At 100%, the world reset. For a second, everything looked normal again. Then I looked down at my hands.

The download bar filled. 10%... 40%...

I turned back to the terminal. The prompt had changed.

The skin on my palms was writing. Tiny, dense paragraphs, shifting as I moved. I leaned closer to read a line:

I frowned. I didn’t remember the lab’s systems having voice auth, but maybe it was part of the new security patch.