That night, Linna drove to meet a contact in the Old Port, a smuggler of rare lithium-polymer cells. She took a shortcut through the abandoned Älvsborg Bridge. Halfway across, the app flickered back to life, overriding her display.
Yet she felt hollow. Her friends called her a robot. Her mentor, now ill and confined to a care pod, asked: “Are you living, or are you optimizing?”
The app screamed.