“Thank you Tamsin, Vic, and everyone for the company, and again happy birthday Fae, it was so great to see you all again!” said Keira. “And Liz, Andy, are you sure you are OK with taking us all the way to Waterford with the car? Let us pay for the diesel at least."

“Nonsense! That’s what friends are for. Also, we could spend the night somewhere there and go sightseeing for a bit tomorrow, so… you are basically doing us a favor!” replied Andy.

Right after the two couples set off, Jenny and Matt also decided to take their bikes and go into “downtown Fermoy” for a drink or something, as Matt suggested.

And so, only the Consolis remained in the house, and both Finn and Fae decided that they could spend the night after all: her parents didn’t seem to mind, plus Finn really wanted to get to the bottom of the whole newspaper article thing. As they all had a huge meal that ended up lasting over two hours, everyone agreed that they should just have some tea and biscuits for dinner, so Vic ensured that he had a good supply of logs for the fireplace, and everyone moved into the living room. After a few minutes, Finn decided to confront his father about his behaviour earlier, and asked him about the article in the paper: he really wanted to know why he seemed so unusually shaken by it. Vic looked at Finn for a second, and then he looked at Tamsin, as if he was asking for permission to do something. Tamsin looked back at him and nodded.

“Right, maybe today is the right time. After all, you are both not children anymore, and it’s better that you learn about this from us now than later.” started explaining Vic, as he quickly went around the small and cozy living room seemingly checking through both windows to see if anyone else was about, outside.

“So… OK, you know your mother and I don’t like discussing technology, and that we really did try our best to… well, make sure you weren’t too interested in computers. Oddly enough, that’s exactly what your grandparents did with me, and that’s probably one of the reasons why I ended up becoming an IT Engineer in the first place. A similar thing must have happened with Finn, I guess, and with Fae as well to an extent. Well… I hope you guys don’t hate us too much for it. We only wanted the best for you, and we wanted to make sure you were safe.”

“What do you mean safe? Safe from what, exactly?” inquired Fae, worried.

“Well, we know nothing for certain, really, it’s just that… well, better safe than sorry, as you know. Let me start from the beginning. And I am talking about twenty-five years ago.”

“It’s me? I was born twenty-five years ago,” jumped in Finn.

“Son, not everything is about you! The other notable thing that happened that year was… well, the Pulse, of course. A few months before you were born, actually. Fae was five back then, and your mother and I… well, we were doing quite well, actually! We were in our early forties, we both had good, well-paid, steady jobs for very respectable multinational tech companies, and we were both working from home. Fae was at her last year of kindergarten, just down the road, and we… well, we were thinking it was a perfect time for a new entry in the family. We were both working in the field of cyber security. I was what you called a "security expert” and your mother was a technical writer, documenting a very important suite of security products used by a lot of companies all over the world. We both had American bosses, and we worked every day with both India and the US. The fact that we were based in Europe meant that we could talk to our Indian colleagues in the morning, and with our American colleagues in the afternoon…"

“You were talking on the phone to someone in India as part of your job? Every day? But that would have cost a fortune…” asked Fae.

“We didn’t really use the phone, we… ahh, never mind, that’s longer to explain. Anyway, let me get to the actual point of this. It was maybe in March when we started noticing that something was off. I was going through some logs of our software hardware BOM dependency checker – or better, our internal AI was crunching anonymized logs of recent vulnerability queries and dependency checks – and I noticed an unusual increase in… well, things related to really old hardware. Some companies seem to have made queries related to 6502 and Z80 processors, and some components used in 8-bit architectures. At the time I thought that could have been due to some company investing in older hardware targeting some retro computing product or project… still, not something you’d see every day.”

At this point, Tamsin jumped in: “Then… I was documenting some new module in one of our logging software, and I deliberately ran queries on different domains to ensure that the ingest system was able to process and display logs of different nature in a way that made sense. I also needed some real-world examples to add to the documentation, and since we get access to anonymized data, I didn’t even have to modify them. So… I stumbled upon something odd when checking for some shipping telemetry logs: there were a lot of movement of batteries from China to Europe, especially, accompanied by some massive quantities of electronic components moving in the same direction as well. What I found weird was that they were also related to some really old hardware, and were also involving the same companies that shipped the batteries as well – I couldn’t know which companies, of course, but I definitely knew that it was the same ones as the same anonymizer codes were used. I told Vic about it because he mentioned something similar just a few days prior, and then he became more intrigued.”

