However, the experience of watching Days of Being Wild on the Internet Archive is distinct. It is often not the pristine, 4K restored version that Wong Kar-wai intended. It is often a washed-out, compressed copy.

Leo opened the laptop again. He didn't watch another video. Instead, he right-clicked the cass/ folder and selected "Download." The progress bar crawled across the screen. 37 items. 128 MB. A whole person, compressed into less space than a single photograph takes now.

He wasn’t looking for the Wong Kar-wai film. He had the Criterion Blu-ray. He was looking for his days of being wild. The ones he’d uploaded, carelessly, to a GeoCities angelfire page in 1999. Back when "being wild" meant filming himself and his friends jumping off the roof of the abandoned textile mill into a pile of leaves, the footage grainy and stuttering, scored to a CD-ROM rip of "Song 2" by Blur.

The cursor blinked on an empty search bar, a tiny white pulse in the dark of 3:47 AM. Leo typed the words he’d typed a hundred times before: “Days of Being Wild Internet Archive.”