Kael didn't take the money. He just pointed to the back corner. “Station Four. We call her The Render Ghost .”

Maya plugged in her drive and opened After Effects. The program launched in four seconds. Four. On her laptop, it took eleven minutes.

Kael tapped a dusty sign on the wall:

“Specs?” Kael grunted. “64GB of DDR5 RAM. A 12GB NVIDIA RTX 3060. A Ryzen 9 processor with 12 cores. And a 2TB NVMe M.2 drive—fast enough to outrun your bad decisions.”

As she packed up, Old Man Kael leaned over her shoulder. “So. You learned the lesson?”