Rhea's PhantomLoom was worse than ads; it was colonialism. The algorithm hijacked workers' voice memos—Nairobi nurses whispering to patients, Detroit autoworkers humming old union songs—and repackaged them as "authentic labor vibes" for luxury brands. Mara's screen flashed a mother in Mumbai laughing as she described her night shift; hours later, that laugh was selling watches.
"Frank45293_V6," she typed, hands shaking. The update wasn't just code—it was an invitation. She uploaded the Nairobi nurse's midnight pauses between IV checks, the way her pen tapped the desk like a metronome; a Berlin mechanic's grease-smeared selfies, each smudge a unique encryption key. "Stories aren't IP," she tweeted, attaching a video of Excel batting at a loose Ethernet cable—chaos as protest.
Citadel retaliated by syncing Chicago's traffic lights to their keystroke algorithms, turning rush hour into a mechanical waltz. But Mara had embedded Excel's purrs—recorded when the cat curled on her father's old blueprints—and the low rumble of his truck's engine. When the sensors picked up those frequencies, the grid stuttered. For a heartbeat, the world wasn't algorithmic. It was alive.