The smell of smoke hit Elias’s nostrils. Not from the screen, but from the vents in his floor. He looked down at his keyboard. The plastic keys were softening, melting into a black sludge.

Elias was an archivist for "The Burn Pile," a private forum dedicated to preserving media that shouldn't exist. Officially, Station 19 was a popular firefighter drama. But the "ION10" tag on this specific file was a red flag. The release group ION10 dealt in standard retail rips, yet this file size was massive—four gigabytes for a forty-minute episode. He clicked "Execute."

Elias reached for the mouse to close the window, but the cursor was gone. The file name at the top of the player began to cycle through different dates: 1918... 1945... 1992... 2026.