B1334.mp4 -

At that exact moment, Elias felt a cold breath against his right ear.

The static on the monitor wasn't supposed to be there. In the corner of the screen, a file sat alone on the desktop: .

Elias didn't remember downloading it. As a digital archivist, his hard drives were usually meticulous graveyards of categorized data, but "b1334" followed no naming convention he knew. He hovered the cursor over it. No metadata. Zero bytes, yet it occupied space. He double-clicked. b1334.mp4

On screen, a grainy, overexposed image flickered into view: a hallway. It was his hallway. The wallpaper was peeling in the exact spot he’d ignored for months. The camera moved with a slow, mechanical precision, gliding toward the door of his office.

On the screen, Elias saw the back of his own head. He watched himself watching the video. The hum intensified, turning into a rhythmic pulsing that matched his heartbeat. At that exact moment, Elias felt a cold

The screen went black. The file was gone. Elias sat in the dark, the silence now louder than the hum, afraid to turn around and see if the recording was still in progress.

"End task," a voice rasped, not from the speakers, but from the air beside him. Elias didn't remember downloading it

He reached for the mouse to kill the task, but the cursor was gone. The video continued. On screen, a hand—long-fingered and pale—reached out to turn the doorknob. Elias froze. He didn't hear a sound from the hallway behind him, but on the screen, the door was creaking open.