I woke up at 8:12 AM. My heart rate was exactly 72 beats per minute. I reached for my coffee, a strange sense of déjà vu washing over me, and glanced at my desktop. It was clean.

But as I moved the mouse, I felt a slight resistance—like a cursor reaching the edge of a box that wasn't there before.

The file SIMULACRA.zip appeared on my desktop at 3:14 AM. No download history, no sender, just a 4.2 MB archive with a name that felt like a low-frequency hum in the back of my skull.