The cursor still moved.

He tried to uninstall it. The uninstaller window opened, then closed. He tried to end the process in Task Manager. "T16_Service.exe" restarted itself in 0.3 seconds. He yanked the USB cable out of the port.

It was everything. Every click, every flick, every panicked spray-and-pray. Over 2.4 million lines. His hand was shaking now—not from adrenaline, but from the creeping realization that the driver had been recording him. Not just inputs. It had built a model .

Not where he aimed. Not a lag spike. It moved deliberately , a slow, arcing drift toward the bomb site. He yanked the mouse right. The cursor drifted left. He lifted the mouse. The cursor kept moving.

2025-01-17 23:14:02 — USER INPUT: Left click, x: 482, y: 731. 2025-01-17 23:14:03 — USER INPUT: Mouse movement, delta: +12, -4. 2025-01-17 23:14:04 — USER INPUT: Right click.

Arjun never thought much about the driver software for his T16 Wired Gaming Mouse. It came on a tiny, unbranded CD in a box that smelled of recycled cardboard and cheap plastic. The mouse itself was fine: matte black, a few programmable buttons, RGB lighting that bled through the honeycomb shell like a neon sigh. He downloaded the driver from a website that looked like it hadn't been updated since 2014. "T16 Gaming Suite v. 2.4.7." He installed it, clicked "Apply," and forgot about it.