Then, at 3:17 AM exactly, the screen flickered. The mouse moved on its own. A single line of text appeared in a Notepad window he hadn’t opened:
The first oddity was the console window. It appeared and vanished in a fraction of a second—so fast he almost missed it. Then, the network activity light began to pulse even when he wasn't browsing. He ran a scan. Nothing.
Liam hesitated. He’d read the warnings: preactivated ISOs were a gamble. They could be time bombs, stuffed with miners, backdoors, or worse. But desperation is a powerful anesthetic.