2%.His smart lights dimmed to a pale, ghostly blue. Deposit received: $12,700.00.

But in the video, there was something else. A figure stood in the corner of his room—a jagged silhouette made of static and unrendered pixels. Elias spun around. The corner was empty.

He froze. He’d had a blue bike when he was six. It had been stolen outside a grocery store, a memory he hadn’t thought of in twenty years.

"Stop," Elias muttered, his fingers flying across the keys, trying to force a hard shutdown. The power button felt like cold stone.

Elias was a digital scavenger. He lived for the ghosts in the machine—code left behind by fired developers or forgotten AI subroutines. He clicked.

Suddenly, Elias’s phone buzzed. A notification from his banking app: Deposit received: $1,270.00. Then, a text from an unknown number: Do you remember the blue bike?