42144mp4 -

The sound didn't come from his headphones. It came from the glass of the physical monitor right in front of his face.

Elias looked up from the monitor to the space behind it. There was no camera. Only the flat, grey plastic of the terminal casing and the dusty ventilation grate of the server room wall. 42144mp4

Elias pushed his chair back so hard it toppled over, sending him crashing to the cold linoleum floor. He scrambled backward, his eyes never leaving the screen. The smile on the monitor grew even wider. Then, the monitor went completely black. The sound didn't come from his headphones

In the video, Elias saw himself looking at the video. It was an infinite recursive loop of him staring at himself staring at himself. There was no camera

The video opened with static that quickly resolved into a high-definition view of an empty office. He blinked. It was his office. He watched the screen as a man sitting at a desk stared intently at a monitor. The man was wearing the same grey hoodie Elias was wearing. He had the same tired eyes.

He looked back at the screen. The video player was still playing, but the counter had stopped. It was stuck at 00:42. On the screen, the motionless version of Elias slowly began to smile—a wide, impossibly jagged grin that stretched far past the boundaries of a normal human face.