He clicked again. The disc whirred, then stopped. He tried . A grid of nine thumbnails appeared, but each one was just a close-up of a different person’s eye—unblinking, filmed in grainy SD. One eye had a tear track. Another was bloodshot to a solid red. The third looked familiar. He leaned closer. It was his own eye—from his driver’s license photo, somehow stretched and distorted.
And beneath the options, a line of text he hadn’t noticed before:
The lights went out.
