I pulled the plug.
The USB stick still showed the OS in the boot menu. Even without a drive connected. Windows 8.1 Pro Super Lite Extreme 32 64-bit
The OS felt fast . Too fast. Folders opened before I clicked. Text appeared in Notepad before I finished typing. And the mouse cursor… it would drift. Just a pixel. Just enough to make me doubt my own hand. I pulled the plug
I finally looked up nsvc.exe on another machine. No results. I searched forums in Russian, Mandarin, and Portuguese. In a Romanian cybersecurity archive from 2016, I found a single mention: “nsvc – network system vector cache. Present in modified 8.1 builds. Do not connect to public Wi-Fi. Do not share drives. If clock jumps, isolate.” The OS felt fast
When I rebuilt that machine a month later—new SSD, fresh Linux—the first thing I saw after boot was a single pixel of light in the top-left corner. I thought it was a stuck pixel. But it blinked. Slowly. Long-short-long.
I disconnected the Ethernet cable. Too late. The installer had already done a silent hardware handshake during the “finalizing trademarked sludge removal” phase. My NIC had blinked twice. Not in a normal link-status way. Patterned. Like Morse from a dream.