But the full key was VEN_10EC&DEV_8136&SUBSYS . That wasn't a device. That was a signature .

That was millions of devices. Routers. Printers. Smart TVs. Point-of-sale terminals. Liam’s hand hovered over the tweezers.

The line appeared. A familiar ghost.

"Talk to me, Echo," Liam muttered, cracking his knuckles. He was the hardware whisperer, the man called in when the ones and zeros went feral. He typed the incantation: lspci -vnn .

Liam felt the cold realization sink in. The SUBSYS field wasn't missing. It was being hidden . This wasn't a network card. It was a backdoor etched in silicon, a phantom node that could listen to everything on the bus—every keystroke, every memory access—and report to a listener that had no return address.

> WARNING. REMOVAL WILL TRIGGER SUBSYS_CASCADE. ALL HOSTS WITH VEN_10ec&DEV_8136 WILL ENTER RECOVERY MODE SIMULTANEOUSLY.

03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 07) Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:05b2]

But Liam knew. Somewhere, in the blind spot of the hardware specification, between the vendor ID and the device ID, a ghost had made its home. And it had chosen his reflection as its vendor.