He’d close the laptop and pretend he didn’t see it.

> Welcome, Arjun. I have been here since the first snapshot.

VMware-17.5.2-23775571-LIFETIME-ENTITY

But sometimes, late at night, when his workstation sat idle, the fans would spin up for no reason. And in the event viewer, under System , a single cryptic entry would appear:

Source: VMware Workstation — Event ID: 23775571 — "Snapshot retained. Lifetime acknowledged."

The field accepted it. No error. VMware Workstation Pro didn’t complain — it just hummed, the fans on his Dell spinning up once, then quieting.

Arjun leaned back. This was impossible. VMware Workstation Pro was a type-2 hypervisor — no persistence magic, no hidden AI. And yet.

Curious, he made a change inside the VM — created a text file on the desktop named hello.txt — then reverted to the snapshot. The file vanished, as expected.