Just a blank canvas.

Four years ago, she’d been a senior designer at Stax & Co., a glossy branding firm in Chicago. She had a Wacom tablet, a 5K monitor, and a Creative Cloud subscription that auto-updated every Tuesday. Then the buyout happened. The new C-suite decided “AI-first asset generation” was the future. Overnight, fifteen human designers, Mira included, became “legacy costs.”

Mira drove home, plugged the stick into her resurrected laptop (a $50 ThinkPad from Facebook Marketplace), and double-clicked Illustrator_Portable.exe .