The quality is slightly grainy, and there’s a weird "recorded from radio" tag at the very end, but to Mark, it sounds like absolute magic. He right-clicks the file, hits "Copy," and pastes it into his 256MB generic MP3 player.

He opens a browser and types into a primitive search engine:

The year is 2005, and the blue light of a bulky CRT monitor illuminates Mark’s face. It’s 2:00 AM. The house is silent except for the rhythmic, metallic whirring of a cooling fan and the occasional "uh-oh!" of an incoming ICQ message.

At 3:15 AM, the progress bar hits 100%. He double-clicks the file. Winamp springs to life, the "classic" skin stretching across his screen. The opening piano notes of "If" bleed through his cheap plastic speakers.

Mark is on a mission. He had seen the music video for on MTV Asia earlier that afternoon—Rico Blanco’s melancholic vocals over those haunting piano chords—and he needs to hear it again. Now.