The video wasn't a recording from the past; it was a live feed of his own living room, taken from the exact angle of his webcam. But in the video, the room was empty, covered in a thick layer of dust. The window behind his desk was shattered, and outside, the sky was a deep, bruised purple.

Leo tried the usual suspects: 1999, 2000, 2012. Nothing. He spent three days running a brute-force script until he finally entered a date he’d seen carved into a park bench earlier that day: 2080 . The extraction bar began to crawl.

When Leo tried to open it, WinRAR prompted him for a password. "Password hint: The year it all stops," the prompt read.