His eight little gateways, restored.
He stared at the screen. The familiar pastel squares were gone. In their place, a ghostly white space and a faint message: “Most visited sites will appear here.”
One by one, they returned. Gmail. Google Docs. Reddit. BBC News. The woodworking forum. The bank. The messy GitHub link.
He felt a strange, hollow ache. These weren't just links. They were digital footprints, the worn paths of his daily journey. Without them, he was adrift.
He didn’t remember touching this. Had a rogue extension? A mischievous update? A glitch in the matrix?
Panic set in. That tile for the niche woodworking forum he visited twice a month but could never remember the name of? Gone. The direct link to his bank’s loan calculator? Vanished. The secret GitHub repository for his side project, whose URL was a string of random numbers and letters? Erased from existence.