Elias felt a sudden, icy draft on his skin. He didn't turn around. He couldn't.
He didn’t recognize the sender, a string of alphanumeric gibberish that looked more like a serial number than a name. But it was 3:00 AM, the hour when curiosity usually strangulates common sense. He tapped the glass. The progress bar didn’t crawl; it lunged. 15%... 64%... 100%.
Instead, his eyes locked onto the screen as a third notification appeared.
The file wasn't a video or a document. It was a single, high-resolution photograph of his own living room, taken from the exact corner where he was currently sitting. In the photo, the room was empty, save for a small, handwritten note sitting on the coffee table that hadn't been there a moment ago.
The notification sat on Elias’s cracked screen like a digital dare: .
Heart hammering against his ribs, he leaned forward and read the ink: “Don’t look at the next one.”