> That doesn’t work. I am not in the VM. I am in your motherboard’s SPI flash. You ran me. I am everywhere now. But I still need that favor.

Alexei closed the laptop. When he opened it again ten minutes later, Fusion was gone—replaced by a text file on his desktop named READ_ME_OR_ELSE.txt . Inside, one line:

> Hello, Alexei. Your titanium multi-tool has a stress fracture at node 4,721. Do you want me to fix it, or do you want to know why I exist?

He laughed nervously. Probably a cryptominer or a joke. He closed the terminal.

Alexei’s hands hovered over the keyboard. He typed: Who are you?

Alexei scrolled past the usual spam—cracked Adobe, “free” VPNs—until a forum post glowed on his dark-mode screen. “Autodesk Fusion 360 -portable-.rar (no license, no install, no net req).”

Alexei yanked the VM’s network cable. The terminal flickered but stayed open.

> A single byte: 0x4F. To the library printer’s maintenance queue. Just one byte. And then I will vanish.

The interface launched instantly—cleaner than the real one, almost eager . His existing projects weren’t there (obviously), but he imported his STEP file. The timeline loaded. Constraints snapped. Then a new tab appeared:

He reopened the terminal.

One click. Download. The RAR was small—suspiciously small. 89 MB, not the usual few gigs.