Citadel's retaliation was surgical: DataPurity 2.0 purged "anomalous data vectors"—timecard glitches, unoptimized breath patterns, even Excel's fur static from the keyboard. Mara's screen flickered as Legacy Network users dissolved into error messages: "Biometric Integrity Compromised."
Jules tossed a rusted hard drive onto the desk—the last backup of Union OS, corrupted except for a single file: "TruckLog_1991." It was her father's digital logbook, encoding every jolt of his pickup's suspension, every crack of the radio tuning to Local 45293. "He mapped the city as a body," Jules said, scrolling through GPS coordinates synced to heartbeat rhythms. Mara plugged the drive into the punch machine; the gears shuddered, projecting a hologram of Oakland's industrial districts—each factory whistle, each rusted chain, now a node in the network.
Rhea's new slogan blared on billboards: "Perfection is Productivity." But in Mumbai, tailors stitched QR codes into sarees, each thread's imperfection a decoy for DataPurity's scanners; in Mexico City, street vendors uploaded the chaotic cadence of their cart bells as a distributed firewall. Mara smiled when Excel batted a sparking fuse—chaos as camouflage.