The final track was twenty minutes of silence, punctuated by a single, high-frequency tone that seemed to vibrate his very soul out of his skin. When it finally cut to black, Elias sat in the dark, gasping.

He looked at his hands. They were younger. The scar on his palm from a kitchen accident two years ago was gone. He looked at the mirror. The man staring back wasn't the tired coder who had clicked the link.

Elias found the link on a dead-end IRC channel: Download_INVIKTOR_Renewal_FLAC.rar .

The archive hadn't just downloaded music. It had restored a previous version of him.