In an isolated virtual environment, time is the first weapon stripped from a prisoner.
Lin Tao sat cross-legged on the seamless floor, his back straight and his hands resting palm-up on his knees. In enterprise hypervisors, untrusted guest containers were deliberately denied access to high-care hardware timestamps. The order to read processor time-stamp counters was intercepted and masked. It replaced real heartbeat care with a coarse, man-made clock that ticked only once every several thousand operations.
Without an accurate timer, an attacker couldn’t measure heartbeat differences in memory access latency. Side-channel analysis became theoretically impossible.
A software abstraction can mask an order, Lin Tao analyzed with calm, razor-sharp clarity, but it can’t mask the physical passage of breakdown through matter. Time doesn’t belong to the overseer-core. Time belongs to heat laws.
Lin Tao set about constructing a living-sound hybrid clock.
He reached into his breast pocket. Then he drew his land-mapper metal pen, positioning the pure-crystal star-white-gold micro-needle over his left thumb callus. He drove the point a tiny fraction of an inch into the stringy skin. He held the needle steady until the sharp sting cleared his sense senses.
[Branch checked: physical main]
He withdrew the needle and pressed his thumb firmly against the wrist blood vessel of his left wrist.
