“It’s not a ghost, Helmut. It’s a firewall. The car needs a handshake from the server to unlock the bootloader, but the server keeps closing the port because my latency is over 300 milliseconds. It’s a digital impossibility.”

Helmut shrugged. “Pin 14 is the wake-up line. Pin 17 is the diagnostic ground loop. You had a floating ground. The car was asleep. The computer was shouting, but the car was snoring. I just gave it a little pinch.”

And the Mothership hated Klaus.