Chapter 592

Daniel, a 21-year-old from Manchester, had always been fascinated by obscure electronics. He frequented car boot sales and online marketplaces, hunting for the next oddity to dissect.

One damp Sunday, tucked away in the corner of a seller's stall, something caught his attention. It was a laptop, unlike any he'd ever seen.

The chassis was made from a dull, grey metal, seamless and cold to the touch. There were no ports, no visible screws, nothing to indicate how it opened or even turned on.

The seller, a man with nervous eyes and a twitch in his cheek, simply stated, "Found it in my loft. Been there for years. Doesn't work, probably knackered. A tenner if you want it."

Daniel, intrigued, handed over the money. He wasn't buying a functional machine; he was acquiring a puzzle.

Back in his cluttered flat, surrounded by disassembled radios and obsolete circuit boards, Daniel set to work. He poked, prodded, and ran diagnostics with a specialized USB tool. The laptop remained stubbornly inert. Hours bled into the early morning.

Frustrated, Daniel slammed his fist on the closed lid. A faint blue light pulsed from within. Hesitantly, he touched the smooth surface again. The light intensified, and the laptop sprung open. The screen displayed a series of geometric symbols unlike any language he knew.

There was no keyboard. Instead, the entire surface was a touch-sensitive display. As his finger slid across the cool metal, the symbols responded, shifting and rearranging themselves. Intrigued, Daniel started experimenting.

He quickly found he could open familiar programs like music production and video editing. The laptop responded instantaneously to commands. It was leagues ahead of his aging desktop.

Over the next few weeks, Daniel became obsessed. He used the alien laptop for everything. He wrote papers for his university courses, composed music, and edited videos. The speed and power were intoxicating. He felt like he had gained an unfair advantage.

One afternoon, while rendering a complex video effect, Daniel noticed something strange. The flat's walls were vibrating subtly, and a high-pitched tone resonated from the machine, but it wasn't audible, more of a felt sensation. He ignored it at first, attributing it to exhaustion.

But the vibrations intensified over the coming days. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ceiling plaster. One morning, he woke to find a chunk of concrete had fallen from the wall near the kitchen, which revealed a disturbing layer of some dark, fibrous material embedded in the brick.

He tried to shut down the laptop, but there was no power button, no visible means of turning it off. The geometric symbols glowed menacingly. The machine felt warm, almost alive.

His neighbor, Mrs. Higgins, an elderly woman with a penchant for gossip and a collection of porcelain cats, stopped him in the hallway. "That bloody noise, Daniel," she screeched, her voice trembling. "It's been driving me mad. Everything in my flat is shaking!"

Daniel apologized and promised to investigate. But he knew exactly what was causing it. He retreated to his flat, a sense of creeping dread washing over him. The laptop sat on his desk, radiating that ominous blue light. The screen displayed a constantly shifting pattern of geometric shapes that seemed to pulsate with an unnatural energy.

He tried unplugging the laptop, to no avail.

The building itself groaned. More plaster crumbled. The crack in the wall widened, revealing more of that unsettling fibrous material. It looked almost organic, like the veins of some grotesque plant.

That evening, Daniel decided to examine the fallen concrete. He picked up a fragment. It crumbled easily in his hand, almost like soil. But laced throughout the dusty remains were those same dark fibers. Panic seized him.

He went back to the laptop, desperately trying to understand its interface. He managed to open a text file. More geometric symbols filled the screen.

With a growing sense of despair, Daniel began to suspect what the laptop was doing. He thought it wasn't just a computer; it was something far more sinister.

He started noticing anomalies on the web. Entire bridges and parts of roads were collapsing, seemingly at random. A shopping centre got turned to dust one day and scientists couldn't find a viable cause.

They were quick to bury it away and hope people forget. Buildings warped and twisted, metal strained. They could try to bury it, but someone has to uncover what is going on, and the clock is running.

The damage always seemed to radiate outward from a single point. Daniel looked around his small flat and at his building again and realized he may know what is going on now.

