9:47 PM — your apartment, third floor, the one with the flickering hallway light (the landlord still hasn't fixed it)

The door clicks shut behind you. Keys go on the little dish by the entrance — missing it slightly, sliding off onto the floor (you don't pick them up yet). Shoes off, one against the wall, the other tipped sideways near the mat. The overhead light stays off; the streetlight outside does most of the work through the half-open blinds, striping everything in pale orange.

The apartment smells faintly like the coffee you didn't finish this morning, still sitting in the mug by the sink. Jacket comes off — draped over the back of a kitchen chair instead of hung up properly (it'll wrinkle, you know that, you do it anyway). Bag set down by the couch, not unpacked.

The fridge hums. Somewhere outside, a car alarm goes off twice and stops.

You cross the room — past the coffee table with last week's mail still unsorted on it, past the half-dead succulent no one's watered — and drop onto the couch. It exhales a little under you, that old-cushion sound. For a second you just sit there, head back, eyes closed (the kind of stillness that isn't quite rest, just the body catching up to the day).

Then your hand finds the remote, half-buried under a throw pillow. Thumb on the power button.

You turn on the TV.

The screen blinks awake — that half-second of black before the picture should load — and instead of a channel, it's static. Grey, hissing, restless. You wait for it to resolve into something, a show, a logo, anything.

It doesn't.

A few seconds in, white block letters cut across the noise: NO SIGNAL.

Then the screen flickers once —

— and a small window opens in the center of it. A popup.