The plasma bolts hissed through the air, scorching metal railings and ricocheting off damp concrete walls.
Rick vaulted over a rusted generator, his lab coat flaring behind him like a warning flag.
Rod was two levels above, sprinting along the suspended walkway, boots thudding in rhythm with the hum of unstable machinery.
"Gonna have to try harder than that, Rick!" Rod called down, tone playful, almost bored.
"Yeah? Keep talkin', buddy. I like knowing where my target is," Rick fired back, snapping off a few shots with his portal pistol—not to hit, but to force Rod into a tighter path.
They'd been trading jabs like that for minutes—fast, shallow cuts in words and weapons.
But when Rod cut a corner and nearly collided with Rick at the next catwalk junction, their eyes locked, and the rhythm broke.
Rod slowed first. "You're really still hung up on this, huh?"
Rick's jaw clenched. "Hung up? You said Diane can be revived by this—"
"Oh please," Rod waved him off, but his voice lost that lightness.
"Don't make it sound like I'm the one keeping her buried."
The air between them went heavier. Machinery still rumbled in the background, but now it felt like it was somewhere far away.
Rick took a step forward, gun hanging loosely in his grip.
"So what now? Your plan's only this? This little multi-angle, three-dimensional chess thing of yours still doesn't answer the real question."
Rod tilted his head. "Which is?"
"How the hell do I know the Diane you un-erase is my Diane?"
Rick's voice scraped low. "Not some… fabricated placeholder? A happy little mannequin with her face on it?"
Rod's mouth curled into a slow, knowing smirk.
"I know. I know. That's just my second step of assurance. I want to observe if other mom in different universe has the same soul and what not with their previous soul.
I'll double-cross check whether it's true after they're un-erased."
He leaned forward like he was sharing something intimate.
"I'll un-erase every Diane. Every single one that ever existed. Except ours."
The words dropped like a stone.
Rick's eyes narrowed, a thought sparking but not yet forming into words.
He let the silence stretch, his mind ticking over something dangerous.
Finally, he said, "So… what about our Diane? What's your method?"
Rod leaned over the workbench, hands flat against the metal, eyes locked on Rick.
"You've been chasing the wrong vector, old man."
Rick didn't look up from calibrating the portal gun.
"Bold claim, considering you're standing here bragging as your IQ isn't inherited, humph."
"It's called Causality-Extractive Temporal Displacement with Continuity Anchoring," Rod said, tone so precise it could have been cut from glass.
"Not cloning. Not memory backups. The actual Diane, displaced forward without touching the past. Ninety-nine point nine repeating accurate."
Rick snorted.
"Yeah, I've heard that sales pitch before.
Past is fixed, Rod. Even I can't change that without pissing off every causality enforcer in six dimensions."
Rod raised a finger.
"I'm not changing it. I'm completing it. The fatal event still happens.
History still logs her death. But the body in that coffin?" His voice dropped lower.
"That's a clone."
Rick's hands stilled mid-adjustment. "…You're saying—"
"I'm saying we extract her from the microsecond before termination—right in the quantum uncertainty buffer—and then swap her with an identical bio-shell grown in advance.
The clone dies. The real Diane gets severed from that point on, her continuity threaded into the present.
Past remains unchanged. The Council's causality monitors stay blind."
Rick leaned back in his chair, flask halfway to his mouth.
"So, you want me to kidnap my wife from her own death and replace her with a meat puppet."
Rod didn't blink.
"Not a meat puppet. A perfect biological placeholder. DNA-match, neural-architecture match, cell-death rate match.
Down to the last molecule, it's Diane—except it's not her.
The clone dies in the past, Diane lives here.
No paradox. No retroactive erasure. No cosmic alarms."
The lab hummed with the low thrum of coolant pumps. Rick's gaze sharpened, lines tightening around his eyes.
Rod's mouth curled in the faintest smirk.
"So tell me, Rick… still think you're the only one who can beat the Law of Temporal Non-Contradiction without getting caught?"
