Below were eight empty rectangles. He couldn't click "OK." He couldn't click "Cancel." The only way to interact with the message was to tile it. Panicking, he dragged it toward a random zone. The message snapped into place. It then read:

That night, he tried to delete FancyZones. He went into PowerToys settings, un-toggled "Enable Zones," and clicked Uninstall. The dialog box froze. Then, a new window appeared. It wasn't a Windows dialog. It was plain white, with black monospaced text:

"No problem," he muttered. "Just a bug."

The first sign of trouble came that evening. He was closing a browser tab, and his cursor twitched. The browser didn't just close—it un-tiled . It shrank, shuddered, and tried to snap itself into a zone that no longer existed because he'd switched layouts ten minutes ago. A ghost window, half-rendered, hovered over his desktop like a poltergeist. He had to kill it via Task Manager.

All three screens went black. Then, one by one, his applications re-opened. But they didn't open normally. Chrome appeared, tiled into a 1x8 horizontal ribbon—a single strip of tabs, eight pixels tall. Spotify tiled itself into a perfect vertical column, showing only the play button. Visual Studio Code opened, but each individual pane inside it—the file explorer, the editor, the terminal—had become its own top-level window, each frantically trying to find a home in the layout.