The figure in the photo wasn't a person. It was a shimmering distortion, a glitch in the reality of the lens.
Elias froze. He didn't look up. Instead, he opened the image file. It was a photograph of his own apartment building, taken from the street level. In the third-floor window—his window—a figure stood behind him. BD20210011.7z
With a final keystroke, the progress bar turned green. The extraction finished. Inside the compressed archive wasn't a spreadsheet or a sequence of genetic code. There was only a single high-resolution image and a text file named README_IMMEDIATELY.txt . The figure in the photo wasn't a person