“We carried on working as normal though,” continued Vic, “but then weeks afterwards we came across some other weird things… someone was requesting some rather odd simulation to be run… some sort of EMP hardening experiment we thought at the time, because someone kept asking for data related to some sort of magnetic disturbance originating at 400km. Again, curious as to why that particular altitude was used, and not only once, there were dozens of simulations specifically mentioning that altitude.

We kept noticing more movement of “retro tech” goods especially to Europe, but the one thing that made us a lot more suspicious happened weeks later: at least fifty different tech companies involved in industrial control systems were requesting security updates earlier than normal: system upgrades that were scheduled at the end of May were anticipated up to one month earlier: that was odd because it is common for those types of airtight systems to be postponing upgrades, not anticipating them. What was going to happen at the end of May? We then decided to look for specific patterns and discovered through different means that: - There were several API requests by government-owned or government-affiliated IP addresses checking for quantities of raw materials and electronics in different parts of the world. - Those requests were typically followed by movements of the same items from one country to another. - The altitude 400 km was popping up more and more frequently on telemetry and weather simulation logs.

Then there was the diesel thing. At the time, we owned a diesel-powered SUV. That may seem normal now, but at the time, most people started buying hybrid or even electric cars. Well, at the beginning of April 2025 or something, we noticed that sometimes some stations would put up notices saying that their diesel pump wasn’t working, or that diesel would come a day or two later. It wasn’t too unusual, but what was odd was that – according to some of our friends working there – there had been an increase in production of diesel at the local IPLOM refinery, in Busalla, near Genoa. Trucks were coming and going to the refinery, so… why the irregular supply to pumps? Still, we did check for signals related to oil price spikes and even checked months before, but we couldn’t find any anomaly. Actually, the anomaly was that prices were oddly stable: even some headlines popped up mentioning prices of petrol – but not diesel – going down a little bit in some areas.

The final giveaway was again from our company’s security software, though. While searching through logs, we noticed quite a few differences in insurance-related documents: there had been recent changes in the wording to explicitly mention “systemic electronic failures”, “electromagnetic interference”, “natural electromagnetic disruptions similar but not limited to solar flares” as exclusion clauses for certain industrial electronic equipment.

It basically felt like something was about to happen. And we couldn’t really shake the feeling: some companies were moving some very old, and very specific electronic components, batteries, and possibly diesel to different locations… and it didn’t come up in the news at all. System updates were anticipated before the last week of May, and some critical systems were patched very proactively without any apparent justification. At the same time, there were simulation data and telemetries related to electromagnetic interference, and again mentions of similar terminology in insurance documents… it was like someone knew that something was about to go down, and it was something big and was going to happen at the end of May.

At this point, I remember I wanted to try and see if I could get more information by feeding all this data to some of the AI systems, and see what they came up with. I think you must have studied pre-Pulse artificial intelligence and large language models, right? Well, they were kind of hit and miss, but when it came to summarizing data and making (even wild) guesses, they were actually pretty good. So we fed all that info and asked what could be some plausible explanation, and… well, let me show you what it came up with."

Vic went to the bookshelf and picked up a small but fairly thick book with a blue leather cover, searched through it for a specific passage, and gave it to Finn to read out loud:

AI ANALYSIS SUMMARY — CONFIDENCE: MODERATE (0.62)

Correlating the provided datasets suggests a non-kinetic, global, near-simultaneous electromagnetic disturbance consistent with a high-altitude EMP event (~400 km altitude). Modeling indicates continent-scale exposure with short duration and no blast or thermal effects at ground level.

Expected impacts include catastrophic failure of modern, high-density semiconductor electronics (advanced CPUs, GPUs, flash storage, modern power electronics, network infrastructure), widespread loss of grid control systems, satellite upsets, and irreversible data loss where state is not hardened.

Legacy and low-complexity electronics—particularly 1970s–1980s designs with thick gate oxides, lower clock speeds, discrete components, analog control loops, and minimal integration—show a significantly higher probability of survival or recoverability. Mechanical systems and manual processes are largely unaffected.

The pattern does not match solar activity or cyber causes. The disturbance would favor actors prepared with simple electronics, local power, fuel, and manual operations, while penalizing highly networked, software-dependent systems.

Estimated window: May 15th to May 31st 2025 — inferred from synchronized maintenance freezes and logistics positioning.

Conclusion: Prepare for selective, infrastructure-level electronic collapse without physical destruction; recovery favors regions and systems able to operate without modern digital dependence.

After reading that, Finn looked at Fae and at his parents, terrified: that cold, detailed summary matched more or less exactly what actually happened on the 26th of May 2025 when the Pulse hit.

“And that was the only time when your father was actually thankful for AI. It actually gave us some pretty good advice,” said Roxanne.