Rick froze mid-tinker, the screwdriver still lodged in the casing of a grav-stabilizer. His eyes didn't leave the metal, but his tone carried that familiar edge.
"You think I haven't thought of that?"
Rod didn't flinch.
"Oh, I know you have. The question isn't if you thought about it, Rick—it's why you didn't pull the trigger."
Rick finally looked up, a half-smirk cutting across his face.
"Maybe because I'm not suicidal.
Maybe because the second you start yanking people out of fixed points, every causality auditor, chronolawyer, and fourth-dimensional busybody comes sniffing around.
And trust me—they're unpredictable."
Rod shook his head slowly.
"That's where you're wrong. You keep thinking extraction has to happen inside the fixed point's own causal layer.
It doesn't. You sidestep it entirely."
Rick leaned back, eyebrows raised.
"Oh, enlighten me, professor."
Rod stepped closer, voice tightening like a coil.
"Step one—forget about 'microsecond before death.' That window's still under observation by higher-order entities.
Instead, you mirror-simulate the Diane event-space in a non-observed quantum manifold—an exact one-to-one causal recreation of the death moment, built in isolation from baseline reality.
Every atom, every photon, every fluctuation… replicated."
Rick frowned. "A causality sandbox."
"Exactly," Rod said.
"Once the manifold is running, you pull Diane from that version of the event—not the original.
From the multiverse's perspective, the real death still happened, untouched. The body in the baseline reality stays in place because in the sandbox, we swap her for the clone.
The clone dies in the simulation, not in the real event, but the simulation collapses in perfect sync with the real one.
To causality? It's identical. No discrepancies. No alarm bells."
Rick's eyes narrowed.
"You're talking about a manifold that perfectly mimics an observed event without being observed itself.
You know how much computing power that—"
Rod cut him off.
"—would take? Yeah. I do. Which is why you didn't do it. You didn't have the resources alone.
Not without lighting up the tech beacons that draw every Chronarch and Oversight Warden in the stack."
Rick set down his screwdriver.
"And you're saying you do?"
Rod allowed himself a small, knowing smile.
"I've got access to an off-grid computation lattice built inside a decommissioned fifth-dimensional currency vault.
No tracking, no oversight, no higher-dimensional eyes.
The kind of place no one checks because officially, it doesn't exist. It runs at a parallel processing depth high enough to render a billion years of quantum fluctuation in under thirty seconds."
Rick stared at him for a long moment, his grin slowly returning.
"So you want to steal my wife from a sandbox copy of her death, swap her with a corpse grown in a tank, and walk her into the present without tripping so much as a dimensional motion sensor."
Rod nodded once.
"Not steal. Transfer. And yes. Perfect DNA match, perfect neural state, no paradox, no causal edits, no interference from higher beings.
To them, Diane dies exactly when she's supposed to.
To us, she's in the next room drinking coffee."
Rick's gaze drifted to the corner of the lab where an empty chair sat under a dust-coated lamp. His voice was quieter when he spoke again.
"Yeah… I thought of it." He lifted the flask to his lips.
"Didn't think it was possible."
Rod's tone carried the final twist of the knife.
"That's because you thought you had to do it alone."
The plasma monitors in the corner of the lab buzzed to life, filling the room with a cold blue glow.
Rod's hands moved across the control console in sharp, deliberate motions, each keystroke punctuated by the hiss of pressurized coolant lines feeding into the manifold core.
"Stabilizers online," Rod said without looking up.
"Rendering the sandbox in layered phases.
One hundred percent atomic fidelity, zero leakage into baseline reality."
Rick leaned over the terminal, flask dangling loosely in his grip.
"This thing better not fry the quantum shielding.
Last thing I need is some Chronarch knocking on the door asking why I've got a dead wife walking around in the wrong year."
Rod didn't respond.
The holographic frame in the center of the room shimmered into existence — at first, an empty void, then rapidly knitting itself into something solid.
Walls. Light. The faint smell of ozone.
It was her kitchen.
