He saw the back of a man sitting at a desk, staring at a laptop in a lead-lined box.

"If you are reading this, the sequence has already failed. Look at the stars, then look away."

He moved the file to a "sandbox" laptop—a machine disconnected from the internet, kept in a lead-lined box. He initiated the extraction. The progress bar crawled, ticking up 1% every hour. As it worked, the laptop’s fan began to scream, a high-pitched mechanical wail that sounded like a warning. At 3:00 AM, the extraction finished.

Slowly, the man in the video—Elias—began to turn around. But in the real room, Elias remained frozen, unable to move a muscle, watching his digital self smile with too many teeth.