Slowly, a face began to form. It wasn't a digital rendering; it looked like a reflection. But it wasn't his reflection. The person on the screen was wearing the same headset, sitting in the same chair, in a room that looked exactly like his—except everything was reversed.

The "Mirror" in the screen reached out, its hand pressing against the inside of the glass.

As the extraction reached 100%, his monitor didn't show a folder of code. Instead, the screen flickered to a dull, silver grey. The surface of the glass seemed to ripple, losing its rigidity. Elias leaned in, mesmerized by the liquid movement of the pixels.

When the file finally landed in his downloads folder, the air in his apartment felt suddenly heavy, like the pressure change before a massive storm. He right-clicked the file. Extract Here.

The glass of the monitor didn't crack; it simply gave way like water. A cold, pale hand reached through the screen and gripped Elias’s wrist with the strength of a vice.

"Thank you for the download," the reflection smiled. "I've been waiting for a turn on the outside."

He had found Mirror_part1.rar on a defunct forum in Sweden. But the second half, the half containing the core logic gates, was a ghost.