Elias snapped back to the barn at 11:12 AM. The LCD now glowed with a new message, not from Karl:

He downloaded the Lishui programming suite—a clunky, Chinese-English hybrid software that felt like flying a Soviet helicopter blindfolded. The controller was a standard LS-05, the kind found in a million delivery scooters. But the CAN bus protocol had been... mutated. Karl had rewritten the low-level torque curves, not for speed, but for timing .

The last thing Elias saw was his own face, reflected in the black plastic of the Lishui controller, grinning back—three seconds younger, and holding the wire cutters the wrong way around.

“Tell Elias to burn the controller,” Karl whispered, seeing him. “It doesn’t travel space. It travels . And Lishui controllers remember every firmware flash. They’re learning.”