The lab's security footage showed Thorne standing perfectly still for eleven hours. Then, in one fluid motion, he peeled off his own fingernails and wove them into his hair like chitinous antennae. He wasn't in pain. He was listening .

They smiled. Evolution's long nightmare had finally found its smile. And the evilutionplex was just getting started.

Maya ran. She locked herself in the cryo-storage unit. Through the frosted glass, she watched Thorne's silhouette twist and elongate. His spine unzipped. New limbs — jointed like mantis arms — punched through his lab coat. He didn't scream. He sang — a frequency that made the glass vibrate into fractal cracks.

It began as a whisper in the lab's white noise machine. Then the lab mice — engineered with human neural organoids — began building tiny bone altars in their bedding. They stopped eating and instead arranged their feces into spiral patterns that matched the golden ratio. When Thorne sequenced their RNA, he found codons that shouldn't exist: triplets that folded into tiny, razor-edged proteins shaped like question marks.