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The sound wasn't music. It was a rhythmic, wet thumping, like a heartbeat heard through a wall of meat. Beneath it, a high-pitched oscillating tone began to climb. Elias felt a sharp pressure behind his eyes. He tried to take the headphones off, but his hands felt heavy, as if they were moving through syrup.

Elias clicked download. It was small, only 44 megabytes. He unzipped it, expecting a joke or a virus. Instead, he found three files: frequency_check.wav the_third_room.mp4 READ_BEFORE_WAKING.txt

Panic flared. Elias slammed his laptop shut, but the audio didn't stop. It continued, vibrating out of the closed plastic casing.

He hadn't just downloaded a file. He had invited something into the hardware of his reality.

He looked back at the laptop. On the closed lid, a small, red LED he had never noticed before began to blink in time with his racing heart.

He looked at his reflection in the dark screen of his monitor. In the dim light of his room, his reflection looked back. But as he blinked, his reflection didn't. The version of Elias in the glass stayed wide-eyed, its mouth slowly stretching into a grin that was too wide for a human face.

The reflection raised a hand—not to its own face, but toward the edge of the screen, as if trying to find a grip on the bezel to pull itself out.