The file was an anomaly that appeared on the workstation of Elias Thorne, a digital archivist for the National Library, at exactly 3:14 AM.

: A spreadsheet of seven billion names, including his own, with a "Status" column. His was marked: EXPIRED. The Glitch

He reached for the mouse to click "Cancel," but his hand was already dissolving into lines of hexadecimal code. The last thing he saw before the screen went black was a notification: "10797.rar successfully archived. Initializing 10798.rar..."