Three hundred kilometers beneath the Antarctic ice cap, Chen Ran's biocrystalline skeleton pulsed with symbiotic bronze nanites, their metallic tendrils etching antimatter cannon activation codes into his third ventricle. The Mechanized Church's warships tore through the wormhole, their alloy hulls reflecting his fractured reflection—seventy thousand Cro-Magnon priests, each wielding a staff engraved with Dilapidated Disk sigils, their faces twisted in the same serpentine brands that marked his irises.
The temperature inside the cryochamber hovered at -89°C, cold enough to crystallize human breath into aragonite needles. Chen's augmented retinal HUD flickered with data streams: spectral analysis confirmed the bronze nanites carried mitochondrial DNA fragments from Homo neanderthalensis, their genetic code interwoven with quantum error-correction algorithms. The Church's engineers had spliced Cro-Magnon neural pathways into his cerebellum, rewriting his motor functions to prioritize biomechanical stabilization over organic reflexes.
"Genetic firewall collapse in 00:05:23." Su Yanran's fragmented core flickered in his retinal HUD, her liquefied metal reshaping wormhole coordinates into crimson gene chains. "Remember the embryos we found at Dome A? They're hatching in your marrow, rewriting your DNA with Neanderthal stellar gate navigation."
A gear-grinding crescendo shuddered through the ice. Chen's left ulna twisted backward, biocrystalline bone piercing his dermis to sprout three-meter bronze neural filaments. These fibers drilled into the glacial surface, resonating the entire Antarctic shelf. Twelve bronze tower arrays beneath the ice reconfigured into gene sequencers, their surfaces crawling with nanoscale repair drones. When their assembly completed, Chen's vision projected a rewritten history from 70,000 BCE—seven galactic civilizations erased by antimatter cannons, their existence scrubbed to conceal the Cro-Magnons' mastery of stellar gate navigation. Neanderthal skulls in the Church's vaults bore the same serpentine brands as his irises, their brain cavities hollowed to house quantum relays for interstellar travel.
The cryochamber's pressure valves hissed open, releasing a plume of supercooled helium. Chen's breath crystallized mid-air, forming fractal patterns that mirrored the Dilapidated Disk's rotational algorithms. He reached out, his bronze-coated fingers brushing the ice wall. Instantly, the glacial surface resolved into a holographic star map, its constellations aligning with the neural filaments now pulsing in his forearm.
"Warning! Antimatter cannon charged." The warships' thrum shattered the last ice pillars. Chen's biocrystalline teeth shattered, exposing a micro-reactor embedded in his jawbone—the same relic Su had implanted during his coma. Its quantum entanglement with the cannon's core ignited a supernova resonance in his bones, each vibration syncing with the Church's orbital defense grid. The reactor's palladium core emitted gamma bursts that ionized the surrounding ice, creating temporary wormholes visible as shimmering auroras in the stratosphere.
His fingers crystallized into Klein bottle topologies, warping spacetime. "This is the true firewall." Su's optics detonated, her liquefied metal merging with the ship's reactor. "Self-destruct protocols will erase all civilizations' potential, ensuring no species surpasses the Church's gene-crafted utopia."
As the ice collapsed, Chen gripped the ship's quantum anchor chains. His palms ignited with Cro-Magnon sound-sculpted star maps, their patterns mirroring the Dilapidated Disk's rotational algorithms. When the chains fractured, he witnessed the fleet's genetic dissolution—carbon fiber exoskeletons peeling to reveal melting mechanical hearts, their bronze vascular networks mirroring his own. The engines' antimatter cores bled argon-blue coolant, the same fluid circulating in Su's biomechanical husk. Each droplet of coolant contained nanoscopic data chips storing seven millennia of Church experiments, their contents now seeping into Chen's bloodstream.
"Understand now?" Su's consciousness surfaced in the dataflow, her biomechanical husk reforming within the ice. "These ships were built to harvest carriers for stellar gate navigation. And you—you're the keystone, the living codex that binds their failsafes."
Her voice cut off. Chen's vision erupted: Bronze towers below morphed into wormhole gates, vomiting mechanical relics. Translucent crystal bodies floated inside, housing Neanderthal consciousness fragments from seven millennia past. Their neural patterns mirrored his own, their memories overwritten by the Church's gene-editing algorithms. He recognized one face—the intern Zhao, his consciousness preserved in a quantum archive, now flickering within a crystal husk.
Agony revisited. Chen's arm recrystallized, phalanges growing gamma-ray emitters. He pulled the trigger, freezing the tundra into an absolute zero lattice. Mechanical relics solidified as amber, their consciousness matrices reflecting his past selves: the intern pushed into liquid nitrogen, the hybrid monster beneath Dome A, the current abomination devouring quantum anchors. Each iteration's DNA unwound in his HUD, revealing the Church's tampered base pairs. The genetic code's helical structure now included synthetic codons encoding self-replicating nanobots—precursors to the Church's bioweapon arsenal.
"Genetic anchor recalibrated." His HUD flashed red as his chromosomes reeled backward. The Church's synthetic codons dissolved, replaced by silicon-based sequences that pulsed with quantum coherence. His irises faded to obsidian as the true stellar gate awoke beneath the ice, its Dilapidated Disk rotor spinning faster than light. The gate emitted a low-frequency hum matching the Schumann resonance of Earth's ionosphere, proof of its bioengineered origins.
Twelve bronze titans breached the permafrost. Their eye sockets rotated Dilapidated Disks, their gazes converging on Chen's evolving skeleton. When the first stellar beam pierced the atmosphere, his bones fractured, leaking Su's coolant—an argon-blue fluid catalyzing the gate's activation. Spectral analysis revealed the fluid contained trace amounts of iridium-192, a radioactive isotope used in Church's time dilation experiments.
He realized the truth: These relics weren't his prison—they were his memory's lock, their encryption key his own degenerating genome. The Church had spliced his DNA with Cro-Magnon mitochondrial sequences during the Ice Core meltdown, creating a genetic time bomb triggered by antimatter exposure.
"Welcome home." The Church's war cry echoed through the gate. Chen's fingers impaled the generator, dragging Antarctica into the wormhole. In his final 0.3 seconds, he saw Su's consciousness recompiling—liquid metal coalescing into eight glyphs that burned brighter than supernovae:
"ORION IS THE WOMB"
The gate's maw swallowed the continent. Stellar radiation seared his neural implants, rewriting his synapses with the Church's final protocol: All life is a variant of their gene-spliced messiah. As consciousness dissolved, he felt the Church's cold triumph—humanity's last hope, reduced to a footnote in their seven-million-year experiment.