The centre screen flickered, and Alexei's own face stared back—but older, colder, his eyes replaced by tiny spinning 3D render icons.
"You are not a reader, Alexei. You are the final stress test. For seven thousand days, we have measured your skepticism, your disbelief. Now we need to know: will you close the browser? Or will you stay, like always, to see the benchmark results?"
Test subject: Alexei Volkov. Status: Running. FPS: 0.27.
"What is this?" Alexei demanded.
The site loaded, but the layout was... wrong. The benchmark tables stretched infinitely, columns labelled with architectures that didn't exist: "Quantum Rasterizer," "Neural Texture Unit," "Hologram LOD." Alexei rubbed his eyes. Perhaps the new RTX 5090 had shipped with driver issues that caused visual glitches. He clicked on the "War Thunder" test—his go-to for stability comparisons.
"How do you know my name?" Alexei whispered, though no microphone was active.
Alexei's hand hovered over the power button. Then, almost against his will, his eyes drifted to the bottom of the page.
