The demo was a graveyard. Leo found skeletal oil rigs, their legs encrusted with dead code. Ghost-nets of abandoned chatroom logs drifted past. He saw a sunken Sega logo, cracked and overgrown with digital anemones. The dolphin nudged him toward a fissure in the seabed.

Inside, a pod of other dolphins waited. But they weren't AI. They were ghosts—fragments of other players who had found the disc, dived too deep, and never surfaced. Their consciousnesses, stripped of ego, now swam as patterns of light. They clicked and whistled in a forgotten language of pure empathy.

No controller prompt. Just the word. He pressed Start.