What would you like the folder to reveal in the next chapter?

He opened . It was a high-resolution photo of his own desk, taken from the perspective of his webcam, dated five minutes into the future. In the photo, Elias was leaning back, looking terrified. He instinctively leaned back.

Elias knew better. As a freelance cybersecurity analyst, he spent his days hunting Trojans. But the file size was impossible: 0 KB. A file that didn't exist shouldn't be able to sit on a server, let alone be sent. He clicked.

A single window popped up. It wasn't a file. It was a live feed of a dark room. In the center of the frame sat a computer monitor, and on that monitor was a folder labeled .

Elias hesitated. His mouse hovered over . The air in the room felt heavy, static-charged. If the first three were the present, the past, and the mind, what was the fourth? He double-clicked.

was an audio file. He played it. It was the sound of his own voice, clear as a bell, reciting a set of coordinates in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The metadata said the recording was created in 1994—three years before he was born.

The extraction bar didn't crawl; it stayed at 0% while his cooling fans roared to life, screaming like a jet engine. Then, silence. Four folders appeared on his desktop: and Bonus 4.