I Forgot I Ever Loved You (Zoe and Hayden) novel Chapter 450

Professor Layne looked at Zoe, sick with worry.

Almost six months of grueling labor were on the line. If Easton Group beat Apex Tech to the press conference, all their sacrifices would go down the drain.

Yet, in that heart-stopping moment, Zoe remained exceptionally calm.

"I understand. Thank you."

No bitter complaints, no explosive rage. Her unnatural serenity left both Professor Layne and Wyatt utterly bewildered.

"Godfather, I'm afraid I won't have much time to chat with you over the next few days."

Professor Layne nodded frantically.

"I know, I know. You focus on fixing this nightmare."

To him, the situation seemed completely hopeless and beyond salvage.

Zoe offered a faint, reassuring smile. "Yeah."

The second Professor Layne and Wyatt walked out the door, Zoe locked herself inside her private lab.

She ran every line of data through a high-grade diagnostic scanner but found no traces of rogue code or compromised subroutines.

Refusing to quit, she hunted for breadcrumbs until her gaze finally locked onto the master processing chip inside the bots' core framework.

She had architected the entire database herself, strictly siloing the developmental phases across independent teams.

Internal collusion was impossible. The only wild card was the master processor, imported directly from a specialized Italian tech firm.

Developing an in-house proprietary chip required billions of dollars in R&D and a minimum three-year lead time.

She simply didn't have the runway for that, so she had circumvented the bottleneck by purchasing pre-built commercial processors to support her proprietary software.

Wasting no time, Zoe surgically extracted the master chips from all the prototype bots and fed them into the deep-scan analyzer.

Just as she suspected, the hardware was infected with a deep-root spyware program. Every single action she took, every byte of data passing through the processor, was instantly mirrored, encrypted, and beamed out via a proprietary uplink.

As for the destination IP, the source code was scrubbed completely clean. Untraceable.

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