The code will only run on some specific soviet-era hardware, and the last hardware was destroyed 20 years ago. There's some new regime that is rumored to have rebuilt the original hardware, and is now on the hunt for the missing source code that is framed above the great grandchild of the original developer, who was executed for treason. The new bad guys are gunning for the source code, and it has to be protected at all costs, to prevent a takeover of the world.

I'm already seeing the inheritance jokes write themselves.

Someone have chatgpt write the screenplay now.

>The same code base passed down though generations.

>Legacy code.

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)