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Elias froze. The drive was four years old. He had only bought it yesterday.
The video cut to black. The reflection on Elias’s monitor showed the empty room behind him—except for the faint, shimmering outline of a woman sitting on his guest chair, exactly where Kate had been on the screen.
Then, his own webcam light flickered on, and a new file appeared on his desktop: .
Elias was a "digital archeologist," a fancy term for someone who bought old hard drives from estate sales and recovered lost family photos for a fee. Most of what he found was mundane: blurry vacation shots, recipes, and tax returns. Then he found the silver drive labeled Property of K. Ward .
Elias didn't turn around. He reached for the power button, but his mouse cursor began moving on its own, dragging the file into the "Upload" bin of his cloud storage. The upload reached 100%.
The footage was grainy, filmed from a stationary camera in what looked like a minimalist living room. A woman—presumably Kate—was sitting on a couch, staring directly into the lens. She didn't move for the first three minutes. She didn't even blink.