Leo should have been suspicious. Instead, he dragged it onto his desktop and ran it.

He double-clicked the zip. It unpacked faster than expected. No password prompt. No “please disable antivirus” warning. Just a single .exe with an icon of a smiling daisy holding a paintbrush. “Prima.exe.”

Then it smiled.

Silence.

A notification. From an app he didn’t install. Prima Cartoonizer v5.4.4 —the smiling daisy icon. The message read: “Export complete. Your portrait is now in the gallery. Look behind you.”

He ran. He didn’t stop running until he reached the all-night diner three blocks away, where he sat shaking under fluorescent lights, refusing to look at any screen larger than a watch.

He unplugged the PC. Yanked the Ethernet. Sat in the dark, breathing hard.

And behind him, in the photo, stood a figure that wasn't there in real life. A tall, thin man in an old-timey suit, no face at all—just a flat, white oval where features should be. He was holding a paintbrush. The daisy icon was pinned to his lapel.

But his phone buzzed.

He slammed the power button. The screen went dark. The fans kept spinning for a second, then stopped.

“You’ve been very still. That’s how I like them.”

The save dialog didn’t appear. Instead, the canvas went black. Then, letter by letter, in a jagged white font, a sentence typed itself:

And the real Leo felt his own mouth try to do the same—against every nerve in his face screaming no .