On the screen, the reflection began to move again, even though the video was still "frozen." It reached out a hand toward the edge of the frame—toward the edge of Elias’s monitor.

The video opened to a shaky, low-light shot of a rain-slicked street. The audio was mostly the rhythmic thrum-thrum of windshield wipers. The camera was sitting on a dashboard, pointed toward a lonely intersection. For the first thirty seconds, nothing happened.

Elias was a digital archivist, which was a fancy way of saying he got paid to organize other people’s messy hard drives. Most of it was junk—blurry photos of dinner, accidental screenshots, and memes that had long since lost their punchlines. Then he found it: video_2021-09-07_23-09-48.mp4 .