The first thing Finn did when he started his day at work was requesting time off for his upcoming trip. They figured three weeks would have been enough, and the second half of December would have probably be the most realistic period they could pick, as it would have allowed time to organize the trip and also included the Christmas holidays. He typically took his bare minimum holidays throughout the year, so hopefully this was not going to be a problem, unless of course his boss decided to be awkward because he was going to be off for three consecutive weeks.

** Éireann Digital Systems
** Employee Management System
   v2050.1.12.66
   Licensed to: Finn Consoli
>> status --vacation
** You have 37 vacation days left.
>> request --vacation --days 15
## Start Date (working day):
>> 2050-12-12
## End Date (working day):
>> 2050-12-30
## Reason/comments:
>> Family trip across Europe.
## Confirm? [Y/n]
>> y
** Vacation requested successfully.

As he finished typing his vacation request, Jarrod came along with the usual pallet of 32 DigiTerms to assemble and configure, but this time the boxes containing the internal components were missing. As Finn started looking confused, Jarrod immediately explained:

“I am going to bring the components in a minute, Finn. Special shipment, or something like that… hang on.”

Jarrod went back to the depot and came back with the missing 32 small boxes. Finn couldn’t help but notice some extra EDS tape all over them. After he helped Jarrod offloading, he scratched some of it off, to check what was written underneath:

DigiTech Corp. — Made in USA

That was highly unusual, Finn thought: it was the first time that he had seen foreign DigiTerm components, made in the USA, even. And what was the deal with “DigiTech”? He kept thinking about it while he assembled his quota of DigiTerms and configured them.

After his lunch break, Sarah, his boss, called him into her office, presumably to discuss his upcoming leave. And indeed, she did just that. She had no objection to Finn taking the time off (after all, he had a lot of days to take) and she seemed quite curious about their itinerary, especially when he mentioned that they were going to Paris.

“It is a bit short notice, and three weeks is a rather long time for you to be away, especially now with the new product launches. Why now, if I may ask?”

Finn tried to be vague without outright lying, and explained that it was a family matter, that both him and his sister needed to be at their old family home in Italy.

“I see. OK. But do not exceed the requested time period. Also, you need to fill in the Transport and Lodging Risk Assessment form, if you are going overseas, and make sure you don not take any item that is property of the company with you. Not even your DigiCard, which would be useless outside Ireland anyway.”

Finn told her he will do that right away and thanked Sarah for understanding. Once his day was over, he hopped on the corporate shuttle and tried to get home early. He was expecting a mail from his sister at any point with more details on the preparation for the trip, especially for what concerned the money side of things.

Sure enough, as soon as he initiated the evening download from his DigiBox, there was an email from Fae.

** Éireann Digital Systems
** DigiMail - National Digital Post
   v2050.4.33.18
   Licensed to: Finn Consoli

** Mail download 2 of 2. 
!! No more dowloads available for today.
** Downloading 1 message...
** You have 1 new message.
   1 - faecon20@cork.eire - Early dinner out tonight?
>> read 1
** Date: 2050-11-28 @ 15:08:53
** From: Fae Consoli <faecon20@cork.eire>
** Subject: Drinks tonight

   Yo!
   I got the name of a good jeweler on Princes St. he is staying open till 7pm apparently, so I figured we could go there and get that ring our dad gave you reduced, so you can be nice and wear it next time we meet him!
   
   What do you think? I know you'll forget about it if I don't hassle you, so please say yes! 
   
   xx sis
>> 

Fae always found a way to boss her younger brother around. Even when speaking in codes, like in this case, she presumed that Finn was just going to drop everything and fit around her schedule. Which he did most of the time, really, maybe because his sister actually did a great job at taking care of him over the years. They both loved each other, like siblings often do, but it was clear that she was very much the boss.