“You mean that… you weren’t actually on holiday here in Ireland when the Pulse hit? You knew and you planned that?!” asked Fae, who really struggled to process any of this.

“Well,” continued Vic, “it was a holiday, but it was a rather sudden one: we told Tamsin’s uncle we wanted to come and visit one last time before Tamsin wouldn’t be able to travel, because she was pregnant with Finn, and that was the truth, basically. Except that we hand-picked Fermoy because it was far more likely to survive such a catastrophe than Genoa or any other city. And we were right. The funny thing is that we realized that a few of our colleagues must have had figured it out as well. Nobody said anything in meetings, but a lot of Americans took quite a few days off before Memorial Day that year, which wasn’t too unusual but not too common either. The weirder thing was a few people (us included) doing the same thing in Europe. I remember our bosses were wondering why we wanted two weeks off at the time, as it felt very random. But we didn’t really know when it was going to happen exactly. Evidence pointed to the end of May, so we wanted to make sure to get settled before it happened, but not miss it either.”

“This is shocking and a bit disturbing dad, but why did you get so preoccupied when you saw that article? Is it something related to Genoa? What happened to our flat then? I remember you telling us that the area wasn’t safe anymore and that it had been broken into…” asked Finn.

“Well, it is probably true, I’d say, at this point.” replied Vic trying not too look into his children’s terrified eyes. “See, we were determined to leave and we didn’t know what was going to happen. We had a cleaner at the time who used to come to our flat twice a week to help us tidying up, and we told her something vague like ‘feel free to use the house while we are gone if you need to’, or something like that…”

“She probably moved in with her son. Oh yes, if I know Gabriela she definitely did” said Tamsin, smiling.

Finn was getting a bit annoyed with that: in the last few minutes, he learnt that his parents still had a flat in Italy, they gave everything away to strangers, and moved over to Ireland and never said anything about it afterwards.

“The point is” continued Vic “that the flat is still in our name, technically, and… well, we may have kept something there that we wouldn’t want to be found by the authorities, especially not now. When I read that the government in Italy is cracking down on unlicensed electronics, I immediately thought about what they could find in our old place…”

“Well? What could they find?” asked Fae, who was getting really concerned at this point.

Vic took a deep breath, looked at his wife who, again, nodded at him, and continued: “As you know, that flat belonged to my grandparents, and it still has a lot of the original furniture, including a rather bulky, heavy, metal safe. Well, your mother and I thought that it could be the perfect place to store some… stuff.

When we had the blue book printed, we went to a place specialized in printing and bonding university theses, and we ordered two copies; which is pretty standard for a thesis. The book contains material entirely written in English that we collected in the last few weeks before the pulse. Logs, copies of documents, telemetries, statistics… things that, if properly understood, may prove that the Pulse was not a natural phenomenon but rather something orchestrated by someone, for their own interests."

Vic picked up the thick blue book again, opened it, and carried on: “see… it is actually disguised as a thesis in English by some guy I made up called John E. Baltimore. It contains some decoy pages and then excerpt of the real data… here, take a look” and he gave the book to Fae so that she could examine it properly.

“This just screams boring, dad!” commented Fae as she read the title of the thesis.

“That was the whole point” explained Vic, “plausible deniability: if anyone picks it up, they will hopefully put it down immediately, unless they know why it really is. And the author is made up of course. We also thought that we could have used that safe to store… something else. The thick metal enclosure would have hopefully acted as a poor man’s Faraday cage, shielding its contents from EMP. We have the key to that safe, but if anyone manages to open it during an inspection, pretty much everything inside it is now considered illegal to simply own, and it could be traced back to us. It would probably make the headlines, too!”

“What on Earth did you put in there, dad?!” asked Fae, even more worried than before.

“Let’s see… we saw that someone was stockpiling old electronics so we thought… what the heck, we could try to do the same, at a lower scale of course. There must be about twenty Z80 processors on there, I remember ordering a small batch online…”

“But… those alone are probably worth… close to 20,000£! Except that you cannot own them, unless they are licensed… what else is in there?!” asked Finn, who was getting very excited and very nervous at the same time time.

“Well… the book alone is more of an overview, a collection of excerpts of the data we collected. There was a lot of data: logs, telemetries, specifications, trade documents, but also some very concerning business plans and strategy documents by some companies that could probably be traced to people or legal entities still operating today…”

“Hang on dad, fair enough that you could stumble upon some logs and stuff, but how did you get business plans and strategy documents? That is typically strictly confidential data, how…?” Fae stopped a few moments to think, and then gave her parents a really concerned look. Of course, they were security professionals, meaning that they could have probably figured out ways to get that data from those companies.

