In the silence, Marcus heard a faint click from the server room down the hall. The sound of forty-seven hard drives spinning down at once.
He typed HELP . A list of commands scrolled by. Most were gibberish, but one caught his eye: shortcut for remote desktop connection
The screen refreshed, showing a window he recognized: his own RDP login screen from thirty seconds ago. Then it started playing. His password appeared, character by character, as he typed it. His private key path. Everything. In the silence, Marcus heard a faint click
A list of forty-seven names filled the screen. Someone—or something—had been here before him. Each name corresponded to one of his servers. Each one had a timestamp from the previous night. A list of commands scrolled by
His fingers flew: Win + R , m s t s c , Enter .
The screen flickered. But instead of the familiar Windows Server desktop, he saw a black console with a blinking cursor. A single line of text: