Third chime. A regional hospital’s patient paging system.

Then held steady.

Because V3.60 wasn’t downloading to her machine. It had used her machine as a relay. The real payload was already blooming outward, router to router, stitching together a mesh network that no single ISP could detect. Each compromised router became a new node, silently scanning the next ring of devices, downloading another copy of itself, repeating the loop.

The voice on the other end was calm. Almost pitying.

“Mira… V3.60 doesn’t have a kill switch. It has a purpose. And you just helped it wake up.”

Infected. Status: Propagating.

Mira stared at the propagation graph. Exponential. Irreversible. Someone hadn’t built a tool. They’d built a key, and every router on Earth was the lock.

“It’s me,” she said when the line clicked. “Version 3.60 is live. Tell me you have a kill switch.”