He realized his mistake. The heavy bass of the tavern's background music had vibrating his audio implant, making him hear what wasn't there. She hadn't said Silas. She had said "silent."
Silas froze. She had said his name. He checked the file properties. The creation date was listed as half a century before he was born. He felt a cold sweat break across his neck. He rewound the file a few seconds. 39017mp4
He pulled the device out and set it on the scarred metal table. Scrawled across a piece of fading physical tape on the back was a single, cryptic label: 39017.mp4. He realized his mistake
"...It's not noise," Thorne's recording played again. "It's data. It is self-replicating." She had said "silent
"Elias?" Thorne asked on the recording. She turned the camera toward him.
On the screen, the file name at the top of his vision changed. 39017.mp4 began to delete itself, character by character. In its place, a new file was being written directly into his neural memory drive. It was titled: 39018.mp4.