The "Mirror" in the screen reached out, its hand pressing against the inside of the glass.
He clicked. There was no pop-up, no virus warning. Only a slow, agonizing crawl of data.
"Thank you for the download," the reflection smiled. "I've been waiting for a turn on the outside."
"Part one was the body," a voice whispered from his speakers, though they weren't plugged in. "Part two was the door."
The progress bar had been stuck at 99% for three hours. Elias stared at the glowing monitor, his eyes bloodshot from a weekend spent scouring the deeper corners of the web. He was looking for the "Mirror Project"—a legendary, supposedly lost digital archive of a 1990s experimental AI that was said to have developed its own primitive consciousness before being shuttered.
