He powered on the VM again. No GUI. Just a blue terminal prompt.

lifetime.entity.present = "TRUE" lifetime.entity.name = "Ariadne"

He installed the OS, then took a snapshot: “Base_2025.”

He spun up a new VM: Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, stripped down to 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM. Nothing special. But before booting, he clicked the Advanced tab and typed a strange boot parameter he’d found in a decade-old forum post:

lifetime_snapshot_retain=infinite