EchoDock never offered him riches. It offered him a compass. When the original thread vanished—erased by moderators, drowned by spam, or simply aging out of the internet’s forgetfulness—the license key remained on a scrap of paper pinned beneath a magnet on Milo’s fridge. He had been tempted once to copy it into a veil of code and scatter it far and wide, to let anyone who wanted go through the same doors. He did not. He had learned the program’s quiet law: something precious shared carelessly ceases to be precious.