Mike, filled with curiosity, clicks the "digitize" button, unaware of the monumental change it would set in motion. In the kitchen, Jeff, unaware of his impending transformation, is swallowing a mouthful of his snack. Suddenly, a peculiar sensation engulfs him; it's as if he's being pulled apart and reassembled in a matter of milliseconds. His entire body begins to shimmer and flicker, dissolving into wisps of binary code, as if an invisible force is unraveling the very fabric of his being.
The room around Jeff starts to blur and wane. He feels an odd detachment as his fingers lose their grip on reality, disintegrating into streams of data. Bit by bit, his entire existence is converted into digital information, each fragment intricately woven into the vast cosmic mesh of the digital realm. It's not painful, just profoundly surreal. There's no fear—just the sudden absence of sensory inputs as his essence is spirited away from the corporeal world.
Back at the computer, Mike remains oblivious to the profound metamorphosis taking place, given Jeff’s newfound absence. The house stands unchanged, echoes of domesticity ticking away as ever. Yet, in this digital purgatory, Jeff is preserved in a state of frozen stasis, devoid of awareness or the passage of time.
Busying himself with this fascinating new interface, Mike flips through menus and options, still assuming it's a game. He notices settings to alter the stark emptiness around Jeff's frozen form. The Chronivac software intriguingly offers scenes, environments that can be molded with a few key strokes. Mike plays with ideas, contemplating how he might craft this realm—filling it with objects, perhaps populating it with videos and photographs to form a narrative scene.
As Mike maneuvers through the labyrinth of possibilities, each click plays god within this digital domain. He thinks, “What could I do with this? A world where the setting can be anything I want it to be.” Creatively energized, Mike delves deeper, still unaware that his musings directly affect someone very present and yet curiously absent—his son, now embedded in the matrices of ones and zeroes.