They demolished the union hall first. Mara watched on a grainy livestream as a bulldozer crushed her father's workbench, the one where he'd taught her to solder at 12. But Legacy users didn't just mourn—they weaponized memory. Buenos Aires projected the amber glow of 6:03 AM, the time every shift used to start, onto the ruins; Tokyo gamers turned union pins into glitched NFTs that crashed Citadel's market bots.
Mara found the timecard punch machine in a basement, buried under rusted circuit boards. Its metal teeth still had the indent of her father's thumbprint, the gears sticky with decades of neglect. When she plugged it into the network, something hummed to life—not as a relic, but as a virus. Every login became a "virtual punch-in," the machine's clack-clack echoing through servers. Citadel's AI couldn't parse the rhythm—it wasn't binary. It was the cadence of a thousand workers slamming timecards, a beat no algorithm could quantize.