Her heart hammered. Corruption? The RAID array was mirrored three ways. She ran a hash check against the backup from six hours ago. The hash matched. The file was physically intact.
Frustrated, she opened the executable in a low-level hex editor. What she saw made her lean closer. The code was… wrong. It wasn't random corruption. It was rearranged . Entire blocks of assembly had been moved. Loops had been unrolled in ways no compiler would ever do. And in the middle of the data section, where there should have been null padding, there was a string of plain English: nxserver.exe
She stumbled to her office, coffee cold in her mug from the night before. On her screen, the server logs were a waterfall of crimson. Her heart hammered