I double-clicked.
The file was the only thing on the desktop. No icons, no wallpaper—just a black screen and that name: alstain.avi . 14.3 MB. Modified December 31, 1999, 11:59 PM.
At 0:12, the chair turned. Not because someone moved it—it turned , slowly, on its own, facing away from the hand. The hand followed. The smudges on the wood began to spell something. Not letters. Coordinates.
The file ended there. No error. No loop. Just a frozen frame of the hand, pointing. alstain.avi
At 0:21, the hand pointed directly at the lens.
At 0:17, the screen flickered. For one frame—just one—the chair was gone. In its place: a mirror. And in the mirror, you . Not you watching. You from three seconds in the future, mouth open, eyes knowing something you hadn’t learned yet.
For a moment, nothing. Then the image shuddered into existence: a single chair in the middle of an empty room. Fluorescent light. No shadows. The chair was wooden, straight-backed, the kind you’d find in an abandoned school. I double-clicked
I closed the player. The desktop was still black. But now, underneath alstain.avi , a new file had appeared: alstain_reply.avi . Same size. Same timestamp.
At 0:07, the hand began to tap. One knuckle. Tap. Tap. Tap. Each tap left a dark smudge on the wood. The smudges didn’t fade. They spread.
The video had no audio—not silence, but the absence of sound, like a room after a gunshot. Not because someone moved it—it turned , slowly,
At 0:03, a hand rested on the chair’s back. Pale. Long fingers. No person attached—just the hand, as if the arm dissolved into static.
But last night, I heard tapping from inside my bedroom wall. Tap. Tap. Tap. And this morning, the chair at my desk had turned to face the corner. End of piece.