With every file gone, the zombie horde on the screen grew larger, their faces becoming clearer. They weren't generic assets. They were people from his social media contacts. His professor. The girl from the cafe. The final file to be deleted was System32 .

Suddenly, a notification popped up in the corner of his screen. Not a game achievement, but a Windows system alert.

The room temperature in his apartment seemed to drop ten degrees. He tried to Alt-F4, but the screen stayed locked. The "game" began to delete his C: drive in real-time, the file names flashing across the bottom of the screen like a kill-feed.

To Victor, a college student in Omsk with a dying laptop and a craving for nostalgia, it was a goldmine. To everyone else, it was a ghost. The uploader, Null_Pointer , hadn’t been active since 2014.