"Who built you?" he whispered.
He touched the surface of the chip.
The last time he saw that exact string was three years ago, on a server that had wiped its own firmware two hours before a financial audit. The time before that, it was on a nuclear lab’s air-gapped terminal that started spitting out prime numbers in the middle of the night. pci ven_10ec&dev_8136&subsys
The fan spun back to life. The log filled with normal chatter. The 03:00.0 line vanished from the PCI listing as if it had never been there. "Who built you