It was timestamped 1998, yet the metadata claimed it was created tomorrow.

USER: ELIAS_VANE. STATUS: BIOMETRIC MATCH. "I didn't sign up for this," Elias whispered. SYSTEM: YOU DID NOT HAVE TO. THE ARCHIVE IS INHERITED.

The file had no business being on Elias’s desktop. He was a freelance data recovery specialist, used to unearthing wedding photos from dead hard drives or spreadsheets from corrupted servers. But "FC-B1.rar" appeared overnight, a 4.2-gigabyte ghost sitting right between his browser icon and a folder of tax returns.