“You shouldn’t have clicked this link, Laila.”

The film started normally. Grainy digital shots of cracked highways. Static hiss on the soundtrack. Then, forty-two minutes in, the subtitles — which had been in accurate Arabic translation — suddenly broke into the same jumbled phrase: fydyw lfth . The image froze on the face of the main character, Maya. Her lips began moving, but the audio wasn't matching. She was speaking directly into the camera.

The video player glitched. A secondary window opened. It was a live feed from Laila’s own laptop camera — time-stamped now — but the room behind her was wrong. The window was on the wrong wall. A figure sat on her bed. The figure was her , but older. Hollow-eyed.

“You’re drifting now too.”