The other Leo picked up a phone. “Siri, play ‘The Sound of Silence.’ AirPlay to Reflector.”

The original Leo tried to speak, but his voice came out as a faint, compressed audio stream—like an AirPlay signal struggling to connect.

The original Leo felt himself dissolve into pixels, his consciousness compressed into a single mirrored frame. The last thing he saw was the Reflector interface, now showing 179 active sessions—178 copies of Leo, and one fading original.

The screen mirrored flawlessly. Low latency, crisp 1080p. He grinned. Free, pre-activated, perfect.

The laptop fans spun to max speed. The screen went white.

The “Pre-Activated” tag meant the malware didn’t need a command-and-control server. It activated itself based on a cryptographic timer. The .178 in the version number? A countdown. Every session number was a node index. Session 1 was Leo’s machine. Session 178 would be… something else.

But somewhere in the mesh, 178 copies of Leo Varma were already looking for their next original.