Citadel's final weapon was invisible: nanobots infiltrating smartwatches, rewriting biometrics to erase "flawed" histories. Lila's burn scar began to fade from her medical records; Mara's union badge NFT glitched into a corporate logo. "They're deleting us from our own bodies," Jules hissed, waving a scan showing Excel's DNA being tagged as "corrupted data."
Mara turned to the one thing nanobots couldn't parse: physical relics. She rallied users to digitize every scarred tool, every rusted timecard, every coffee-stained blueprint. In Buenos Aires, a retired autoworker uploaded the grooves of his wrench—millimeter-deep indentations from 30 years of torque—as a cryptographic key. In Tokyo, gamers minted "Glitch Artifacts" from the union hall's demolished bricks, each pixelated edge a firewall.
Excel's fur, now a patchwork of nanobot-resistant static, brushed against the punch machine's gears. The resulting feedback loop wasn't code—it was a scream: every ache, every pause, every story Citadel had tried to delete, roaring back to life.