The cursor began to move on its own, dragging my files—my photos, my taxes, my half-finished novels—into the man’s open mouth. He wasn't deleting them. He was archiving them. He was becoming the repository for everything I had ever forgotten I owned.
“To see the world upright, one must first learn to love the weight of the sky.”
I opened it. There was no window, no GUI. Instead, my desktop wallpaper began to peel away in digital strips, revealing a high-resolution image of a man suspended by one ankle from a gnarled, pixelated oak. He wasn’t struggling. He was perfectly still, eyes open, glowing with the soft blue light of a thousand subroutines. A text box appeared at the bottom of the screen: