He stayed up until 3:00 AM, the blue light of his monitor reflecting in his tired eyes, until the decryption bar finally flickered to 100%. The folder unzipped, revealing a single directory named Day_Zero .
In the video, he saw himself sitting at his desk, hunched over the keyboard. But there was one difference. In the live feed on his monitor, a shadow stood in the corner of his room, right behind his chair.
Elias didn't turn around. He couldn't. He watched his digital self slowly reach for the mouse to close the window, but the shadow moved faster. The screen went black, and the file Prager.rar vanished from his hard drive as if it had never existed.