When Elias finally bypassed the handshake protocol, the video didn't open in a standard player. Instead, a terminal window flickered to life, scrolling lines of amber text before the image stabilized.
The lights in Elias’s apartment flickered. On his monitor, the file size of the video began to grow exponentially, devouring his hard drive space, then jumping to his cloud storage, spreading like a digital contagion.
As Elias watched, the timestamps at the bottom of the screen began to behave erratically. They didn't count up; they counted toward a specific coordinate in time that hadn't happened yet.
