The green phosphor of a high-security terminal flickered with a rhythmic, clinical pulse, casting sharp shadows across the workstation of Senior Systems Architect Elias Vance. To a casual observer, the task appearing on his screen looked like routine maintenance—a standard cleanup of legacy data. But in the high-security corridors of the Network Data Sanitization Center (NDSC) in Virginia, the reality was far more profound. This was not a deletion; it was a surgical excision. This was the beginn...