The Last Collapse

Chen Yiwei was once the most dazzling genius in the world of quantum physics until his daughter died in a car accident when she was twelve years old. He was shattered by a huge sense of guilt, and he devoted the rest of his life to researching multi-world interpretations, trying to physically prove that his daughter was "alive in another universe." In a desperate suicide attempt, he took a lethal dose of potassium cyanide but woke up safe and sound. It wasn't that the poison failed, or that the rescue was timely—it was that the hypothesis of quantum immortality came true for him. Within the framework of the many-worlds interpretation, each quantum measurement would cause the universe to split, and consciousness would only continue along the surviving branch. This means that no matter what kind of fatal danger he encounters, as long as there is a branch in which he survives, his subjective consciousness will never experience death. Chen Yiwei fell into an absurd prison: every suicide pushed him into an even stranger universe. The color of the sky changes, friends become strangers, and physical constants shift slightly. He kept jumping to find the branch where his daughter was still alive, but found that every time he "survived" he was overdrawing the lifespan of the entire multiverse - his consciousness was accelerating the increase in entropy, pushing reality towards heat death. At the end of probability, he meets another immortal - a being that has been forgotten by the universe. The other party told him the truth: Quantum immortality is not a law of physics, but the persistence of consciousness in "observation". As long as he does not accept his daughter's death, the universe will split infinitely to avoid this observation. Meanwhile, in a rare branch, daughter Lin Wantang survived and grew up to be a cosmologist