“That’s not a cheat detection timer,” the voice continued. “It’s a decompression counter. You’ve been staring at the bomb, not the wire.”

She opened the payload builder module—a feature she'd never had to use before. She selected a single option: .

Lena smiled grimly, cracked her knuckles, and whispered to her glowing violet pointer:

They were preparing a coup. Fifty million gaming PCs, all converted into a botnet that answered only to them—on a global scale, all at the same synchronized second.

She hit .

Lena’s hands flew across the keyboard. She paused the game process with her kernel driver. The violet light froze.