The clerk glanced at it, then shrugged. “Trade-in from last week. Old guy. Said it was a ‘journey he didn’t need to take again.’ System doesn’t recognize the title, but the disc reads as a standard PS2 game. Two-fifty, no warranty.”

“You have 1 life. The town has 1,000.”

No menu. No options. Just Start .

She whispers: “The old save file is still here. Do you want to load it?”

That night, in his room, with the radiator hissing and the window fogged with frost, he slid the disc into his old backwards-compatible PS3. The console hummed. The screen went black. Then, a single line of text appeared:

He pressed X.

He had no old save file. He pressed No .

The girl smiled. Then she said, aloud, through the tiny TV speaker: “Good. Then you’re not him.”