Then, forty minutes into the broadcast, the screen flickered.
Panic surged through him. He tried to kill the process, but the keyboard was locked. On the main broadcast feed, the professional graphics were replaced by a garbled, mocking image of a skull. The audio turned into a deafening, distorted screech.
Sitting in the sudden silence of the darkened ballroom, Elias realized the true cost of the download. He had tried to save a few hundred dollars, and in exchange, he had lost his reputation, his data, and his future. The "full free download" had been the most expensive mistake he ever made.
A strange window popped up on Elias’s control monitor—one that wasn’t part of the software. It wasn’t an error message. It was a command prompt, lines of green code scrolling at impossible speeds. His mouse cursor began moving on its own, clicking through his personal files, opening his browser, and accessing his saved passwords.