He drafted a quick reply to her and sent it, realizing he didn’t have long if he wanted to make the appointment, he quickly looked for the little jewelry box containing the Z80 that his father gave him the day before, and put it in his pocket. He figured out from Fae’s email that she must have found a potential buyer for that highly prized piece of electronics, and couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

Finn walked for a good fifteen minutes to the stop for the 208 tram, and waited another ten minutes till the tram came about. After a good thirty minutes, he got off at Daunt Square and walked for a few minutes to Princes Street. Obviously Fae didn’t give him any more details on where to meet exactly on Princes Street, so he started wandering about, hoping to find either a jeweler shop or her sister. Eventually, he saw Fae waving at him at the other side of the street, gesturing to him that he should come and join her, so he did.

“You got the… ‘ring’, yes? Good. Kathleen said that is the jeweler we have to go to,” said Fae while pointing at a jeweler shop a few blocks away. “We have to ask for the ring to be reduced, and say that we were told to talk to Sean. Lemme do the talking, OK?”

Finn didn’t object and they buzzed the doorbell outside the jeweler shop. A short, middle-aged man with long gray hair and rather remarkable mustache peeked from a blind, trying to quickly determine if the two sibling looked like potential customers, and opened the door after a couple of seconds. It was a very old jeweler shop inside, with solid wooden display cases with all sort of elaborate rings, necklaces and old-style earrings with lavish precious stones of all sorts. Even the jeweler — Sean, presumably — was dressed as if he was from another century. There was no trace of electronics anywhere, and even the cash register was fully mechanical. The only thing that gave away the fact that they weren’t gone back in time was the electric lighting.

“Sean? We have a… ‘ring’ to resize. My dear friend Kathleen recommended that I bring it here because you did a great job with hers last time, she said.” said Fae, struggling to maintain a normal tone of voice: she was undoubtedly pretty excited about this whole thing.

The jeweler, who until that moment kept a very composed and professional demeanor, dropped one of the earrings that he was polishing and instinctively looked up at Fae, slightly alarmed for a fraction of a second. He then composed himself and said, succinctly:

“I see. May I see the ring, please?”

Fae looked at Finn, who put a hand in his pocket and passed the small jewelry box to his sister, who handed it to Sean. The jeweler opened it fractionally and closed it almost immediately, handing it back to Fae. He put back the earrings in the display case where he took them from and locked it, then looked at the siblings and said:

“Very well. It will only take a short while, but I need the right equipment from my laboratory. If you would be so kind to follow me to the back…”

He then went to the front door, locked it, and gestured to the siblings to follow him to the back. They went through a small door on the back of the counter and then through a small corridor into another room.

It certainly looked like a goldsmith’s laboratory. There were lenses, tools to work with good and precious metals, safes, and… a DigiTerm that was turned on. That was perfectly normal: a jeweler would probably be able to afford one and use it to check the prices of gold and other precious metals and stones, for example. Finn however noticed a few details of the DigiTerm that weren’t quite right: it was an old model! Maybe four, even five years old. No one would notice that except for an @-ditir employee, but the serial number and the model identifier clearly gave it away.

“Now, if you could please hand me that Z80… it looks like one of the last one ever produced before they went out of production back in ‘24, in which case…” he paused quickly as he finished typing something on the terminal only to quickly push himself and his swivel chair towards one of the safes. “…you are looking at something truly le-gen-da-ry! No kidding. If it works, that is, of course.” He quickly entered the combination, opened the safe, and took out a couple of breadboards with a simple electrical circuits already connected. The siblings were still in shock to see how that very meek jeweler turned into this extremely energized man within a matter of seconds: he was obviously excited to obtain that chip, but he had to verify that it was genuine and still working.

He then grabbed the jewelry box from Fae, took out the chip, and plugged onto a breadboard. He quickly connected some wires to some of the pins of the processor, plugged in some other components Finn had no knowledge about, and finally connected a small battery. He then started a timer on his fancy-looking mechanical chronograph watch, and looked at the LED blinking. He kept looking at the LED and at his watch a few times, and scribbled something on a piece of paper.

“Very promising, very promising” he said, after disconnecting the battery and yanking the Z80, only to plug it in onto another circuit.

“Let’s play some music, shall we?” Again, he connected some of the pins of the chip to another circuit that seemed to have some sort of buzzer connected to it, connected the same battery to this new circuit, and a high-pitched noise came out of the buzzer.

