The progress bar crawled. Outside, the city’s power grid groaned. 98%... 99%... Complete.
The rain lashed against the neon-lit windows of Elias’s cramped apartment, mirroring the digital storm raging across his monitors. Elias was a data-hoarder, a digital archivist of a forgotten era. While the world had moved to glitchy, compressed streaming, he clung to the purity of physical media and high-bitrate ISOs. But his old playback software had finally buckled under the weight of a corrupted firmware update.
