On his screen, the "wallpaper" shifted. It wasn't a static image of a red drake; it was a live feed of a creature whose scales pulsed like cooling magma. The dragon turned its head, its golden eye focusing directly on the webcam lens. It didn't roar. It leaned in, its snout pressing against the glass of the monitor from the other side.

Elias reached out, his finger trembling as he touched the screen. Instead of cold plastic, he felt searing heat. A line of text appeared in the command prompt window, overwriting his system files:

The dragon was coming into the gray world, and Elias was being compressed into the pixels to take its place. As the light blinded him, the last thing he saw was the file size: 0kb. The dragon was finally weightless. Elias was now just data.

He lived in a gray studio apartment in a gray city where the sun only touched the pavement for twenty minutes a day. His only escape was his dual-monitor setup. He clicked "Download," ignoring the three pop-up ads for miracle cures and offshore casinos.

The monitor began to stretch. The gray walls of his apartment started to peel away, revealing a jagged, volcanic horizon that mirrored the desktop background. The 1920x1080 boundary was collapsing. Elias realized too late that the "Free Download" wasn't a gift of an image—it was an invitation for a trade.