Ten seconds in, a figure appeared. It wasn't a person, but a silhouette made of the same light and shadow as the pillars. It didn't speak, but it looked directly into the camera—directly at Kaelen.
Kaelen, a junior data-miner with a habit of poking at digital bruises, bypassed the security lockout on a rainy Tuesday. He expected a corrupted surveillance feed or perhaps a fragment of old firmware. What he found instead was a window into a world that shouldn't exist. MGX41RTX.mp4
The file labeled was never meant to be opened. It sat in the deep-storage archives of the Neoterra Research Facility, a 41-megabyte anomaly that had corrupted three different decryption subroutines before it was flagged as "hazardous data." Ten seconds in, a figure appeared
Kaelen realized too late that wasn't a recording. It was a bridge. And something from that glass forest was currently calculating its way into his reality, one perfect reflection at a time. Kaelen, a junior data-miner with a habit of