“Fine,” he said. “But you owe me.”

Arjun sat back in the attic, the old server’s fans whirring a lullaby. He knew the truth: the Cisco VPN client for Windows 10 wasn’t just software. It was a ghost from a less paranoid age—a digital skeleton key that still worked because no modern firewall expected anyone to be that desperate.

Arjun laughed bitterly. “You’re the threat, you overgrown antivirus.”

Arjun sighed. His attic was 30°C, full of spiders, and his wife would kill him if he woke her. But Elena had once flown to Singapore on a weekend to hand-deliver a spare power supply when his mainframe died.