Carlos muttered. “Mismatch means reimaging five machines. That’s a full day of work.”

Carlos spent the next three hours in the digital equivalent of a dusty basement. He found a community forum where an IT admin in Bangalore had preserved a Google Drive link. The post was from 2019. The link still worked. He downloaded the files, trembling as he scanned them for malware. Clean.

He opened his browser and began the hunt.

“I don’t have VLSC access,” Carlos said. “This is a small branch.”