Then another chime. Then a cascade of them, a symphony of disconnection, as every monitor, every laptop screen, every phone display in the building began to minimize out of reality.

He was deep in the registry of a domain controller—one so old its uptime measured in years, not days. Buried under HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services was a key he’d never seen before: MinimizeOverride .

The tech asked her to clarify.