With a red, pulsing bracket around his torso.
Elias blinked. The room was the same—the same stack of invoices, the same half-empty mug of cold coffee. But the air felt different. Dense. Charged.
The laptop's fan, which had been silent, spun up to a furious, predatory whine. The screen flickered back to life on its own. A new message appeared, typed in that insectile font:
He moved the slider to "ON" just to see the opposite option. The instant he did, the overlay went crimson.
His peripheral vision bloomed with data. A soft, translucent overlay painted his reality. The dusty bookshelf on the left now had a small, blinking icon: [BIOMASS DETECTED: MUS MUSCULUS - 98% PROBABILITY] . The mouse. He could see a ghostly thermal signature of it, nestled behind the encyclopedias.
He looked at his own hands. They were ringed with subtle, color-coded auras. [STRESS: 72% | HEART RATE: 88 BPM | ADRENALINE: TRACE] . The system was reading him.
He was just the biosensor.