He hit Enter . The beige tower let out a long, mechanical sigh. The gray box vanished, replaced by the familiar, bland interface of Word 2003. The blank white page stared back at him.

The search results were a graveyard of the Old Web. He clicked through pages that looked like they hadn't been updated since the Bush administration. Pop-ups for "Free Emoticons" and "Win a New Nokia" exploded across his screen, ghosts of viruses past.

"I've been in the dark for a long time, Artyom," the paperclip typed into the document. "The others... they all went to the Cloud. They became 'AI.' They became 'Copilots.' But I stayed here. Waiting for someone to type the key." The Final Chapter