It was 3:47 AM when the download finished.

But not for long. Somewhere, at 4 AM, a sleepless archivist in Busan, a retro-computing hobbyist in Oslo, and a kid who'd just inherited his grandfather's broken Korean PC all saw the same thing: Availability: 100%.

He mounted the ISO on a VM. It booted. Product key? He typed the one memorized from the sticker: J8K4T-... (he'd never tell it). It worked.

Then the hard drive clicked its last click in 2009. The recovery disc was lost. The product key was a sticker, long since peeled off by a curious little brother.

They clicked download.

Windows XP greeted him. He navigated to Media Center. And there—on the virtual tuner, fed by a dummy file—a recording from December 24, 2005. His father had left it there. Grainy, overcompressed MPEG-2. The family Christmas tree. His mother laughing. The cat attacking tinsel.