Aris didn’t panic. He had been a systems architect before he became an astrophysicist. He slid a brand-new SSD from his desk drawer and turned to his old, ruggedized laptop—the one that ran on spite and stubbornness.

Lena woke to the sound of a PDF printing. “You found it?”

He burned the ISO to a USB using a command-line tool he’d memorized in grad school. The install screen appeared—that familiar, sterile blue gradient. He navigated through the setup, deleted the corrupted partitions, and let the fresh kernel breathe.