Select “Picture” and click “Browse.” Leo’s heart hammered. He navigated to his “Saved Pictures” folder. He had one image in mind. It was a photo he’d taken last summer on a terrible vacation. A blurry, sun-bleached shot of a parking lot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was a discarded soda cup in the foreground. A dumpster in the back. It was, objectively, the ugliest photo ever taken.

He selected it.

He was still late for work. His coffee was still cold. But he had won. Against the badger, against Microsoft’s obtuse menus, against the quiet tyranny of default settings. He was the master of his own machine.

He slammed the toggle to .

The first result was a Microsoft help article. It was written, Leo suspected, by the badger itself. It used words like “personalization cascading menu” and “Windows Spotlight dependency.” He closed the tab in a rage.