“Excellent! Alright, gotta be sure. Just give me a minute or two please!” Sean said, justifying himself for having to run another test. He then moved to a DigiTerm that was on, plugged in some sort of chip somewhere, and started typing:

>> new 8mhz.asm
>> edit 8mhz.asm
** edit v1.23.8
** file:8mhz.asm - 0KB
   ORG     0x0000
   LOOP:   IN      A, (0x01)
           XOR     0x01        
           OUT     (0x01), A       
           LD      BC, 0x4AAA 
   DELAY:  DEC     BC   
           LD      A, B 
           OR      C
           JP      NZ, DELAY 
           JP      LOOP
   .
>> z80asm -o 8mhz.bin 8mhz.asm
** Assembling...
** Assembled successfully.
>> progrom
** progrom v2.3.0
 > load 8mhz.bin
 > program
** Programming ROM...
** ...
** ROM programmed successfully.
 > verify
** Verifying ROM...
** ROM OK.
 > exit
>> 

He then disconnected the chip and swapped it with the similar one that was on the breadboard with the LED test. He connected the battery and again checked his watch. The LED was now blinking much slower than before, more or less exactly every second.

“Jackpot. This, my friends, is a real 8MHz Z80 chip. Something that Éireann Digital Systems can only dream about putting in their gear. At least for now, that is. I had to run the first test with the blinking LED, which gave me a rough idea that it was probably going to be at least 4MHz. Then the buzzer test, which produced exactly the beep I expected for 8MHz (I know the different sounds by heart, like every respectable tinkerer). So at that point, all I had to do was write a simple program in native Z80 assembly code, with the appropriate delays to have a LED blink exactly every second in case of an 8MHz frequency. Simple!”

Finn understood about 1/3 of what Sean said, but he was immediately filled with the most profound admiration for that person, who seemed to talk to computers in their very own language. He was, most definitely, a real programmer.

“You guys are lucky that Kathleen did warn me before, because this is way too hot. If I asked the right people, I could have both of you killed for this. At least a couple of times each, actually!” Sean said that with a really straight face, looking at the siblings getting more and more terrified.

“I am kidding, of course!” he burst into an uncontrollable laugh. “Chill! You are walking out of here alive. PROBABLY!” he stopped laughing for a second just to see the reaction of Fae and Finn, then continued smiling. “No, really, you’d wonder what one could do with £2,000, right?”

The two siblings were starting to get slightly annoyed with Sean’s twisted sense of humor, and asked if he would be able to purchase it in cash. Again, the jeweler turned hacker laughed hard and said:

“Sure! Here, 2,000£ in cash. Should have a couple of 1,000£ bills in my pocket… ah no, pity!“ When he noticed that they weren’t fully appreciating his sarcasm, Sean tried to compose himself and tried again: "Let me rephrase: I can probably give you something like 200, maybe 300 Irish Pounds in cash, but not more than that. Also, you are going to need Francs or Liras or whatever they use wherever you are going and… well, you are probably going to get ripped off at the currency exchange office, I tell you…”

Fae understood the logic of the previous sentence, but she really struggled to understand what they were supposed to say or do. As expected, Sean had to spell it out for them:

“Do you remember how you got here? I don’t know, like walking in a really fancy jeweler’s store?!” Finn and Fae finally understood: jewels, of course: hopefully Sean was going to give them the value of the chip in jewels that they could easily trade overseas. Simple, but brilliant, and very practical.

They got a few different gold rings, as plain as possible, some silver earrings, some silver necklaces, and also some small gold ingots, the perfect currency to get a correct amount of foreign currency during a long journey like the one they were going to start in a few days. Sean thanked them endlessly for giving him such a powerful chip, and reminded them that Kathleen was going to get in touch to discuss the details and give them some “presents” for the trip — he presumably referred to some data storage medium to take abroad.

