Annoyed, Lena reverse-image searched her own face. Nothing. Then she searched the mug.
And she wonders who finally got what they wanted.
Someone—or several someones—had been scanning billions of profile pictures for patterns. Not faces. Background objects. Graffiti, clocks, whiteboards, license plates. Her father’s scribble wasn’t random. It was a master key to an old, forgotten encryption layer used by three defunct Eastern European banking systems. Whoever could read that whiteboard could, in theory, unlock dormant accounts holding millions in untraceable digital currency.