Ivan thought of the smell of coal smoke in his village and the way the snow looked like crushed diamonds under the streetlamps in 1985. But the box didn't want the diamonds; it wanted: 04.12.1985, Perm Krai. He typed it. The diamonds vanished.
By the time he reached the end, the "Autobiography" was complete. It was perfect. It was professional. It was entirely unrecognizable.
Ivan looked at the printed page. He realized that a "blank" was exactly what he had created—a blank space where a human being used to be. He hit Save , attached it to the email, and sent his ghost out into the world to find a job.
He remembered the ink stains on his fingers in third grade and the professor who told him his poetry was "functional but uninspired." He remembered the heat of the library and the girl in the yellow sweater who studied across from him for three years, whose name he never learned. The template asked for: Degree, Institution, Year. He gave it the skeleton. The girl in the yellow sweater was deleted.