A hatch hissed open. I stepped through.

It started, as these things always do, with a late-night click.

The "Campaign" wasn't against the Covenant. It was against the memory of a simpler time. Each "level" was a year I'd lost. Each checkpoint was a moment I'd failed to appreciate.

I walked for what felt like hours. The audio logs weren't Sadie's story. They were mine. A recording of a voicemail I'd left an ex-girlfriend six years ago. A snippet of a laugh from a friend who'd passed away. The sound of my mother calling me for dinner in 2004.

Then, the sound. Not the familiar, mournful saxophone of the main menu. This was a wet, clicking static, like a Kig-Yar's claws on glass. My monitor flickered, and I was there.

The download took seventeen minutes. When I double-clicked the installer, there was no license agreement, no splash screen, no option to choose a directory. Just a progress bar that filled with the quiet menace of a loading screen from a game that knows you're not supposed to be here.

And for the first time in a decade, I didn't play to win.

Inside was a single text document. It read: But the mission never ends. To exit, uninstall your last ten years. Y/N? I stared at the prompt. My cursor was a tiny, blinking UNSC logo.