“The integration is live in T-minus ten minutes,” said Marcus, his voice tinny through her headset. He was in the server room, fingers hovering over a cluster of cables that looked like the nervous system of a sleeping giant. “Connecting Arena to the factory floor sensors. Real-time defect capture. No more paper lag.”

Outside, Press 4 groaned, unaware of the ghost that had briefly lived inside its sensors. On the factory floor, a worker scanned a batch number and waited for the work instruction to appear. It came, as always, from the Arena QMS.

The lights dimmed. The hum of the servers deepened into a growl.

But then the second packet arrived. And the third. And then a flood.

The screens flickered. The orderly tree of documents—CAPAs, audits, change requests—began to shiver. Folders expanded on their own. Sub-folders nested inside sub-folders like fractals. Elara saw a corrective action form duplicate itself, then mutate, spawning child tasks for machines that didn’t exist.