To celebrate the success of their last transition, the siblings decided to have a quick dinner at a pub nearby. All of a sudden, the trip to France and Genoa felt very real: they had the money, Finn had been able to get time off without his boss complaining too much about it…

“Do you remember anything about Genoa, about the old flat?” asked Finn, out of the blue. His sister had lived there for the first five years of her life, before the Pulse, and she did actually remember what it was like. Now, a quarter of a century later, it felt more like a dream, or better, like she had lived another life. When her brother asked that, she started staring at her glass for a few seconds, as if she could see her childhood being projected there like in a movie.

“Of course I do. I remember the house, I could draw you a map of it. I used to run around a lot and… I had this little skate board that I used to sit on and go from room to room. The floors were… very different, it is like they were mosaics of all tiles in most of the rooms, and mum said I wasn’t allowed to play with soap bubbles because it would make the floor slippery, except in the kitchen because there the floor was different.” she told her brother, as she experienced a mixture of different feelings. Her parents working from home on their computers, the mountain of soft toys she had in her room, all her dolls she liked to dress and undress all the time, all her other toys.

Finn asked what was different back then. She tried to focus: she experience quite a shock when they decided to stay in Ireland. She was happy to meet all her cousins and relatives, and she always enjoyed going on holiday, and especially taking the plane. Well, that, for one, was very different now.

“We came to Ireland in… a plane! It was big, a lot of people were on it. But it was common back then, that’s how you went to places, when they were really far” said Fae, and Finn asked immediately how many days it took to fly from Italy to Ireland.

“I remember falling asleep but it wasn’t night, and we didn’t have meals when in flight, so… I think it must have been only a couple of hours.”

The two paused for a moment, trying to factor in the fact that they would have spent several days to get there by sea and land. Then Finn asked about the computers they had, and technology before the Pulse. Again, Fae paused once more while she tried to think back and look through her childhood memories. She tried to translate what she remembered as a little girl through what she had studied later in life, trying to make sense out of it.

“Well, it is weird because when I think back I feel like I lived in the future: I remember asking "Alyssa” or something to turn on and off the lights, and to play music, and a voice replied and complied…, well, most of the time. I remember watching a screen a lot when I had lunch or dinner, it was called “iPad” I think."

“You mean like a DigiBook?” asked Finn, trying to make sense of all that.

“No,” said Fae trying to match her memories with her more recent pre-Pulse history course “it was most definitely a portable touch-screen tablet I think, and it didn’t have a keyboard, just the screen, and it was… well, better than our TV!”

Finn was more intrigued. “What about mom and dad… you said they had computers and worked from home with them? Was dad… a programmer back then? Was it legal?”

Fae explained that she didn’t remember much but she said that she could tell when dad was working because his computer screen turned dark, and there were a lot more small letters and numbers on it. She said she thought that working meant working on a computer, because that’s what her parents did.

“But let’s talk about something useful, like… how are we going to get to Genoa? There are multiple options, but I think only one is actually viable.” said Fae at one point, taking a folded map of Western Europe out of her bag.

The first option was to take a train to Dublin, and then cross the Irish Sea to Holyhead. From there, they would have got to London after catching a few different trains and maybe buses, if available. From London, it would have just been a train to Paris through the British Channel. From Paris, it would have been all trains to Lyon, Turin, and then finally Genoa. The biggest problem of this option was crossing England. It would have been expensive and probably not safe, considering the current political situation over there.

Alternatively, they could have gone completely by sea, straight from Cork. They would have had to board different ships probably, in France and then circumnavigate Spain, and then Marseille, and finally Genoa. That may have possibly been cheaper, but it would have definitely taken a very long time.

The most viable option turned out to be figuring out a way to get from Cork to La Havre by ship, and then rely on the French national railway system (one of the best in Europe, after the Pulse) to get to Rouen, Paris, Lyon. Then cross the border and get to Turin and then finally Genoa. This way, they would have bypassed England completely, also making the journey considerably shorter. They both agreed that this route made the most sense, provided that they could figure out a way to get to Calais.

The two siblings kept chatting for a couple of hours, and that was very unusual. Clearly, they were both excited and worried about the upcoming trip but they were definitely happy to share that odd mix of emotions with each other.