The time stamp now read 00:00 again. The hallway was no longer empty. The woman stood directly in front of the camera, pressing the balloon against the lens. Pop. The screen went red. When the color cleared, Mara saw herself—sleeping, three hours from now, in her own bedroom. The camera angle was from the ceiling corner. She didn’t own a camera there.
It was 3:47 AM when the file appeared on the city’s central surveillance server. No upload log. No source IP. Just a name: . 052015-881.mp4
Technician Mara Chen noticed it only because the system flagged a corrupted metadata field. Standard protocol said delete and ignore. But the file size was exactly 88.1 MB—too precise for a glitch. She copied it to an air-gapped terminal and pressed play. The time stamp now read 00:00 again
In the feed, her future self sat up in bed, turned to the corner ceiling, and smiled—exactly the same smile as the blurred woman in the hallway. The camera angle was from the ceiling corner
