Arjun had seen this before. In 2009, a young engineer had downloaded a cracked version of RSLogix 500 from a torrent site. The file had contained a keylogger. The entire SCADA network had been ransomwared three weeks later. The plant had paid fifteen lakh rupees in Bitcoin. The engineer had been fired, blacklisted.

The plant ran for 847 consecutive days after that. No malware. No downtime from license issues.

Silence.

At 3:17 AM, he went online with the CJ2. The program checksum matched. He forced the faulty output that had caused the freeze — a stuck bit in a forgotten data register. The conveyor shuddered, then rolled.

"I can't do that," Arjun said.

"Sir, it's not free. The license costs. And I don't have our old activation key."

So Arjun had learned CX Programmer — grudgingly, at first, then with the reluctant respect of an old craftsman. He'd programmed the new PLCs, set up the CJ2 racks, written the ladder logic for the conveyor interlocking. He'd saved the .cxp files on a company laptop that had been decommissioned in 2021.