He started documenting it. Screenshots, timestamps. But when he viewed the screenshots on his phone, the taskbar was normal. Charcoal grey. The shift existed only on his primary display, in real time.

Leo never noticed when it started. No one did. It was the kind of change you feel before you see—a retinal ghost, a wrongness in the peripheral.

Then, one Tuesday at 2:17 AM, it shifted.

Panic arrived as a quiet thing, like a draft under a door. He searched forums. Reddit threads titled “Taskbar tint shift?” had one reply: “Don’t look at it directly.” Another post, from a deleted account, read: “It’s not a bug. It’s a threshold. When it turns white, don’t log off.”

Leo laughed. A brittle, dry laugh. Then he set up a script to record the taskbar’s hex color every ten seconds.

He didn’t log off. He couldn’t move. The white was not a color but an absence—a negative space that felt warm, like a mouth exhaling. The icons dissolved. The clock melted into a smear. Then the white spread upward, eating the desktop, the open spreadsheets, the edges of his open window.