The file appeared in Elias’s downloads folder at 3:03 AM. He hadn’t clicked any links or visited any shady forums; it was just there, a 1.4MB archive titled .

Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a programmer with insomnia. He right-clicked and hit Extract .

He walked to his front door and looked through the peephole. The hallway was empty. But when he returned to his computer, the image in the folder had changed. The shadow was closer. The file size of began to grow, byte by byte, as if it were recording something in real-time.