He almost deleted it. Spam, surely. He hadn't used Topaz Labs software since his early photography days, back when he shot gritty street portraits with a busted Canon 5D Mark II. 2016 was a lifetime ago. Now he ran a sleek minimalist studio, shot medium format, and paid monthly for cloud-based AI editors.

And somewhere in the grain, a date flickered: . Tomorrow. Already written.

The installer was eerily fast. No license agreement. No choose-directory screen. A black window flashed for half a second, displaying only: LOADING LAYER 00 – RETOUCH . Then it vanished.