The monitor didn't display a menu. It turned pitch black, then slowly revealed a low-resolution rendering of a room. Elias froze. It was his room. Not a generic apartment— his room. The stack of unwashed coffee mugs on the desk was there. The tear in the floral wallpaper he’d hidden behind a poster was there.
The progress bar didn’t move in percentages. Instead, it crawled through words: Indexing Consciousness... Calibrating Sensory Input... Mapping Regret. GOSA-Release-0.15-PC-Windows_x86.zip
Elias stopped breathing. June 12th was the day of the accident. The day he had looked at his phone for three seconds too long. The day the world had ended for someone else while he walked away with a scratched bumper and a lifetime of silence. The monitor didn't display a menu