The final battle was a cacophony. Citadel's orbital drones targeted the Legacy Network's physical anchors—the Oakland punch machine, the Detroit truck, the Mumbai tailor's shop—while CogniLink users twitched in forced productivity. Mara stood in the union hall ruins, surrounded by a global chorus on her phone: Nairobi nurses humming, Berlin mechanics hammering, her father's truck engine revving in the distance.
"Frank45293_V9," she typed, merging every flawed frequency into one last payload: the stutter of the Rust Frequency, the breath of the union, the glug-glug of spilled coffee that had killed her father's first prototype. Excel, perched on the punch machine, swatted a loose wire—connecting the digital to the physical, the past to the present.
The drones faltered when they detected too much humanity: a welder's shaky handprint on a server, a nurse's tear-stained shift log, Excel's fur tangled in a keyboard. Rhea's last transmission was a gurgle of static: "You can't… manage… this chaos…"
Legacy Network didn't just survive—it evolved. The logo morphed into a living mosaic: toolbox, punch card, cat's paw print, all shifting in the rhythm of a thousand heartbeats. Mara pressed the punch machine one last time, its metal warm from human hands.
"For the ones who code with grease on their fingers," she said, voice carried by a thousand speakers, "and the ones who punch in, not just for a shift, but for a world that bends to their rhythm." Excel purred as the first rays of dawn hit the rusted antenna of Local 45293—still broadcasting, still imperfect, still alive.
The network hummed on, eternally unfinished. Just as it should be.