“We’ve been watching you through the camera you thought was off, Elias. Thanks for opening the door.”

The hum of the server room was the only thing keeping Elias awake. It was 3:00 AM, and he was staring at a progress bar that had been stuck at 99% for twenty minutes.

Suddenly, the screen flickered. The progress bar turned green. Download Complete.

He opened it. The text wasn't a set of instructions. It was a single line of code, followed by a sentence that made his blood run cold:

The extraction finished. But instead of an .exe file, a single text document appeared on his desktop. It was titled READ_ME_BEFORE_PLAYING.txt .