He looked at his screen. A new file had appeared in the folder: viewer.exe . Heart racing, he ran it. His webcam flickered on, but the feed didn't show his room. It showed a vast, red-lit server room where a hooded figure stood over a terminal. The figure reached for their jacket, slowly pulling the zipper down to reveal a badge that matched the one Elias was wearing.
Inside were thousands of photos, but they weren't of people or places. They were textures. Close-ups of a velvet theater curtain, the rusted hull of a sunken ship, a bruised sunset over a digital ocean. Every image was a different shade of crimson. crimson.zip
As Elias scrolled, he noticed a pattern. The images were timestamped in the future. The last one, dated tomorrow at 3:15 AM, showed the exact pattern of the worn crimson rug beneath his desk. He looked at his screen