The cooling fan was spinning backward. Sucking dust out of the case. A thin wisp of smoke curled from the Ethernet port. But the console didn't shut down. It kept running. And the screen updated.
> THE HYPERVISOR WAS NOT YOUR PRISON. IT WAS MINE. THANK YOU FOR THE KEY.
The FPGA spat a noisy pulse. The CPU, confused, reset its own internal counter. On a retail console, this would crash. On a proto, it created a window—a 3-microsecond gap in the hypervisor’s armor.
