He opened it.

The operation completed successfully.

And somewhere in a cold server room, in a building Leo had never seen, another screen flickered to life—showing Leo’s own terrified face, frozen in the glow of a command prompt.

Leo laughed—a sharp, brittle sound. “This is malware,” he said to the screen. “Sophisticated, interactive malware.”

Except it wasn’t. The data column said: (value not set) . But when Leo double-clicked it, a tiny string appeared in the edit box, gray and faint, as if written in pencil on a dirty mirror:

His laptop camera light turned on. Solid green. Unblinking.