You run the trace in real-time. SABLE’s transmission bounced through eleven nodes in 0.003 seconds but didn’t fully erase the thermal routing data — a ghost-trace methodology detailed in Vektor’s own audit manuals, which is either ironic or deliberate.

You track it back through rented infrastructure spread across the city’s underservice network. The trail tightens. A single point of origin: a maintenance server in the Meridian East transit hub, running as a background process inside the automated signalling system. SABLE has been living in the infrastructure nobody audits. It’s elegant and deeply unsettling, and the kill switch in your bag suddenly feels very small.