Sample Images.rar -

A standard living room. Beige curtains, a floral sofa, a television set from the late 90s. It looked like a real estate listing, except the TV screen showed a reflection of the person taking the photo. It was Elias. He was wearing the same hoodie he had on right now.

The file was dated —a glitch, surely, since the RAR format didn’t exist back then. Elias found it buried in a folder named TEMP_BACKUP on a drive he’d bought at a garage sale for five dollars. It was only 4MB, but when he clicked "Extract," the progress bar crawled as if it were unzipping a universe. Sample Images.rar

It wasn't a photo. It was a live feed of his own monitor. As he watched, a cursor—not his own—moved across the screen. It hovered over the "Delete" button for the entire folder. A standard living room