But the girl fights back. She is a guerrilla metaphysician. When the city sends in data miners disguised as sheep, she turns them into actual sheep and sends them off a cliff that leads to a better place. When the algorithms try to predict her next move, she sits perfectly still for eternity. She knows that the city’s greatest weakness is its insistence on pattern recognition. The girl is the anomaly. She is the beautiful, unparseable error.
When the city finally opened its eyes again, she was gone. But the buildings were no longer grey. They were stained with the hues of a sunset that had never happened, and the cobblestones, though still watching, looked a little more like they were daydreaming.