“Right, well, now I probably don’t have to explain why we don’t have any of that material here with us today, and why it’s still in Genoa: we couldn’t risk going through border control with strictly confidential data that we shouldn’t have had access to. So we copied everything on Blu Ray disks, which are very durable, and kept them in the safe. We also stored the Blu Ray reader/writer we used in there, too. And… my small collection of single-board computers like Raspberry Pi’s and similar. And of course our laptops, even thought the solid state hard drives probably failed by now…” said Vic. “Those Blu Ray disks though, those are the one thing that just cannot get in the wrong hands. They are possibly the only hard evidence that the Pulse was orchestrated.”

“Dad, whoever gets their hands on that stuff could start a revolution. You gotta tell the authorities, we have to talk to a lawyer, soon!” suggested Fae.

“Or we make it disappear… did you try contacting whoever may be living at your old place?” asked Finn.

“Yes, we tried several times but we could never get hold of Gabriela. We tried with letters, land phone, telegrams… nothing.” said Tamsin.

Vic suddenly went quiet, avoiding everyone’s look for a few long moments. Finally, he looked at his children and decided to speak his mind:

“The truth is that we rely on you two to sort things out. Your mother and I are getting old, and going all the way to Italy is no picnic. Not anymore, anyway, and it hasn’t been in a long time.

Everyone looked at Vic, in silence. That was indeed the only way, even though everyone knew very well that it was not going to be like going on holiday for a week or two.

“If you two could do this, I think we could figure out a way to cover the costs. Give me a second.” said Vic, as he got up and went out of the room.

“You gotta be really careful. And you have to go there before January. Crossing the Alps now is bad enough, but the more you leave it, the more dangerous is going to be: the weather is going to play an important part in your journey” warned them Tamsin.

“Here, this should cover it. You are our only hope. You just cannot let the authorities get hold of the only proof that the Pulse was not an accident.” Said Vic as he came back into the room.

Vic handed Finn a small box, like those you would use for a ring, or a pair of earrings. Finn opened it and he gasped at the sight of that small chip inside it. He picked it up with a trembling hand and looked at it.

Zilog Z80

That was indeed more than enough to cover their travel expenses, both ways. If they could figure out a way to sell it.

“I think I may know a way to sell it, and also get some sort of ‘protection’ for such a trip.” said Fae, breaking the silence.

She then started explaining about the article that she was writing for the Examiner, and how she had a few contacts in the digital underground in Cork. She explained that they often need to send data to different countries, and since it is basically impossible to do so using packet radio or the DigiNet, they often rely on data couriers to move such data physically, and cover long distances. They would also definitely be interested in acquiring a mint-grade pre-Pulse Z80.

The family spent a good fifteen minutes discussing the feasibility of that plan, how dangerous the journey would be and how essential it was that they had some sort of protection, in case they were discovered or something. The underground was always looking for new faces to use as data couriers, as they would have a much higher chance of success than sending someone who had been already involved with them.

“Oh sis, before I forget, here!” said Finn after a while. “This is the Technical Reference for the G2xx generation of DigiTerms, licensed for general use from 2044 to 2046… that’s the oldest I could come across without asking around.”

“Let me have a look at that dear…” said Tamsin, intercepting the binder before Fae could grab it. She started skimming through it, especially at memory diagrams and pinouts.

“See? They still documented things properly until just a few years ago: this is almost a proper reference manual, with all the information you need to actually understand how this machine works, internally.” commented Tamsin “now they won’t even list what processor they are putting in these things, I bet”

“Of course not mum, and it’s safer that way: only fully-qualified EDS technicians would need to take any of these things apart anyway, and it would probably require at least six different specialists, for safety reasons…” said Finn, more or less quoting corporate guidelines off by heart.

“Welcome to the new Digital Revolution: hyper-proprietary systems carefully managed through extreme corporate silos artificially licensed through perdiodic subscriptions to the ignorant masses. Maybe these DigiPunks as you call them in your article, Fae, are the closest thing we have to a more sane future.” pointed out Vic, before retiring with Tamsin to the their bedroom on the upper floor. Finn rolled his eyes: his dad was becoming more of a pessimist as years went by, he thought.

The two siblings stayed up a little longer, both concerned and excited to discuss the next steps. When he finally went to bed, Finn spent a good while thinking about his past, his education in Computer Science, his job at EDS, and how things actually were changing just in the last few years when it came to how technology was packaged and sold — or better, licensed — to the general public.

There may have been some merit to his dad’s summary of the current digital establishment after all.