It wasn't a mirror reflecting her. It was another room. Another person.
She clicked.
It wasn’t Netflix. It was a live feed. Grainy, like a security camera from the 90s. A living room. Different furniture, different wallpaper. But the same blue light from a laptop. And sitting in a worn-out armchair, facing away from the camera, was a figure in a grey hoodie.
Her regular Netflix account had been acting strange. New horror movies would appear, ones with posters that seemed to shift when she looked away. A documentary about lucid dreaming had played for three seconds before glitching into static, and for a fleeting moment, she could have sworn she saw herself on screen—sitting in her chair, watching herself.
The figure slowly turned around. It was a man, gaunt, with a familiar face she couldn’t place. He was crying. Silent tears carved clean paths through the dust on his cheeks. He raised a shaky hand and pressed it against his screen—against her face.
She looked at her own reflection in the dark glass of her window. For the first time, she wasn’t sure if it was hers anymore.
Anya leaned closer. The figure in the feed leaned closer too, at the exact same moment.
A message popped up in the search bar, typing itself out letter by letter: