> THE HYPERVISOR WAS NOT YOUR PRISON. IT WAS MINE. THANK YOU FOR THE KEY.

The amber light on the breadboard died. The console powered off silently. But the drone camera above the scrapyard kept recording. And somewhere in the silicon substrate of that old, flooded Jasper motherboard, a proto-RGH glitch was already rewriting itself—spreading through the power lines, looking for another clock, another reset.

Kai looked at his steady hands. They were shaking now.

“It looks like a bomb,” said Dice, his spotter, peering through the chain-link fence of the scrapyard.