Marcy looked at her screen. The script was still running. File by file. Ghost punches stacking up like a second shift no one ever saw.

User ID: 0042 | Name: J. Carver | Timestamp: 2016-03-14 03:14:00 — three hours before his first punch.

Terminal spit out: User ID: 0042 | Name: J. Carver | Timestamp: 2016-03-14 08:31:47

And in the empty office, two floors above a concrete vault, a silent ZK Teco terminal—unplugged for eight years—briefly blinked its green LED.

Then she wrote a new script. This one didn’t read. It watched.

She downloaded it anyway.