I realized then that Parasite-Infection.rar wasn't a virus for the computer. The computer was just the carrier. The .rar was a compressed version of something that needed a biological processor to run.

I clicked into the SAMPLES folder. It was no longer empty. It was filled with thousands of .jpg files. I opened the first one. It was a photo of me, taken from the perspective of my own monitor, dated three years in the future. I looked pale, my eyes replaced by the same silver wiring seen in the executable.

The second photo was of my neighbor. The third was of a stranger I’d passed at the coffee shop that morning. Every photo showed the same progression: the wires starting as a mist, then a web, then a replacement for the nervous system. The Breach