took over. "We've discovered that synchronized, intense stimuli can temporarily stabilize the local reality structure."
As if on cue, the lab's lights flickered. The walls began to warp and fold. Through the window, a campus building appeared in two places at once, as if space itself had been crumpled like a piece of paper.
"It's found us!" someone screamed in terror.
"Activate secondary protocol!" Lin Zhan commanded.
The researchers quickly formed a circle and pressed the devices on their wrists in unison. A faint electromagnetic pulse spread through the room, and the distorted space snapped back to normal.
"That's impossible…" Chen Mo said, his voice filled with disbelief.
"It's not simple interference," Howard said, breathing heavily as he adjusted his glasses. "When twenty brains generate the same fear frequency simultaneously, we briefly become a macroscopic quantum system—like Cooper pairs in a superconductor."
Lin Zhan led Chen Mo deeper into the lab. "But this is what's really effective."
In a separate room was a modified fMRI machine, wired to a host of sophisticated electronics.
"We call it the 'memory safe'," Lin Zhan explained. "It monitors brain activity. When it detects a critical memory beginning to fade, it automatically applies a transcranial direct-current stimulation."
Chen Mo touched the machine in awe. "How did you build this?"
"We didn't," Lin Zhan's face was grim. "We found it here after the 3iAtlas appeared. The signature on the scheduled user log… it looks a lot like yours."
A chill ran down Chen Mo's spine. He remembered the distorted reflection in the doorframe.
"I want to try it."
Lin Zhan helped him connect the sensors. As Chen Mo began to think, to push the boundaries of his understanding, the familiar sense of cognitive erasure returned. Just then, the fMRI detected the anomaly, and a precisely controlled current passed through his brain.
Pain, sharp and electric. And with it, the fading memory returned in stunning clarity. Chen Mo saw the complete picture: the 3iAtlas wasn't just demonstrating Gödel's theorem, it *was* the theorem made manifest—a being that was both physically real and logically impossible.
More current pulsed through his neurons, shielding the dangerous thought. Chen Mo's eyes gleamed with a mixture of terror and exhilaration.
"It's not an invasion…" Chen Mo whispered. "It's a homecoming! Our universe *is* the logical system it created!"
Lin Zhan watched the readouts nervously. "Chen, your brain activity is off the charts! Stop!"
But Chen Mo couldn't stop. With his memory shielded, he could briefly see through the mathematical structure of the 3iAtlas. The beauty of its infinite, self-referential geometry was both terrifying and intoxicating.
The fMRI suddenly blared an alarm, its readings going haywire. The lab lights flickered wildly, and the walls began to ripple like water.
"Warning: Reality anchor overload," a cold, mechanical voice announced.
Lin Zhan ripped the sensors off Chen Mo, but not before he caught a glimpse of a horrifying image on the screen. It wasn't a brain scan. It was a clear image of a human face, smiling directly at them.
It was Chen Mo's face, but ten years younger, with a sly, knowing smile he had never worn. And most terrifyingly, Chen Mo recognized it—it was the "future scientist" expression he had practiced in the mirror when he was twelve.
"It knows we're here!" Professor Howard screamed, pointing out the window.
The 3iAtlas was changing course, moving slowly toward Princeton. Its self-referential structure began to unfold like a metallic flower, revealing a bottomless, dark cavity at its center.
Lin Zhan hauled the nearly unconscious Chen Mo to his feet. As they evacuated, he noticed a small inscription on the base of the fMRI machine: "To me, ten years from now—I hope you remember this design."
Speaking into his radio, Lin Zhan's voice was strained. "Anchor compromised! I repeat, anchor compromised!"
Outside, the infinite geometry of the 3iAtlas began to fold in on itself, like a colossal eye slowly opening, its pupil reflecting the entirety of Princeton.
In his hazy consciousness, as he was being carried out of the lab, Chen Mo noticed that the circuit diagrams on all the researchers' wrist devices were identical, as if copied from a single blueprint.