There was an old woman in a small village who survived the Civil War. She was seven when the Nationalists took Galicia — no great battles here, just men disappearing in the night, the silence after, the names no one said aloud for forty years. She survived the dictatorship, the hunger years, the slow thaw. She survived emigration — not her own, but everyone else’s. She watched the village empty like a bathtub with the plug pulled. She survived the return of democracy, the European Union, the euro, the financial crisis, and the pandemic. She died in 2023, three months after ChatGPT was released, having never used it.