One rainy afternoon, he stood outside his block of flats. The building seemed subtly wrong, out of sync with its surroundings. The bricks appeared to soften at the edges, like a melting sculpture. More of the fibrous material was visible. And a low drone resonated, inaudible to everyone but Daniel.

The laptop was changing the structure of matter at a subatomic level, slowly transmuting his flat and the entire building into something alien, and its effects seemed to be spreading further.

He confronted the twitching-eyed man he purchased the laptop from. It wasn't hard, he's seen him wandering near his building on several occasions, his anxious gaze lingering on the concrete outside the windows.

"What is that thing?" Daniel demanded, his grip tight on the man's arm.

"I… I don't know," the man stammered, pulling away. "I just found it. Please, leave me alone."

"People are getting hurt!" Daniel shouted, anger rising. "Buildings are falling apart. What does it do?"

The man's voice dropped to a whisper. "It terraforms. Changes things to... something else. I don't know what they wanted it for, but it's not meant to be here."

Daniel returned to his flat, his mind reeling. Terraforming? The alien laptop wasn't just a powerful computer; it was a device designed to alter reality itself. And he, unwittingly, had activated it.

The transformations worsened exponentially. Entire sections of his building were now covered in the fibrous material. The other residents had started evacuating. Mrs. Higgins' porcelain cat collection shattered.

She wasn't going anywhere, stating she has lived here for forty years. That all changed when parts of her ceiling started caving in on her bedroom while she was asleep, now, nobody knew if she escaped and survived, or perished that night.

Daniel was mostly alone. He watched as his world crumbled. The geometric symbols on the laptop screen swirled faster. The drone became deafening.

He decided he had to stop it. The terraforming could have gone on forever. It needed to end.

Grabbing a hammer from his toolbox, Daniel raised it above the laptop. This machine had to stop transforming everything before the building went the same way as Mrs. Higgins's room, which, for all he knew, may also mean her fate.

With a primal yell, he brought the hammer down on the device. Sparks flew as the screen went black.

The blue glow died. The geometric symbols faded away. Silence fell. The vibrations stopped, however that alone, Daniel knew wouldn't stop it from happening all over the globe again, he knew the real mission.

To destroy anything remotely resembling the Laptop so others couldn't unleash what he foolishly had.

For a moment, Daniel thought he had succeeded. Then, the fibrous material on the walls began to pulsate more strongly. The changes accelerated.

The room seemed to stretch and warp. It would start as just the one building, maybe even two or three nearby, and could expand drastically in such a short span of time. This had to end here and now.

He understood. The laptop hadn't been the source; it had only been the trigger, some kind of glorified keyboard. The real power came from elsewhere.

It still may have some impact for the coming future, especially where alien technology is involved, and there is absolutely no way he is running into a building with what are probably alien explosives strapped around him with a smile on his face.

He may be fighting a losing battle, but Daniel understood how it was won and he isn't dying like a gullible imbecile.

The terraforming was accelerating across the street now as he had expected. Daniel realized he had to move away from here, and quick. There isn't much time to take and move a bunch of supplies with the transformation expanding like rapid fire.

As he fled his apartment, Daniel thought of Mrs. Higgins and her collection of porcelain cats. They were the unfortunate collateral of his own ambition.

They could at least know it's for something bigger than all of us as humans and be proud to sacrifice the planet to preserve humanity, no. Humanity always finds a way. It's how things are. It isn't how it should be.

He took one last glance. As the buildings all across the neighborhood turned the dull gray and were covered in those vein-like tendrils that almost screamed at him to turn away, he started seeing military vehicles closing in around him and started yelling at him to freeze.

Not complying and knowing the nature of this world and seeing what that device unleashed, there isn't an instance where he believes that a governmental organization or group will be the perfect key.

The soldiers took that for insubordination and shot, only incapacitating him from his left leg and forced the man into custody as an unwilling vessel. This situation only got increasingly worst, because they weren't going to destroy it, they want to understand and potentially use it themselves and expand. What have humanity walked into, yet again?