The progress bar moved with agonizing slowness. At 44%, the fans in his terminal began to scream. At 82%, the lights in his apartment flickered, casting long, rhythmic shadows against the wall.

The server room hummed with the sound of a thousand mechanical bees. Elias sat in the glow of his monitor, eyes stinging from sixteen hours of data recovery. He was hunting for "The Mic"—Project SS-Mic—the legendary neural-mapping experiment that had vanished when the research station went dark in 2024.

Elias looked at his screen. The file size of the second archive was growing. It was supposed to be a static 2GB file, but the numbers were climbing. 2.1GB... 2.5GB... 4.0GB. It was downloading more of itself from somewhere that wasn't the internet.

The tearing sound stopped. In the sudden, deafening silence of his room, Elias heard a soft click —the sound of a microphone turning on right behind his head.

There was no voice. Instead, there was a sound like wet silk being torn. Underneath the tearing, a rhythmic thumping—a heartbeat, too slow to be human. Then, a soft, digitized whisper began to bleed through the headphones. It didn't sound like it was coming from the file; it sounded like it was coming from the wires themselves.

He tried to kill the process, but the cursor wouldn't move. On the monitor, a waveform appeared. It wasn't a standard sound wave; it was shaped like the floor plan of his own apartment building.

LISTENING TO SUBJECT: ELIAS.