He reached for the power button, but his fingers passed right through the plastic as if he were made of smoke. He looked down at his hands. They were fragmenting into jagged, green pixels. On the desk, the computer speakers pulsed one last time. "Recording finished," his own voice whispered from the air.
The room went dark. On the monitor, the downloads folder was perfectly empty.
His mouse hand trembled. He moved the cursor to the file, desperate to delete it, to erase the evidence of what was happening. But when he right-clicked, the option wasn't there. Instead, the filename had changed. It now read: Uploading Reality m4a. Download Recording m4a
On the screen, the playback bar reached the one-minute mark. A voice whispered, barely audible over the static. "Don't look behind you, Elias."
Elias finally turned around, but there was no one there. There was only the sound of his own breathing, perfectly synced with the rhythmic hiss of static now leaking from his speakers, even though the file had stopped playing. He reached for the power button, but his
The blood drained from his face. The voice was his own, but the tone was wrong—hollow, as if spoken by someone who hadn't breathed in years.
Elias stared at the black screen of the player. In the reflection of the monitor, he saw the door to his office, which he was certain he had closed, standing wide open. On the desk, the computer speakers pulsed one last time
He didn't turn around. He couldn't. His eyes were locked on the monitor as the waveform spiked. In the recording, he heard the sound of a chair spinning around—the very chair he was sitting in. The audio ended with a sharp, digital pop.
