The progress bar didn’t move from left to right. Instead, it unspooled into a spiral.

I shouldn't have opened this, the screen read."I shouldn't have opened this," Elias whispered, his voice sounding like it was coming from miles away.

The screen flickered black, then white. A single line of text appeared in a font that looked like dried ink:

He opened it. The text wasn't written in code or English; it was a live feed of his own thoughts.

"Installation of what?" Elias demanded, his fingers hovering over the power button.

As the bar hit 100%, the room didn't just go dark—it vanished. Elias was no longer the one sitting in the chair. He was the file, tucked away in a folder, waiting for someone else to find a weirdly named link and click Extract .

Elias didn’t remember downloading it. The name looked like a cat had walked across a keyboard, but the file size was impossible—0 bytes, yet it pulsed with a faint, rhythmic glow on his monitor. Against every instinct he had as a software engineer, he right-clicked and hit Extract .