Alex tested the installers on a spare machine, an island of virtualized safety. The driver’s installation was a negotiation with anachronism: warnings about unsigned certificates, compatibility modes, obscure dependency DLLs. The utility’s interface was square and earnest—tabs for capture, motion detection, and a log window that dutifully recorded packet retries and handshake failures. When the camera finally answered, it did so in a wavering monochrome: a mattress, a stuffed bear, a puddle of daylight on a nursery rug. The footage jittered like memories on bad film, frames slightly off-kilter as if time itself had been compressed with the archive.