Leo’s laptop fan screamed. The temperature gauge spiked to 90°C. The video stuttered. The shape in the mirror didn’t stutter. It moved in the gaps between frames.
The footage was grainy, shot on a camera that had been dropped one too many times. A wide shot of a living room. The kind of living room you see in old rental listings—wood-paneled walls, a CRT television in the corner, a dusty philodendron dying in a ceramic pot.
But the file size had doubled.
Leo sat in the dark. The silence was heavier than before. He looked at his router. The activity lights were blinking in a frantic, arrhythmic pattern. Not the usual steady pulse of data. This was a heartbeat. A panicked one.
And a man.
“It’s not a movie,” he whispered. “It’s a teleport. And you just gave it your IP.”
“It sees you now.”
The final packet clicked into place. The file was exactly 1,573,284,096 bytes. Not a byte more, not a byte less. Leo double-clicked.