Silence.

The server room of the abandoned Millennium Tower had no right to still be humming.

Mendez took a deep breath. He cracked his knuckles. Then he began.

Vance slumped against the server rack, the adrenaline leaving her body in a shaky exhale. She looked at the ThinkPad. The Kali Linux wallpaper—the sleek, dark dragon—seemed to smirk.

Despite the move toward 64-bit, several specialized use cases still require a 32-bit environment:

"On this, the memory addresses are exactly what they expect. We can talk to Sierra-7 in its own language."

Kali Linux is the industry-standard open-source distribution for penetration testing and ethical hacking. Developed by Offensive Security, it comes pre-loaded with hundreds of tools for information gathering, vulnerability analysis, wireless attacks, and reverse engineering.

"What's the plan?" Vance asked.