The breakthrough came during a blackout. Jules, flashlight in hand, pointed to the Union OS code—rows of binary interspersed with irregular gaps. "It's not just labor rhythms," she said. "It's rest rhythms. The 90-second pause after a welder lifts their mask, the 3-minute smoke break that's never on the clock." Mara pressed a hand to her chest, feeling her heartbeat against the scar from the server fire.
She designed the Breath Protocol: every user's inhale-exhale cycle became a decryption key, synced to the punch machine's clack and the truck's engine hum. In Cairo, textile workers uploaded the sigh of looms between shifts; in Toronto, nurses embedded the cadence of a patient's rattled breath into their logins. Citadel's sensors couldn't distinguish resistance from respiration—both were gloriously, stubbornly imperfect.
Rhea's response was a neural interface—CogniLink—promising "seamless productivity." But when a Pittsburgh steelworker tried it, his memories of a crushed finger overloaded the system. Mara smirked: they'd forgotten pain is part of the body's code too.