Marco slowly closed his laptop. He didn't call his boss. He didn't file a ticket.

The router’s normally silent fans spun up to a jet-engine whine. The temperature in the closet rose by ten degrees. And the amber LED on the front panel turned blue .

Marco had never seen a blue LED on a 2900. They didn't have blue LEDs.

The router’s console port was a dead thing, a cold RS-232 scar on a metal chassis. For three years, it had sat in the damp corner of a forgotten telecom closet in the basement of Bldg. 7, blinking its amber LED like a dying heartbeat. No one had SSH’d into it. No one had issued a show run . It was a ghost in the machine, running an ancient IOS version riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese.

But then, something changed.

router>

Marco leaned back. His coffee cup trembled in his hand. "What the hell is 'Neural Routing Protocol'?"