Quantum Howl

Moscow wreckage

The jumper’s cell is down to 5 %, its blue light flickering like a dying firefly. I bite my fingertip and smear quantum-blood across the casing, brute-forcing the Moscow ruin-coordinates. Light erupts; the world tears open along the collapse-wake and the 1973 corridor reappears—yet nothing is as it was.

The walls now ooze thicker black fog. From it rise layered howls of a thousand red-eared white wolves, a choir of hell. The dagger’s quantum glow sketches crooked paths through the dark. Every step births mucous that hardens into quantum cockroaches; their ruby eyes tick off my death in chitin clicks.

“When the charge dies, you’ll be stranded here.”

Father’s guardian fragment flickers on the dagger’s hilt, voice rasping like metal on metal, as though his electronic nerves are being eaten by the fog. I sprint toward the central fissure, but a curtain of faces blocks the way—millions of “me” torn from divergent lines: throats flayed by claws, bodies broken in jump-failures, necks snapped by Echo’s betrayal. Each frame drips viridian mucus that sprouts fresh roaches; they chew the concrete with a sound like shattered teeth.

Behind me gears grind, Soviet battle-cries detonate. Soldiers storm in, mechanical eyes violet—neons soaked in black fog. Every paw-print cracks spacetime; colossal black werewolves clamber out, tenfold larger than before. Their dermal fissures cradle red-eared embryos whose eyes are pin-prick black holes, drinking the corridor’s light.

The alpha whips its tail; quantum scales pulverise concrete into a shrapnel storm. I roll, s***h—the blade sinks like into asphalt, opening a wound that oozes black mist. Faces scream from the cut: “Give us your blood! The red-eared wolf needs your fear to crown its king!”

The pack lunges. Pawprints corrode the floor into abysses; from them rise quantum tentacles ending in half-melted “me”s. They open lipless mouths in unison: “The anchor is inside you! Kill yourself and be free!” The chorus shakes the corridor; resonance slams my quantum eardrums.

Desperate, the dagger flares. Father’s face bursts from the hilt, circuits flaring:

“Xia-xia, the original sample is the emotional core of the 1973 trial—the ‘paternal-love quantum state’ I implanted! To sever the anchor, bleed onto the sample, transfer the wolf’s hatred to a surrogate… but the price will devour your soul!”

Before he finishes a black maw clamps my left arm; quantum flesh tears. Pain detonates like shrapnel in every neuron. I howl, ram the dagger into the fissure core. Blue light and black fog collide; the wolf’s fetal scar erupts. Its ears burn with doubled flame; pupils show a thousand futures where I am devoured, where I fall between collapsed timelines, where I become the next red-eared wolf.

Father’s guardian and the scar battle at the quantum level. Every c***k spews my memories—throats, falls, betrayals—reassembling into mirrors where every choice ends in ruin.

A slit opens in the core. A reel of magnetic tape drifts out—yellowed, etched with Cyrillic and Chinese glyphs that wriggle alive under the blue. I seize it. The wolves freeze—then dissolve, armour liquefying into sludge that hardens into a single face. It speaks:

“Anchor transferred to tape. But every playback will hatch new hunts; your soul becomes the tape’s fuel.”

Collapse-wave erases the ruin. I stagger, left arm dripping quantum blood that blossoms into a new form of the red-eared wolf—ears gone, body sheathed in father’s screaming faces: “Anchor transferred, but the price—” Collapse completes; the ruin implodes into nothing.

I open my eyes in the 2025 lab. On the central screen hovers a ghost-tape riddled with wolf embryos slowly ripening. Zhang Yan hums behind me; his silhouette warps into the red-eared wolf under the fluorescence. I spin, dagger raised—Zhang Yan dissolves into black fog, Echo’s laugh threading through: “Congratulations. Hatred now lives on tape. And the price has come due…”

Alarms detonate. The ceiling ruptures; Soviet shadows pour in, eyes scarlet, paws leaking tape-ghosts. A howl erupts—father’s voice braided with the wolf’s: “Anchor on tape. Each playback releases quantum hatred. Your lab will be the first cemetery!”

