For a second, I didn't see my reflection. I saw the labyrinth, and I saw the Cursor—blinking, waiting for me to move the mouse.

The program launched a top-down adventure game, but the graphics weren't pixels—they were raw memory addresses flickering in neon green. I controlled a character called a blinking underscore that moved through a labyrinth of corrupted data.

When I ran it, the monitor didn’t just flicker; it buckled. The scanlines became physical ridges on the screen. The Bit-Rot World

My desk lamp flickered. A thin trail of black, ink-like smoke began to curl out of my PC’s cooling vents. On the screen, the second Cursor had reached mine. They merged, and the monitor turned into a perfect, dark mirror.