He woke up to Edith Piaf softly singing about regret, one of the many nods to early twenty-first century pop culture he scattered throughout his day. The music was pouring through his studio-grade hi-fi system, the nanometer carbon membranes accurately reproducing every little fizz and crackle of the analog recording. For a moment, a spinning top flashed through his mind, then he opened his eyes and greeted the day. His room, tidy and small, was illuminated by reddish rays of sunlight, plainly visible in the incredibly dusty air. The day before, he had begun sorting through his newest acquisition, a collection of 2012 movies on DVD.

Over the last decades, his obsession with the first years of the twenty-first century had only grown. There was something about this time that just continued to fascinate him–that hopeless clinging to a past long gone, all that stupidity and grossness and beauty–he loved it. He got up, and while his implants performed a vigorous warm-up/self-check routine, he read the net.