His pulse ticked up. He glanced at the webcam shutter—closed. Good. He lifted the laptop, checked the Ethernet port. Empty. No physical connections. This was running from inside the firmware.
The screen flickered. A second later:
A delay. Five seconds. Ten.
Not a pop-up. Not a Windows notification—he hadn’t run Windows on it since day one. Instead, a single line of green text appeared on the black terminal he’d left open: