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It was a photograph taken from the passenger seat of a car moving at high speed. The foreground was a blur of a grey guardrail and motion-streaked wildflowers. But beyond the blur, perfectly framed by the window, was an ancient, crumbling stone watchtower sitting alone on a bald, green hill. The sky above it was the bruised purple of an oncoming summer thunderstorm, pierced by a single, sharp shaft of golden late-afternoon sun.

Whoever named it that didn't just want to save a picture of a road trip. They wanted to ensure that in the infinite sea of human data, this exact second in time—this exact viewpoint of a storm rolling over an old tower—could never be confused with anything else. 9AF3B32C-76D4-4601-A761-1ED072647942.jpeg

He pulled up the metadata. There was no GPS location tagged, no camera model listed. The timestamp simply read: September 14, 2018, 05:42 PM. It was a photograph taken from the passenger