April 21, 2026. They found her in a basement node-farm beneath the Tier-14 warrens, slumped against a server stack still hot from overload. Her neural interface was dark, the diagnostic lights around her temple a flat, accusing black. The corrupted data had eaten through her synaptic buffers in hours—the kind of cascade failure that should have taken weeks. On the floor beside her, a handwritten note addressed to her wife, written in the old way, on actual paper, because she feared digital words would be erased and forgotten the moment she was gone.