The table stood exactly as Rick remembered it that morning — two coffee mugs, one half-full, one untouched.
A thin stream of sunlight cutting across the counter. The clock on the wall ticked down, each movement pulling them closer to the moment.
Rod's voice was steady.
"We're locked to one millisecond before the causal convergence point. Clone in position. Transfer vector primed."
Rick's smirk was gone. His eyes fixed on the figure standing by the counter, her back turned.
"Run it," he muttered.
Rod's fingers danced over the console. The manifold hummed, deep and resonant, as if the room itself was holding its breath.
Diane moved. Slowly, she set the coffee pot down and turned — not toward Rod's carefully staged extraction point, but directly toward Rick.
Rick stiffened.
Her eyes met his through the manifold's projection field. Not a glance. Not confusion. Direct. Intent.
Her lips moved — no sound, but Rick swore he saw them shape the words.
"I knew you'd come."
The kitchen lights flickered.
The manifold's projection spasmed with static, the image bending in on itself.
Warnings screamed across Rod's terminal.
"Impossible—she's not supposed to have perception beyond—" Rod's hands flew over the controls.
"Shut it down!" Rick barked.
Too late. The feed collapsed in a burst of white light, leaving only the hum of the lab equipment and the taste of ozone in the air.
Rod exhaled, breaking the silence.
"You didn't tell me she could… see you."
Rick didn't look at him. His gaze lingered on the now-empty projection field.
"Yeah," he muttered, voice low. "Because she's not supposed to."
Rod's console still crackled with static, the system dumping terabytes of corrupted projection data into the scrap partition.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes locked on Rick.
"You've seen that look before."
Rick didn't answer right away. He twisted the cap back onto his flask, took a long pull, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Yeah. Once or twice." He hesitated.
"Fine. More than once or twice."
Rod's brow furrowed. "Meaning…?"
Rick's voice flattened into that infuriating mix of deadpan and buried regret.
"Meaning I've been running versions of this stunt since before you were screwing around with toy particle colliders.
Different tech, different angles — brute force causality grabs, false-timeline tunneling, even raw spacetime scalpel work.
Every time, same end result. She looks at me like she's been waiting for it… then the whole thing folds in on itself like wet paper."
Rod leaned back slowly. "And you never told anyone because—"
Rick cut him off.
"Because I don't give a shit about what some Chronarch, Oversight Warden, or fourth-dimensional accountant thinks.
I'm not scared of 'higher beings.' I've pissed in the Citadel's water supply; you think a bunch of extradimensional pencil-pushers can scare me?"
He gestured vaguely at the dead projection field.
"But this isn't them stopping me. This is her. Every time."
Rod frowned. "Her?"
Rick jabbed a finger toward the empty projection space.
"She's not supposed to see through the event frame. No subject is. You pull someone from a fixed point, they're in the frame — not outside it.
They don't perceive the extraction.
They don't know. But she does.
She's always looking right at me before the collapse, like she knows the code to my play before I even run it."
Rod's expression darkened. "That's not possible unless—"
"Unless she's already operating outside baseline perception.
Which means she's either been tampered with by something bigger than both of us… or she's playing her own game."
The hum of the manifold core cooling system filled the space between them.
Rod finally spoke.
"So why keep trying if you knew she'd shut it down every time?"
Rick's grin came back — but it wasn't amusement. It was defiance.
"Because the fact she can shut it down means she's still in there somewhere.
And I'm Rick Sanchez. I don't stop until I figure out how to break whatever cage she's in… even if it's one she built herself."
Rod studied him for a long moment, then turned back to the console.
"Then we stop treating her like a passive subject and start treating her like an active player."
Rick raised an eyebrow.
"You think she's aware enough to help us?"
Rod's hands hovered over the controls.
"I think if she's aware enough to stop you, she's aware enough to choose not to. Which means the first step isn't extraction."
Rick tilted his head. "Then what is it?"
Rod's mouth twitched into a half-smile.
"You better get ready old man, I will call mom..."