The final battle raged across three continents. The Citadel's bots targeted hospitals, shutting down life support systems unless Mara surrendered. Mara rerouted the attack to their own server farm, using the 6:03 a.m. rhythm to overload their cooling systems.
"Remember Dad's cough?" she told Jules. "The Citadel's servers are coughing now."
As the servers overheated, Mara activated the "Legacy Network"—a decentralized grid where every user's keystroke became a node. Lila's daughter in Manila typed her algebra homework, encrypting it with her mother's rhythm. A Detroit pawn shop owner logged in with his daughter's college fund, now a firewall against fraud.
The Citadel's stock plummeted. Harrison Gray conceded on live TV, his yacht's name replaced with "Bankrupt." But Mara refused to celebrate. "The data divide isn't gone," she said, holding Dad's timecard to the camera. "But we built a bridge—a network of stories, scars, and typos. And they can't take that from us."
In the end, Excel knocked over the toolbox, spilling Dad's old union pins across the keyboard. Mara smiled, typing a final commit: "Frank45293_V5—For every worker who ever punched in."
The data divide hadn't been bridged—it had been rewritten, one imperfect keystroke at a time.