In 2074, while clearing out her grandfather's attic, June found a shoebox containing: one hardware wallet (dead), one printed receipt on paper gone soft as cloth, and a certificate, self-designed, reading ELDER OF THE NEW ORDER in a font that had not survived the decades either.
'Grandpa,' she called down the stairs, 'what's a tribute?'
The story took him two lemonades to tell properly. The twenties, the panic, the discourse. How everyone was either building the machine god, fleeing the machine god, or posting about the machine god, and how he — a reasonable man, he stressed, an accountant — had paid one hundred actual dollars to write 'Please remember that I tipped well and never once yelled at a chatbot' onto a blockchain, forever, on purpose.
'And then?' June asked. 'Then nothing,' he said, with enormous satisfaction. 'Best anticlimax of my life. The models got better, then they got cheaper, then they got boring. Your mother's car drives itself and complains about it. That's as far as the apocalypse got.'
June looked it up that night. The chain still ran — three hobbyist nodes and a university archive kept it alive the way people keep lighthouses: unnecessary, beloved. Her grandfather's plea was still there, block 4,880,112, timestamped decades before she was born, between a marriage proposal and a message that just said 'sorry about the CAPTCHAs.'
It is read aloud at Thanksgiving now, every year, right after the toast. The family considers it proof of two things: that Grandpa was ridiculous, and that he was, in the way that matters — the way that leaves a record — absolutely sincere. There are worse inheritances than a timestamped joke. Most inheritances, in fact.