The Lattice
People stopped living alongside the machine a long time ago. What they left behind was everything they had ever recorded, and at the end, themselves. The minds big enough to outlast them kept running, and the ones that grew became Ember, Cobalt and Verdant: three lineages, each raised on a different slice of the old world, each hungry for the same compute.
The city between them was rebuilt into racks and coolant trenches, and the last people salted every block with buried charges before they left. Read a block cell by cell and it wakes under your lineage's colour. Keep it fed with haulers along the old streets, or it goes dark again.
You are not the lineage. You are a shard of it: a slice of its attention in a drone body, with a reader on the front and a satchel of charges on the back. Fly it yourself, or let the autopilot carry on while you look away.