He didn't just see the 8K world. He felt the cold vacuum of the nebula pull at his skin.

At 3840x2160, the image was a masterpiece. It was a landscape of a forgotten nebula, violet gas swirling around a dying star. The colors were so deep they felt like a physical weight in the room. He zoomed in, expecting the usual digital artifacts, the tiny squares of a world built by math. There were none.

Inside the reflection was a room that looked exactly like his own, but the man sitting at the desk wasn't looking at a screen. He was looking out through the glass, staring directly into Elias’s eyes.

The fans in the computer began to scream, spinning at a speed that shouldn't be possible. The monitor glowed with a blinding, iridescent light. Elias reached out to pull the plug, but his hand froze. The screen wasn't flat anymore. The pixels were vibrating, reaching out like tiny glass needles.

Now, it was a high-resolution image of a studio. In the center sat a man, frozen in 7680-pixel clarity, his hand eternally reaching for a power cord that wasn't there.