Elias sat in the dark, breathing hard. Had it crashed? He reached out and tapped the spacebar.

The quality was startling. For a 'HDTVRip' of a show that supposedly aired in 1998, the image was crisp, almost unnervingly so. There was no grain, no static, no tracking errors. It looked 4K sharp, despite the file extension.

Elias watched himself on the screen as a shadow detached itself from the corner of his room behind him. He spun around, but there was nothing there.

A woman walked into the frame. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater that looked itchy. She walked to a window and peered out.

Coldwater was an urban legend disguised as a television pilot. It had aired once, late at night on a defunct public access channel in the late 90s, and was promptly buried due to a copyright dispute—or at least, that was the story the moderators on the obscure media preservation forums told. There were no streams, no DVDs, and only a handful of grainy screenshots on fan wikis.