Her grandfather’s letters? Green. All of them. The video of her sister? Green, even the thumbnail showed a tiny blurry figure taking a wobbly step. Her thesis? Orange, but recoverable—a few corrupted vector lines in the CAD files, but the core work was there.

At 3:17 AM, Maya woke to a chime.

By 4:00 AM, she had back 1.9 TB of data. The missing 0.1 TB? Mostly cache files, temp internet history, and one corrupted panoramic render of a museum she’d never liked anyway.

Her toddler, Leo, had been “helping” earlier, jabbing buttons on her laptop while she answered a phone call. Somehow—maybe a stray click, maybe a hidden shortcut—he had initiated a full format of the 2TB drive. The operation completed in seconds. The data, however, was now marked as “empty space.”

File type? She selected “Pictures,” “Documents,” “Video.”