But the console is still down there. And water doesn’t erase a ROM. It just waits.

The game ran perfectly. The opening cutscene on Makin Island—rain, flames, the rasp of a Japanese officer’s last words—loaded without a hitch. Leo played through “Semper Fi” on Veteran, knuckles white around a third-party controller. Every time he died, the game stuttered just for a moment, as if remembering something it had forgotten. He chalked it up to the burned disc.

Leo was seventeen, obsessed with old war games, and broke. A legitimate copy of Call of Duty: World at War for the Xbox 360 cost more than his weekly lunch budget. So when he slid that disc into the tray and saw the Treyarch logo stutter across his CRT monitor, he didn’t feel guilt. He felt victory.

Leo froze.

He told himself it was a script trigger glitch.