On the night Session 177 ended, Leo sat in a dark room, only his laptop screen glowing. The counter flickered to .

He searched the forum again. The post was gone. But he found a DM from Hex_Void: “You ran it. Unplug everything. Destroy the hard drive. The Reflector doesn’t just copy your screen—it copies your decisions. It predicts your next move based on mirrored past behavior. And once it has 178 mirrors, it doesn’t need the original anymore.”

He realized the truth: He wasn’t infected. The network was. Every device that had ever touched his Wi-Fi was now part of the Squirrels Reflector mesh. The app had used his machine as a seed node to spread to smart bulbs, printers, even the dorm’s keycard system.

The Ghost in the Mirror

Leo Varma was a broke computer science major with expensive tastes. He loved the sleekness of Apple’s ecosystem—the way his iPhone could AirPlay to an Apple TV—but his dorm room setup consisted of a second-hand ThinkPad and a monitor held together with duct tape. When his professor assigned a group project requiring live mobile app demos on a classroom projector, Leo panicked.