He hovered his cursor over it. The metadata was blank—no date, no size, no source. Curiosity, sharp and cold, nudged him to double-click.
His mouse hand trembled. He moved the cursor to the file, desperate to delete it, to erase the evidence of what was happening. But when he right-clicked, the option wasn't there. Instead, the filename had changed. It now read: Uploading Reality m4a. Download Recording m4a
Elias finally turned around, but there was no one there. There was only the sound of his own breathing, perfectly synced with the rhythmic hiss of static now leaking from his speakers, even though the file had stopped playing. He hovered his cursor over it
The file sat on the desktop, a generic icon labeled Download Recording m4a. Elias didn't remember clicking a link or hitting save. He had spent the afternoon cleaning up his cluttered downloads folder, and there it was, wedged between a PDF receipt and a blurry screenshot. His mouse hand trembled
