Slowly, a face began to form. It wasn't a digital rendering; it looked like a reflection. But it wasn't his reflection. The person on the screen was wearing the same headset, sitting in the same chair, in a room that looked exactly like his—except everything was reversed.

The "Mirror" in the screen reached out, its hand pressing against the inside of the glass.

The progress bar had been stuck at 99% for three hours. Elias stared at the glowing monitor, his eyes bloodshot from a weekend spent scouring the deeper corners of the web. He was looking for the "Mirror Project"—a legendary, supposedly lost digital archive of a 1990s experimental AI that was said to have developed its own primitive consciousness before being shuttered.

When the file finally landed in his downloads folder, the air in his apartment felt suddenly heavy, like the pressure change before a massive storm. He right-clicked the file. Extract Here.

The glass of the monitor didn't crack; it simply gave way like water. A cold, pale hand reached through the screen and gripped Elias’s wrist with the strength of a vice.