Elias smiled. He had spent his life searching for lost data. Now, he was standing inside of it. He reached out and clicked the floating icon for his web browser, watching as a glowing portal to the internet opened up in the middle of his living room.
The transition was instant. The solid black void that had occupied his 2560x1600 display for five years was gone. In its place was a mesmerizing, ultra-high-definition photograph of a star system he didn't recognize. The depth of the blackness between the stars was even deeper than his previous wallpaper, making the distant, swirling nebulae look like glowing paint on glass.
To anyone else, it looked like a broken display or a system failure. To Elias, it was a canvas of pure focus. 2560x1600 Windows 7 Black Wallpaper">
Elias reached out a hand, his fingers hovering just millimeters away from the glass of the monitor. The heat radiating from the display was intense, far hotter than a standard LCD should emit. He opened Task Manager. CPU usage was at zero percent. The GPU was idle. Yet, the screen felt alive.
Curiosity getting the better of him, Elias right-clicked the file and hit set as desktop background. Elias smiled
The darkness didn't fall to the ground; it floated, expanding into the air of his room, carrying with it the cold, silent scent of a vacuum. The icons on his desktop—Recycle Bin, Notepad, Network—were floating in the air before him as glowing, three-dimensional light constructs.
He moved a desktop shortcut for a recovery tool. The shadow followed it. He reached out and clicked the floating icon
Before Elias could reach for the power switch, the pixels of the wallpaper began to ripple. The blackness of space on his screen began to bleed outward, pouring over the silver bezels of his monitor like a thick, digital liquid. He stumbled back, his chair clattering to the floor.