For several seconds after seeing the number, Jake didn't move.
He sat in front of the monitor with one hand resting lightly on the desk and the other still near the mouse, his eyes fixed on the center of the screen as if staring hard enough might force the platform to correct itself.
0.00 VM
The number didn't flicker. It didn't glitch. It didn't refresh into something more reasonable after a delayed sync or a loading error. It just sat there in clean, quiet certainty, almost arrogant in its stillness, as though it had always belonged there.
Jake leaned back slowly in his chair.
The apartment felt unusually quiet around him. Not tense, not charged, but stripped down to the kind of silence that made small things noticeable. The hum of the refrigerator drifted faintly from the kitchen. Somewhere below, a motorcycle passed along the street, its sound fading into the distance. The curtains near the balcony shifted slightly in the breeze from a cracked window.
