99% charge. He’d left it at 12%.

Karl set the T580 down slowly.

Karl’s hands went cold. He never put a SIM in the WWAN slot. But the XDA’s daughterboard didn't need a SIM—it had a direct RF tap that piggybacked on the laptop’s own antennas, listening for a wake tone buried in commercial LTE traffic.

Then the 4K panel split into four grainy video feeds, all black and white, all dated . A lab. A server rack. A woman in a lab coat holding a board that looked exactly like the T580’s motherboard—except where the WWAN slot should be, there was a small daughterboard with a coaxial port.

The screen flickered. A second later:

Not a pop-up. Not a Windows notification—he hadn’t run Windows on it since day one. Instead, a single line of green text appeared on the black terminal he’d left open:

His pulse ticked up. He glanced at the webcam shutter—closed. Good. He lifted the laptop, checked the Ethernet port. Empty. No physical connections. This was running from inside the firmware.

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