Each click was a door. Each slider was a time machine.

At 2:00 AM, he found a module not listed in the original brochure:

Elias found the CD-R at the bottom of a cardboard box labeled "Old Drives & Junk." It wasn't a pressed disc from a factory; it was a silver Memorex, the kind you burned yourself. On its surface, someone had written in fading black Sharpie: Nik Software Complete Collection 1.0.0.7 - 2013.

He slid the disc in. The drive whirred, coughed, then spun up with a determined hum.

His own face appeared on screen, but from a photo he'd never taken. He was younger. Standing next to a woman with soft eyes and a yellow dress. A woman he didn't know but, in that moment, desperately missed .

Elias sat in the silence, the ghost of the yellow dress burned into his retinas. He looked at the blank screen, then at the silver disc, now cold.

And the screen flickered.

He shouldn't have clicked. But his cursor drifted, and his finger pressed.