Leo’s mother called him on a Tuesday, her voice thin as old paper. "The old computer won't start. All the photos from your father's retirement party... they were on there."

The program chugged, then rendered: a gaudy, rotating 3D cube with his father’s face tiled across every side. The default song—a cheap MIDI waltz—began to play.

There was his father, mid-sentence, holding a glass. There was his mother, younger, throwing her head back. The lighting was fake, the shadows were wrong, but the moments were real. The software hadn't preserved them perfectly—it had framed them like a carnival mirror.

The download was painfully slow—498 MB, a relic from another age. He installed it on a virtual machine running Windows XP. The old splash screen flickered: a spinning silver globe, text that looked like chrome.