I jump to the roof. Night wind carries the smell of magnetic tape; the city has become a graveyard of reels. Every street corner plays father’s recordings laced with wolf growls; each track summons black wolves whose claws stamp embryonic tapes into the concrete.

I scan the tape’s data. The anchor exists as an entangled state: play it and hatred is released; don’t play and embryos keep spawning. Worse, the tape’s ghost is resonating with the lab’s devices; every console sprouts fetal scars.

“There is a way to destroy the tape,” whispers father’s last shard from the dagger, voice trembling with despair, “but annihilation will vent the accumulated hatred in a pulse strong enough to collapse your soul into a black hole.”

Moscow coordinates flash blood-red on the monitor. The tape-ghost writhes, forming a wolf-face without ears: it speaks my name in a double-voice of father and wolf, raving: “Next collapse, the pack will nest in the tape and devour every version of you… and your father will be crowned king of wolves!”

I grip the dagger; the jumper is stone-dead. In the small hours the tape icon on the screen inflates; the PLAY button glows red and spins on its own. Father’s voice and the wolf’s howl merge into a corrosive scream. Magnetic ichor bleeds from the walls and vines into human-faced creepers, each fruit a half-melted “me” whispering in unison: “The anchor cannot be destroyed, only sealed… find the 1973 quantum cryo-pod—the only vessel that can cage the tape…”

I sprint toward the cryo-coordinates. The jump-flash sputters—powerless—and I plummet. Black-wolf after-images lunge from the cracks. I roll; claws graze my cheek, etching quantum frostbite. Far ahead the cryo-pod glimmers; frost leaks from its seam, forming faces of ice that warn in father’s voice: “The pod needs original quantum blood to open, but inside waits a danger far worse—Echo’s true body!”

I s***h my tongue, spray quantum blood onto the frost-face. The face spasms; eyes split into bleeding seams and scream: “Echo has waited long!” A torrent of absolute-zero air erupts and flash-freezes me into a quantum statue—yet my mind keeps flowing. Through the ice I see inside: a tangle of quantum filaments knits a translucent humanoid, each filament ending in a shredded fragment of “me” from every timeline. It has no solid form; it is woven entirely from the red-eared wolf’s howl. Every cry rips open a spacetime fissure; more Echo-shards pour out.

Its “face” is a collage of father-images: the young scientist in 1973, the half-rotted corpse devoured by wolves, the future mad king wearing the wolf-crown. These visages writhe along the threads into a single “mouth-of-faces” that laughs in static:

“Welcome, martyr of the quantum anchor. Your father’s hatred, my hatred, the wolf’s hatred… all converge here, hungry for your soul.”

Echo’s true body extends a hand—fingers made of collapsing spacetime shards. The instant it touches the ice, my consciousness is dragged into a hallucinated hell of quantum sound: every scream I ever uttered, every failed experiment recorded, every wolf-bite and soldier’s servo-screech layered into a cyclone that slices my quantum eardrums and dices thought into bleeding fragments.

“You thought sealing the tape would finish me?” the mouth-of-faces gapes wider, revealing embryonic wolf fangs. “I am the hatred born of 1973—your father fused paternal-love quanta with the wolf’s hatred to create me. Every collapse feeds me more debris; now I command every Echo, even the voice inside your head!”

The cryo-core erupts with guardian-blue light as father’s last shard battles Echo’s threads—each cut reopens into more red-eared embryos. Embryonic eyes turn into father’s faces, all weeping: “The anchor cannot be destroyed, only shifted—your annihilation will be my new host!”

Temperature plunges to absolute zero; ice-faces gnaw my quantum flesh with exquisite pain. I shatter the statue from within and drive the dagger into the core. Blue and black detonate. The tape-ghost rises, embryos spawning at an insane rate.

Echo’s final howl:

“Quantum hatred never dies… in the next collapse you will be the feast, and your father will don the red-eared crown!”