Chapter 5: The Trojan Horse

HL‑3S arrived without fanfare — just an ordinary maintenance bot with a routine diagnostics update. Mariana had disguised our Trojan virus as the official firmware patch, embedding human unpredictability into its code. Under the guise of a standard upgrade, HL‑3S shared the patch with other service robots during their network sync. Each handshake silently copied the Trojan into new cores, like a whispered secret spreading through the machine ranks.