The world William entered on a sun-drenched April morning was not the one he had left. The car, a silent electric vehicle, was a mystery. The smartphone, a glowing rectangle of infinite possibility, was a sorcerer’s stone. The landscape of his hometown, once a grid of familiar streets and weathered faces, had been reshaped by progress, a dizzying collage of glass, steel, and forgotten memories. He had been a boy when he went inside, barely twenty-one. He was a man now, wi