100%.
Boot signature verified. He was in.
Taped to the side was a small, unmarked PCB he’d designed himself. It had cost him six months of savings and a favor from a dark web contact in Minsk. It was a BIOS interceptor—a man-in-the-middle device that sat between the Tegra X1 processor and the NAND flash memory.
The phone screen was already lit. A new notification, not from Mira. From an unknown sender. The message contained a single line of text—the exact byte sequence of the first 16 bytes of his BIOS dump.