The screen went black. Then the BIOS splash screen of the VM appeared—except the VM didn’t have a BIOS. It had his motherboard’s BIOS. The real one, the ASUS splash screen of his actual desktop.
He clicked Yes.
The cursor moved to the center of the screen and typed, one character at a time: windows 7 custom iso
Alex pressed Y.
No calculator, no Notepad, no games. He typed winver . The screen went black
The screen filled with file names he didn’t recognize. No .exe , no .dll . Just names: Despair.sys , Remorse.cfg , Forgotten_Update_KB2014-07-17.cab . Timestamps from the future—and the past. 1999. 2031. One from November 5, 1955. no .dll . Just names: Despair.sys