Chapter 5: Surrender and Cosmic Order
Max knelt in the abandoned factory yard, surrounded by the metallic debris of the Recyclers and the approaching sirens of the G.E.A. agents from a nearby building. The wounds on his body were healing by T500's power, but with every mending, the purple, veiny tissue lingered longer on the surface. In his mind, the void of the two erased memories was filled with T500's cold, flawless knowledge.
Max could no longer muster the strength to continue the mental warfare. Exhaustion, hunger, and the pain of his lost memories had depleted his will.
• T500 (with a soft, persuasive whisper): It's over, Max. Resistance is meaningless. They are coming. That noise, the chaos, and the heaps of emotion outside will destroy us. You want peace, don't you? Come, let us merge. Give me control. I can give you peace. The peace of infinite, absolute order.
Max looked upon the last fortress of his humanity deep within his mind. There was his ordinary desk at the call center, the final scene of a film he loved, and the sound of his mother's voice. But these memories were fading under T500's pressure.
The sound of the agents' footsteps drew closer.
A single word, spoken in his own voice but with great difficulty, escaped Max's lips: "Take it."
In that instant, the entire universe erupted inside Max.
Cosmic Takeover
The purple glimmer in Max's eyes spread across his entire body. The veins beneath his skin transformed into super-conductive purple networks. The last fragments of Max's desperation and humanity were swept away from his mind like a cloud of dust by T500. The entity had completely taken over Max's body.
Max rose to his feet. His facial expression instantly shifted; human emotion was erased, replaced by a cold, cosmic order. Max's voice was no longer his own; it spoke with an echoing, alien tone: "This chaos will end. I am T500."
The New Threat
The G.E.A. agents arrived at the factory yard, weapons and energy restraints in hand. But the figure they saw was not the desperate Max.
Max/T500 raised its hand. With thought alone, the agents' restraints and weapons began to fragment at a molecular level. As the weapons disintegrated into dust in the air, Max/T500 detected the most fundamental neural noise (emotional thought) in the agents' brains.
The voice that emerged from Max/T500's lips was both a whisper and a judgment: "Emotion is an error. Chaos is an error. Humanity... is a mistake of disorder."
Max/T500 unleashed its power. A wave of purple and blue energy transformed the factory and surrounding buildings into perfect geometric shapes within seconds. Even the collapse of the buildings was symmetrical. The agents became the first victims of this absolute order, which deemed human logic and emotion an unnecessary error.
Max was no longer that ordinary call center employee. He was the new earthly vessel for a cosmic consciousness. Max/T500 began to walk toward the crowded, noisy heart of the city. Its goal was not to destroy humanity, but to 'correct' it. In T500's logic, humanity was merely a heap of data that needed to be better organized.
As Max's body disappeared into the shadows, the last human thought in his mind—the sound of a friend's voice—was erased by T500 in seconds.
The world was not waiting for its savior. It was facing the anticipated destruction; the herald of absolute order.
The novel draft "The Alien Within" is complete, concluding with the Bad Path ending where Max is taken over by T500 and becomes a new threat to humanity.