"Delete it," the man in the video urged, his silver eyes wide with terror. "Before the archive recognizes the observer."
He scrolled faster, his heart hammering against his ribs. The photos began to blur, showing him in places that didn't look like Earth. The sky was a bruised violet, and the buildings were made of translucent glass. In the very last file, a video titled "KSN_Final," a version of Elias with eyes like polished silver looked directly into the camera.
Inside were hundreds of photos, but they weren't of family vacations or historical events. They were photos of Elias.
Elias looked down at his own hands. They were starting to turn translucent, the skin shimmering like the glass buildings in the photos. He tried to scream, but the sound that came out was the hiss of a corrupted audio file.
"You weren't supposed to find this yet," the older Elias whispered, his voice vibrating through the modern speakers. "The loop hasn't closed."
The room went cold. The mechanical rattle of the hard drive stopped abruptly, replaced by a rhythmic tapping from inside the computer case. Tap. Tap. Tap.
In the first few, he was sitting at his desk, exactly as he was now, but the room was empty of furniture. In the next dozen, he was older—gray-haired and stooped—standing in a garden he didn't recognize. The timestamps on the files were dated forty years into the future.