Elias froze. The air in the room grew cold as the cooling fans spiked to a scream. On his monitor, a live feed appeared. It wasn't a street camera or a hacked webcam. it was a top-down view of his own room, rendered in perfect, thermal detail. A red dot pulsed right over his chest.

The hum of the server room was the only heartbeat Elias had left. It was November 20, 2022, and according to the digital clock on his dash, he had been "offline" for exactly forty-eight hours.

He realized then that you can't truly delete yourself from a system that owns the ink. He hadn't escaped the grid; he had simply turned himself into a "404 Error"—and the system was coming to fix the glitch. The door handle clicked.

7:58:01 AM: Total silence. The world doesn't know I'm here, which means I can finally see what the world is actually doing.