His only anchor was a 64GB USB drive, worn smooth as sea glass, that hung from a lanyard under his shirt.
“Portable,” Marco said. “Like me.”
Fatima leaned over his shoulder. Her expression softened into something like respect. “You did that without installing anything?”
He sat in a corrugated metal trailer at a desalination plant outside Dammam, Saudi Arabia. The site manager, a woman named Fatima who trusted no one, handed him a laptop. “No software installs. No network. You have two hours to verify the pump house integration against the structural model.”
The laptop was sterile—Windows 10 LTSC, locked down by corporate IT. No admin password. No USB storage write access (though read was still enabled). Fatima watched him from the corner of the trailer, arms crossed.
Marco’s version was special. He’d added a Python script that watched for changes in XREF paths and a tiny SQLite database that tracked revision hashes. He called it The Wanderer .