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In the live feed on the screen, a door opened—the door right behind Elias. He turned around. His room was exactly as it should be: messy, lived-in, and very much occupied. But when he looked back at the monitor, a figure walked into the empty digital room. It looked like him, but its skin had the texture of unrendered pixels. The figure looked directly into the camera lens. "Thanks for the invite back," it said.

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When he double-clicked, the image didn't open in a viewer. Instead, his monitor flickered, the cooling fans spiked to a scream, and a download bar appeared in the center of his screen. It wasn't downloading to his computer; it was downloading from it, pulling data into a void he couldn't see. In the live feed on the screen, a

"I am the version of you that stayed behind," the speakers crackled. "The one you cropped out of the frame in 2022. You thought Untitled118 was just a mistake, a pocket-dial of the soul." The download bar hit 99%. But when he looked back at the monitor,