For ten seconds, nothing happened. Then, the screen flickered.

The screen went black. The server powered off. And in the silent, dark command center, Leo realized that the ghost of Sector 7 had never been in the machine. It had been in the back door they had all pretended didn't exist.

Leo Vasquez, a senior systems architect for the city’s Integrated Security Grid, knew this better than anyone. The Grid was a sprawling, invisible nervous system of cameras, traffic sensors, license plate readers, and environmental monitors. And at the core of that system, running on a hardened Linux server in the basement of City Hall, was a piece of middleware known only by its project codename: .

The pristine, empty street dissolved into a chaotic mosaic of pixels. When the image snapped back into focus, Leo gasped.

[INFO] [DHNetSDK] Goodbye, Architect. We have your fingerprint.