At first, she blamed Windows Update. That automatic nemesis had a habit of breaking things. She rolled back the last three updates. Nothing. She reinstalled the driver. Nothing. She disabled antivirus. Nothing.

They had disabled the switch. But Maya had rewired the house.

The mesh nodes came online. The VPN tunnel snapped into place like a seatbelt. The client's server appeared on her screen, and the data began to flow.

She pulled up a packet sniffer—Wireshark. The traffic was bizarre. Her laptop was sending out thousands of tiny, malformed packets to a non-existent IP address. It wasn't a virus. It was a counter-measure.

By disabling the driver, they hadn't crashed her computer. They had made her blind.

A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She wasn't alone on this network.

Her weapon of choice was Connectify Hotspot—a legacy piece of software that, when paired with a souped-up Wi-Fi card, could turn her laptop into a digital sorcerer’s stone. It could sniff packets, bridge VPNs, and weave isolated IoT devices into a single, secure web.

The rain hammered harder. Then, her secondary monitor flickered.