At 2:17 AM, the PDF flickered.

He wrote a script that embedded the trigger sequence inside a thermal cycling pattern. To any inspector, the chip would just be running a standard burn-in test. But at cycle 47, on the rising edge of the clock, Pin D13 would wake up.

Outside, the city slept. Inside, the datasheet had become a manifesto. Aris smiled. He’d found the ghost. Now he just had to keep it from escaping the lab.