Chapter 1: You Clicked It

Chapter 1: You Clicked It

The clock on Leo’s monitor glowed a defiant 2:47 AM. Outside, the city had long since fallen into a muted hum, but in his small apartment, the only sounds were the whir of his PC’s cooling fans and the rhythmic click of his mouse. The air was thick with the ghost of yesterday’s instant ramen and the metallic tang of a half-finished energy drink. This was Leo’s kingdom: a throne of worn pleather, a scepter of fiber-optic cable, and a world contained within the blue-lit rectangle in front of him.

His IT helpdesk job was a soul-crushing litany of telling people to turn things off and on again. His life outside of it was… this. A digital archeology dig through the forgotten catacombs of the internet. Tonight, he was spelunking through a forum dedicated to ‘lost media,’ a dusty archive of dead links and decade-old posts from users who had long since abandoned their digital avatars.

His desire was simple: a jolt. Anything to break the suffocating monotony. He craved the thrill of discovery, the morbid curiosity of finding something that was meant to stay buried.

He found it in a thread from 2008 titled, "Weirdest thing you ever downloaded?"

The post was by a user named ‘N0_FACE,’ their profile a blank default icon. The message was short, almost an afterthought buried beneath pages of nostalgia.

N0_FACE: Found this on an old FTP server. No idea what it is. It's not really a game. More like… a feeling. Don't share this.

Attached was a single file: final.exe.

The warning was like a dare. It was bait, and Leo, starved for stimulation, was ready to bite. This was his obstacle: common sense. Downloading a random executable from a ghost user on a fossilized forum was the digital equivalent of picking up a syringe in a back alley. His professional mind screamed about malware, keyloggers, ransomware.

But the other part of him, the part that was a ghost in his own life, was intrigued. What could be so bad it warranted a warning not to share?

He took the action. He ran the file through a sandbox first. Nothing. No flags, no suspicious network activity. It seemed clean. With a sigh that was part exhaustion and part anticipation, he dragged final.exe to his desktop and double-clicked.

The result was underwhelming. His high-end monitor flickered and resolved into a crude, pixelated mess that screamed late-90s. The game—if you could call it that—was a first-person view of a long, sterile hallway. The walls were a smudged, repeating texture of gray concrete. A single, buzzing fluorescent light strip overhead cast everything in a sickly yellow-green glow. There was no music, only the low, oppressive hum of the light. At the far end of the hallway was a plain wooden door.

The goal was obvious. He moved forward with the W key. The movement was clunky, his virtual footsteps echoing with an unnatural sharpness. He reached the door, clicked on it, and the screen went black.

Then, he was back at the beginning of the same hallway.

“Okay,” Leo muttered to the empty room. “Loop one.”

He walked the hallway again. Same buzzing light, same concrete texture, same wooden door. He clicked it. Black screen. He was back at the start.

Loop two. He did it again, a little faster this time. He was looking for changes, for the trick. Horror games loved this gimmick. On the third loop, maybe a face would pop up, or the walls would bleed. But there was nothing. The hallway remained stubbornly, terrifyingly mundane.

By the end of the third loop, annoyance was replacing curiosity. This wasn’t a game; it was a digital purgatory. He was about to Alt+F4 and delete the file, chalking it up to a failed art project. But as the fourth loop began, something was different.

The screen didn't just fade to black and reload. It tore, a violent glitch of green and purple static filling the monitor for a split second, accompanied by a harsh screech from his speakers that made him jump.

When the image returned, the hallway was there. But it wasn't the same.

The turning point was subtle at first. The sickly yellow-green light was gone, replaced by the soft, warm glow of an incandescent bulb. The walls weren't concrete anymore; they were a familiar, off-white drywall. On the left wall hung a poster—a stylized, limited-edition print from a gaming convention he’d attended three years ago.

Leo’s fingers froze over the keyboard.

His eyes darted from the screen to the actual wall of his apartment, just to his left. There it was. The same poster, with the same slight curl at the bottom-right corner.

His heart began a frantic, panicked drumbeat against his ribs. Coincidence. It had to be a bizarre, terrifying coincidence. Maybe the game scraped images from his PC? But he’d run it in a sandbox. It wasn't possible.

He forced his virtual self to move forward, his gaze sweeping the digital space. To the right, near the floor, was a scuff mark on the virtual baseboard—a dark, crescent-shaped smear. He knew that mark. He’d made it himself last year, trying to shove his new desk into place. Leaning over in his chair, he could see the real one. A perfect match.

The surprise was a tidal wave of ice water. Nausea churned in his stomach. The simple game was no longer an obstacle; his reality was. The game wasn't just a hallway.

It was his hallway.

He could see the stack of takeout containers he’d been too lazy to throw out, rendered in crude, blocky polygons next to the door. He could see the faint water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs neighbor's leak last summer. Every detail, every imperfection of his cramped, lonely life, was replicated on the screen with chilling accuracy.

Then he saw it. The ultimate proof.

Halfway down the digital wall, at about eye level, was a jagged, ugly scratch in the plaster. It was an inch long, shaped like a lightning bolt. It was the first mark he ever made in this apartment, the day he moved in, when the corner of a bookshelf had gouged the wall. It was a memory point, a scar he saw every single day. And it was there, in the game.

This wasn't a game. It was a mirror. A violation.

Something was watching him. Something knew the precise geography of his private space, down to the last scratch. The feeling of being an observer in his own life suddenly felt terrifyingly literal.

His breath hitched. He stared, mesmerized and horrified, at the door at the end of the hall. It was his front door. The same cheap wood, the same tarnished brass knob. But in the game, it felt like the entrance to a tomb.

He was about to slam his finger down on the power button, to cut the connection, to sever this impossible link.

But then, a sound came from his speakers. It was soft, but it cut through the hum of the PC like a razor.

A single, distinct footstep.

It came from the other end of the digital hall. Near the door.

Leo hadn't moved.

He wasn’t alone in the hallway. And he had a sickening feeling he wasn’t alone in his apartment, either.