The Citadel's CEO Harrison Gray announced "VaultCore 2.0"—a neural network that learned to mimic human error. Mara's firewall flagged anomalies: typos that matched her childhood bike accident scars, pauses that mirrored Excel's midnight demands for tuna. "They've been watching me for years," she whispered, scrolling through breached biometric data.
Jules discovered The Citadel had hacked Dad's old dockworker union database, mining decades of timecard records to replicate his rhythm. "They're not just fighting us," Jules said. "They're erasing the past."
Mara devised a "chaos protocol"—code that introduced random typos and coffee stains into the system, making it impossible for VaultCore to distinguish real users from noise. But The Citadel retaliated by buying Excel's brand of tuna, hiking prices to bankrupt Mara's supporters.
In a desperate move, Mara went live from Dad's old workshop, now a shrine to his tools and timecards. "They think they own the future," she said, holding up his rusty wrench. "But the past is fighting back."
The broadcast was interrupted by a power surge—The Citadel had hacked Oakland's grid. But the live feed had already spread: union halls across the country lit up with Dad's 6:03 a.m. timecard rhythm, typed into keyboards as a digital strike.