It started a week after he’d downloaded a "free" system optimizer from a forum. At first, it was just the fan spinning up at 3:00 AM, the laptop gasping for air while it was supposed to be asleep. Then came the lag—the way the Charms bar would stutter when he swiped from the right, or how would snap open to strange, flickering login pages before vanishing.

At the very bottom, a new line appeared in real-time, typed by a ghost: I like the new interface, Elias. It makes everything so easy to find.

The cursor on Elias’s desktop drifted across the colorful Start screen tiles like it was being pulled by an invisible thread. He wasn't touching the mouse.

Desperate, he tried to trigger a System Restore, but the spyware had already eaten the shadows. The restore points were gone, replaced by a single entry dated "The End."

As the laptop’s fan reached a screaming pitch, a single window popped up on his desktop. It wasn't a blue screen of death. It was a Notepad file, filled with everything Elias had typed in the last forty-eight hours: his bank login, his draft emails to his sister, and a transcript of the conversation he’d just had with himself about being watched.