October 14. Evans doesn't sleep. I don't think he remembers how. He just sits there in the dim light of the server room, staring at the Zero-Degree Algorithm. He calls it 'The Great Simplifier.' I call it a nightmare in C++.

I'm just the assistant. I handle the coffee, the scheduling, and the endless streams of data that Evans ignores. He treats me like a piece of office furniture that occasionally speaks. But I see the numbers. I see the way the algorithm isn't just predicting market crashes—it's creating them. Not in the economy, but in the physical world.

October 21. The first 'glitch' happened in Midtown. A three-block radius of Manhattan simply... stopped. Not frozen in ice, but frozen in state. A taxi remained suspended an inch off the ground. A businessman was caught in a permanent stride, his face a mask of corporate urgency. The temperature in the zone dropped to exactly zero degrees Celsius, regardless of the weather. Evans was thrilled. He called it 'spatial optimization.'

November 2. Evans has expanded the model. He's no longer interested in Midtown. He's looking at the global heat map. He believes that by 'optimizing' the temperature of the planet to a single, uniform constant, he can eliminate conflict. No more resource wars, no more climate migration. Just a clean, silent, zero-degree equilibrium.

I tried to tell him that people need heat to live. He looked at me—really looked at me for the first time in three years—and said, 'Mark, you're thinking in biological terms. I'm thinking in mathematical terms. Life is just a noisy variable. I'm removing the noise.'

November 15. The 'Optimization' has gone global. The news reports are fragmented, then they just stop. I can hear the silence growing outside the office. It's a heavy, oppressive quiet that swallows the sound of the city. I watched through the window as the Empire State Building began to shimmer, its steel turning into a translucent, frozen crystal.

I am the only one left moving. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm the noise. Maybe because I'm too insignificant for the algorithm to bother with.

Evans is still at his desk. He's frozen now. He's a statue of pure logic, his finger still hovering over the 'Enter' key. He looks peaceful. He finally found the simplification he was looking for.

I'm sitting here, writing this in a notebook because the computers have all become blocks of ice. I can feel the cold creeping up my legs. It's not a painful cold; it's just a lack of everything.

I wonder if the world looks beautiful from the outside. A perfect, white sphere of zero. No noise. No variables. Just the math.

*** OTMES-V2: [V-03]-[T7-01]-[M3:9,M8:8,N2:0.9,K2:0.7,theta:85]