Leo didn't have a Vista disc. Nobody did. He sat in the dark, staring at his beautiful, unusable machine, now a perfect, gorgeous, utterly stranded ghost of an operating system.

"Whoa," he whispered.

He clicked "Yes" only because the "No" button was grayed out.

Then his second monitor flickered. An old "Clippy" paperclip—not the original, but a corrupted, glitching version with static for eyes—appeared on the screen.

When it returned, Leo gasped.