Artyom put on his heavy headphones and pressed play. There was no beat, no lyrics. Just a voice that sounded like a thousand people speaking at once, telling him exactly where he had left his lost keys, the name of his future wife, and the reason why the sky is actually violet.

After clicking through seven layers of pop-ups and dodging "Your PC is Infected" warnings, he found it. At the very bottom of a grainy, lime-green website called SoundVault , there it was:

The song lasted exactly three minutes. When it ended, the file deleted itself. The lime-green website was gone, replaced by a "404 Not Found" error.