The chorus hit.

But in Leo's pocket, his phone buzzed. A notification from his cloud storage: File successfully backed up. "Its_My_Life_BonJovi_320.mp3"

That night, he didn't sleep. He ripped the 320kbps file to a USB stick, got in his car—a sensible hybrid now—and drove. No destination. Just the old highway past the reservoir. The song on repeat. By the third loop, he was crying. Not sad tears. Angry ones. Somewhere between the second verse and the guitar solo, he had become a stranger to himself.

He downloaded the file. It took three seconds. A ghost finished traveling through fiber optics to land in his Downloads folder.

The next morning, he called in sick. First time in four years. Then he did something absurd: he found an old guitar classifieds listing, drove two hours to a pawn shop in a strip mall, and bought a beat-up Ibanez with a cracked pickguard.