The Citadel launched "Ghost Protocol"—AI avatars trained on stolen keystroke data to impersonate Mara's users. In Manila, crowdworkers were forced to mimic grandmothers' bingo habits to spread malware. Mara tracked the attacks to a server farm in Nevada, its cooling system humming with the rhythm of 6:03 a.m. timecard punches.
"Jules, they're using Dad's pattern against us," she said, pointing to the server logs. "But what if we flip it?"
They coded a counterfeit keystroke swarm—thousands of fake users typing in Dad's rhythm, overwhelming The Citadel's systems. Meanwhile, Mara flew to Manila to meet Lila, a crowdworker who'd lost her daughter's tuition to Ghost Protocol. "They took our stories and turned them into weapons," Lila said, showing Mara a cracked phone with Citadel's "Worker Efficiency Score" app.
Mara embedded Lila's typing quirks into "Frank45293_V4," creating a decentralized firewall where every user's story became a layer of defense. "This isn't just code," she told Lila. "It's a union."
Back in Oakland, Excel pawed at the toolbox's rusted latch. Inside, Mara found a yellowed union newsletter from 1989: "Strike the machines, not the workers."