"Evolution is not slow when the gardener is impatient."
Three weeks after F-02-15's termination, the lab was quieter.
Monitors still breathed. Pumps still sang. But the chorus had thinned; fewer pods glowed now, and those that remained pulsed with restless light — as if the ocean beneath their glass had learned to dream.
Otto Apocalypse stood at the central console, gloved finger tracing a line of data that rose and fell like a scripture only he could read.
"Fragment retention… decreasing," a technician reported. "Cross-link interference is rising between active units."
"Not interference," Otto corrected. "Gravitation."
He enlarged a cluster of neural graphs. Each clone's signal trembled toward a common center and then recoiled, as though embarrassed by its own longing.
"They're trying to be one thing," he murmured. "Good."
Week 6. F-02-18 failed during a controlled overclock. Her last word, recorded through blood-warm static, was "wait."
Week 7. F-02-11 stabilized. She smiled when no one spoke to her, and pressed her palm to the glass of the original pod as if greeting a reflection.
Week 8. F-02-19 manifested an abnormal surge of Holy Blood radiation while hearing the word sister. Containment foam charred. She cried until the sedatives remembered their function.
Otto dictated notes in a voice that made compassion sound like geometry.
"Conclusion: The fragments seek a lowest-energy state — unity. Each termination accelerates convergence. The original is becoming a sink."
He descended the observation steps and paused before the golden pod at the far end — the only one that looked asleep instead of paused.
Florence's original body floated in the warm hush. Ageless. Uncreased. The faint gold in her veins flickered in sympathy with distant heartbeats that were not hers.
"Do you feel them returning to you, my dear?" Otto asked the quiet. "Loss is such an efficient teacher."
The EKG answered with a soft climb. For a moment, the golden light along her ribs brightened — a candle answering a draft.
"Extraordinary," he whispered, and meant it.
Week 9. Joint simulation: F-02-11 and F-02-19.
They stepped onto the test floor like mirrors that had been taught to walk. Eleven moved with careful hands; Nineteen moved like a blade remembering it had edges.
"Begin," Otto said.
Targets bloomed — drones painted with weak Honkai signatures. The twins reacted differently to the same song: Eleven purified the air in luminous breaths; Nineteen cut heat into the room, Holy Blood boiling along her knuckles.
Their fields collided. Harmony shattered.
"Hold," Otto said, almost bored.
Eleven shuddered, looking up toward the original's pod on the gantry as if it were a moon. "She's… calling."
Nineteen flinched. "Too loud."
The lights stuttered; the test ended. In the glass above, the golden pod brightened as if a sleeping lung had released a sigh.
Week 10. The network began to collapse.
Two pods went dark within hours of each other. The others shook as if in fever. Readouts spiked, dipped, knotted.
"Arch—sir," the chief technician caught himself, "if this continues, we'll lose the batch."
"You say that as if it were waste." Otto didn't look up from his console. "Every death narrows the distance."
Onscreen, the convergence map tightened like a noose.
Week 11. F-02-11 woke with tears already on her face.
"Please," she whispered to the glass, to the gold beyond it, to the shadow of herself. "Don't let us disappear."
Down in the hush, the original's pulse rose, then calmed — a hand reaching through water. Eleven pressed her palm to the pod.
"Soon," Otto said, and almost sounded kind. "One of you must be the whole of you."
Week 12. F-02-11 failed in her sleep.
There was no convulsion, no rupture — only a long exhale, a last tiny smile, and a softening of the monitor line until it became a horizon.
Every other pod flared. The golden pod blazed.
Alarms chimed; technicians scrambled. Otto lifted a hand and the room obeyed.
"Stand down. Record everything."
For thirty heartbeats the chamber glowed like dawn. Then it faded, leaving a quiet that felt like the echo of a cathedral.
Otto wrote, neat and unhurried:
"Convergence event observed. Fragment recoil minimal. Subject O (original) displays increased coherence. Recommend immediate preparation for Phase Apex."
He approached the golden pod once more. Beneath the glass, Florence's fingers twitched — the smallest refusal to remain only beautiful.
"Almost there," he told her. "You're learning the shape of one."
The intercom crackled. "Sir, external notice from Intelligence. Anti-Entropy movements in the north are anomalous. Also… Kaslana activity flagged near Sector K."
Otto's smile ghosted across his face.
"Kaslana," he repeated softly. "How punctual you always are."
He glanced at the board. Phase Apex blinked patiently: Integrate Siegfried Kaslana sequence — finalize Accelerated Body harmonics — lock consciousness lattice.
"Proceed with sequencing," he said. "Quietly. We're nearly finished."
That night, the lab slept with one eye open. Security threads doubled. The pods dimmed to the color of held breath.
Deep in the golden cradle, Florence floated in a dream that had fewer voices than yesterday. In that thinner silence she felt not absence but gravity — the sensation of selves returning like birds that had finally remembered home.
Her lips moved against the fluid.
"Together," she mouthed. "Please."
Somewhere above, a bell rang far away — not Schicksal's, not holy, but the kind of iron note that precedes breaking.
Otto stood alone at the viewport, watching the faint lights of his garden.
"Come, then," he told the dark, as if speaking to fate or to a man with a sword and a promise. "Let us see whose miracle arrives first."
And the month turned over like a page.
The doors of the world were about to open.