The rain had been falling on the city for weeks. Not real rain. The kind that falls on the internet — a constant drumbeat of probes, scans, and automated fists rattling every doorknob on every block, every hour of the day. Most people don't hear it. That's fine. That's what we're here for. My name doesn't matter. Call me the op. I run a small shop — we keep websites alive, patch the holes before the wrong people find them, and make sure that when something goes sideways, there's always a way back. It's not glamorous work. But this spring? This spring was something else. The Case Files Start Stacking Up It started, like most things do, with a tip. A researcher — one of the good ones, the kind who finds a skeleton key and hands it to the locksmith instead of selling it to a fence — ran an AI scanner across a codebase. The codebase was NGINX (pronounced "Engine X").…