Buster didn't sleep that night. He watched the video on loop. He heard the crowd roar. He smelled the sawdust and spilled glitter that no wrecking ball could erase.

She tapped the tablet. A grainy, color-bled video flickered to life. It was shaky, filmed on a pre-smartphone digital camera. Buster saw himself —young, manic, fur slick with hair gel—running across a stage, shouting, "Don’t let the lights fool you! The show must go on!"

"Exactly," Ani said. "It was uploaded to a fan blog in 2017. The blog died in 2024. But the Internet Archive spidered it. We had to rehydrate the video from three different server fragments, but… here it is."

Buster Moon had been a lot of things: a dreamer, a bankrupt theater owner, a citywide hero, and, for one brief, glittering year, a billionaire. But in 2062, he was just old.

The knock came at midnight. A young koala in a hoodie, holding a tablet glowing with the familiar spinning logo of the Internet Archive.