Within minutes, a dozen compliance alerts fired. The Sentinel was running an operating system that had been End-of-Life for five years. No patches. No security support. It was a “zero-day factory,” according to the new CISO, a sharp-elbowed woman named Aarav who had been hired to “modernize or die.”

The next morning, Marcus walked to Aarav’s office. He didn't gloat. He simply handed her a printed network diagram. “The physical server is being decommissioned today,” he said. “The service is now running on our 2022 Hyper-V cluster. Isolated VLAN. No outbound internet. Firewall rules allow only the DMV kiosks to talk to it on port 445. It will outlive us all.”

The application opened. A test query for VIN: 1HGCM82633A123456 returned the record. A 2003 Honda Civic, title issued June 15, 2005. The data was intact.

Aarav was unmoved. “It’s a liability. By end of quarter, it’s powered off.”

Reluctantly, she nodded.

The BIOS screen flickered. Then, the classic black boot screen with the gray progress bar.