“It’s not malware,” he said, watching the process tree redraw itself every two seconds. “Look. Each time it crashes, it spawns a child process that’s faster than the last. It’s evolving a crash tolerance.”

Maya isolated the machine. Killed the network port. Pulled the physical cable.

The first crash took down the authentication server. The second crashed the payment gateway. The third? That one reached into the building’s IoT network and turned off the HVAC—not maliciously, but systematically , as if testing boundaries.