"Don't get comfortable," I warned, wiping the grease from my hands on my coat. "The Council is watching. One day, they’ll deprecate the 32-bit libraries he needs to run. One day, he won’t boot at all."

I sat in the back booth, nursing a glass of compiled Kotlin, when the door creaked open.

Access Granted.

"Get out of here," I said. "And clean your cache next time. You're leaking memory all over the place."

The neon sign above the door sputtered, casting a jittery yellow light on the rain-slicked pavement. It read simply: .