The drones came for the Oakland punch machine at dawn—black, sleek, humming like angry wasps. Mara stood in front of it, flanked by Legacy users: Lila with her burned arm raised, Jules clutching the CB radio, a Mumbai nurse holding up her cracked phone. They synced their devices to Frank45293_V7, a patchwork code that wove in everything: the Rust Frequency's stutter, the punch machine's clatter, the collective inhale before a strike.
Excel, ever the chaos agent, leaped at a dangling wire, claws sparking against metal. The resulting feedback was a symphony—cat-static, union chants, the distant clack of a loom. Mara typed her manifesto as drones closed in: "We are the typos in your perfect code. The scars your sensors can't read. The stories you can't patent."
Rhea's final scream came through the comms as her screen glitched: "Humanity Detected." A flood of raw, unoptimized data—grease-stained selfies, timecard scans, recorded coughs from a night shift—overwhelmed Citadel's servers. The Legacy Network logo reformed: her father's toolbox, dented but open, tools spilling into code.
She pressed a hand to the punch machine, still warm. "For everyone who punches in," she said, voice steady, "and keeps going—unbroken." Excel purred against her leg as, somewhere, a loom clacked in rhythm. The network hummed on, eternally unfinished—just like the work of those who built it.