It was in the act of hibernation itself.

“Impossible,” she whispered.

But the 3:15 AM wake-ups? That was the ghost trying to phone home. The original Lotus-Eater was designed to “wake” the shadow session when the real user was asleep, compress its stolen data into a tiny watermark inside the hiberfil’s unused slack space, and then—when the user next hibernated—that data would jump to any other XP machine on the same power grid via low-voltage line noise.

She typed the command. The system paused.