With trembling fingers, she double-clicked. The player opened to a dark screen. Then, a match struck. In the flickering orange light, she saw a room she recognized instantly. It was her own hallway, just outside her office door.

The second video: Reena walking her dog in the park last Tuesday.The third: Reena through her own living room window, illuminated by the blue glow of her monitor.

She scrolled to the bottom of the list. The last file was named Watch_Me_Now.mp4 . It had been created only two minutes ago.

Her breath hitched. These weren’t her videos; they were videos of her.

Reena was a freelance video editor, a woman who lived in the quiet architecture of timelines and color grades. Her hard drive was a graveyard of "Final_v2" and "Rough_Cut_Actual_Final" files, but this was different. The source was an anonymous cloud link sent to her business email with no subject line. Curiosity, that old, dangerous itch, won. She clicked.