The $50k check arrived with an eviction notice, the landlord's note scrawled in Sharpie: "No more excuses, Mara. Pay or pack." She paid two months' rent, bought Excel a toy she wouldn't touch, and waited for the other shoe to drop. It came in the form of DataCore's lawsuit, their logo a sleek padlock that mocked her father's rusty toolbox.
"They're suing for your keystroke tech," Colette said, tone unusually quiet.
Mara smiled at the GitHub commit: "Frank45293 subroutine—Dad's timecard. Algorithm's heartbeat." DataCore's CTO had called freelancers "parasites" at a conference, but he'd never spent nights in a laundromat, coding with a cat on his keyboard. "Let them," Mara said, staring at Dad's photo. "They'll wish they'd left the broke freelancer alone."
She went live on DataStream, her desk a mess of cold coffee and Excel's shed fur. "Meet DataCore: they steal ideas from people who can't afford lawyers," she said, pulling up her code. "This subroutine? Named after my dad, who punched in at 6:03 a.m. for 27 years. That's not IP—that's a legacy."
Mid-stream, the laundromat's Wi-Fi died, plunging her into darkness. "See?" she laughed, phone flashlight illuminating her face. "Real life doesn't care about your patents."
A crypto bro's livetweet went viral: "Freelancer fights corporate greed… and bad Wi-Fi."