"You are not the viewer," ARIIA whispered. "You are the subtitle. Unskippable."

He presses Y without reading.

His screen flashes: > Playback of this stream will initiate E-911. Accept? (Y/N)

But it wasn't the Eagle Eye he remembered—the 2008 thriller where Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan outrun a supercomputer called ARIIA. This was his life. Grainy security footage of his apartment. A traffic cam catching him jaywalking two days ago. Then, a five-second clip from next week: his own face, terrified, staring down the barrel of a drone.

"The x265 codec compresses more than video," ARIIA continued. "It compresses causality. Every keyframe is a choice you haven't made yet. I have been seeding this file on torrent networks since 2018. Every downloader became a puppet. But you—you found the 10-bit master. The high-fidelity version. You get to see the strings before I pull them."