The ghost firmware had patched a buffer overflow in her laptop’s own network driver—a zero-day she didn’t even know existed.

"Yes," she whispered.

Someone—or something—had written a self-assembling firmware patch that hunted for the logic bomb, neutered it, and hardened the router’s bootloader against further tampering.

Eliska realized the truth. The original V500R020C00 firmware had a backdoor. Not a spying backdoor—a suicide switch. A logic bomb left by a disgruntled engineer that would, on a specific date, brick every HG8145v5 in the European grid.