Daria had seen fake VPNs before — honeypots run by state actors or malware disguised as privacy tools. But this one was different. It was open-source, audited by a collective she trusted, and routed traffic through a mesh network of independent nodes in Turkey, Germany, and Canada.

She downloaded it, installed it on her laptop, and for the first time in months, she accessed a banned news site. The headlines were brutal — a protester she knew had been arrested. But knowledge was power.

Daria smiled. "Then you know it's already in a thousand hands."