The shadow in the webcam reached out a hand. Elias reached for the mouse. He didn't know if he was clicking to start his life or to end it, but as the compiler began to roar, the version number finally changed.

The room grew cold. On his second monitor, the webcam light flickered to life. He saw himself, but the image was delayed by exactly three seconds. In the video, a shadow stood behind him that wasn't there in the real world.

The progress bar didn’t move like a normal file. It filled in erratic bursts, accompanied by a high-pitched whine from his cooling fans that sounded less like mechanical stress and more like a scream. When it finished, a single executable sat on his desktop: AS.exe . He ran it.