NexusPain was Rhea's final gamble. Smartwatches began sending shocks synced to users' old injuries—Lila gasped as her arm burned where a fryer had spilled years ago; Mara's shoulder ached from the night she'd carried Jules out of a server fire. The pain wasn't physical; it was a data echo, weaponized trauma.
But Union OS had a backdoor. Mara scrolled through the code—her father had encrypted it with stories of injury, not as weaknesses, but as keys. A steelworker's fractured finger, the way he'd learned to type with one hand; a nurse's chronic back pain, how she'd memorized patients' rooms so she wouldn't have to bend for charts. Mara fed those stories into the system, each ache a decryption code.
Excel knocked a coffee mug off her desk, brown liquid pooling over the keyboard—just like the night her father had died, when a spilled cup had shorted his prototype. Instinctively, she coded the glug-glug of the spill into the override. When NexusPain triggered, instead of pain, users heard 1989 union chants, distorted by the coffee-static. The algorithm couldn't compute: trauma transformed into solidarity.