“Honey, where are you? Could you clean up the hen shed? Where are you now?” shouted Tamsin from the field outside. Vic replied rather vaguely, saying he was inside, as he didn’t particularly want his wife to find him. He really needed to finish what he was doing.

“Are you in the cellar? What are you up to?” continued as she was getting closer and closer. She ultimately got into the cellar, which was pitch black if not for a faint greenish light… it was a computer! Vic, for some reason, had an old terminal turned on in the corner and was definitely typing something.

“You cannot possibly be using that. They will trace you, you know it. Why are you doing it? Why now?” asked Tamsin, really concerned that her husband was doing something illegal they would all regret soon.

He was actually doing something illegal. But, as he immediately explained to his wife, they were not going to know about it, because he explained that he re-programmed the tracing devices they placed on their property long ago, and that he already managed to successfully communicate with his old contacts many years ago, just to make sure that he could reach them again in case of a real emergency, like now.

Tamsin felt only partially relieved. She was still very disappointed that her husband didn’t tell her any of that, but her curiosity to know what Vic was able to know was greater than her disappointment.

“Who did you contact? Are you sure you are not being monitored on the other hand?”

“Look at it yourself. I gave him sufficient proof it’s me, but I didn’t tell him anything because I know I have been out of the loop too much to trust my old contacts.” said Vic, showing her a message he had just received.

* ID:
  786FD00E21069BF8E268F0825E6777B5
  A303DC3509D33CF4B6D225909C941EB8
* From: carl8@itgoa
* To: consul8@ieork
* IZT: 805768889 (Wed 2050-12-07 09:10:41)
* Subject: Just checking in
  
  Vic! It is you then! Thank you for providing verification in advance, that saved an extra exchange which is always good anyway. 
  
  Yes, Caterina is great and Luca is a man now, like your Finn I believe! It would be cool if the kids could meet someday, wouldn't it? But not as much as if we could for sure! Hah! Feeding hens and growing potatoes! I would love to see that! But at least things seem quiet over there!
  
  Here... not so much. You heard right, there are going to be regular searches in private homes, unannounced, from the new year onwards. But what they don't tell you is that they actually already started unofficially. They are cracking down on infrastructure, furthermore: HubLink 26 and 32 are down, in Sampierdarena -- they went for the most blatant targets. I think Foce and Castelletto will be much later, but they did violate the gentlemen's agreement so... well, fun is about to begin. We will start releasing information to the general population but to be honest I don't think that most people would care: they will discredit what we disclose, as usual. So it could be tough this time, we will see. 
  
  I think the same people are still in your house. A seventy-something South American woman and her son. He's a bit of a hothead and he's getting smarter, at least that's what Massi keeps saying. He also said that someone has been asking questions. Or at least that's what he heard from the young South American lad... I don't know more than that though.
  
  That's it. Good to hear from you, let me know if you need anything, OK? 
  
  Would love to try some Guinness. It has been... nearly forty years I guess. Massi threw up so much that time! And you were cheating, always carrying the same half-drunk pint for most of the evening!
  
  Caterina sends her love to Tamsin btw. And so do I.
  
  You should get on a plane and come back you fool! Ah no, wait. Sorry, bad joke, I know.
  
  Larry
>

“I don’t trust him,” said Tamsin immediately.

“Oh, neither do I, but he did give me some details at least. Details I can double- and triple-check. Sure, Massi could also be compromised, but he must know I have other contacts. I got a few things out of that message: for sure it is him writing back, no one found anything in our house, and Gabriela is still there with Juan. Not sure who turned up asking what questions, but that’s one more reason to hurry up. I think I got what I needed to know, don’t you?"

Tamsin looked at him in silence for a few seconds; her expression agreed with him.

“But I am still pissed that you got all this going without even telling me. We made a choice twenty years ago, and we didn’t do that badly, I thought.”

Vic looked at her, nodding, and then entered a command to shut down the terminal. The room became pitch black, and the two hugged as the humming of the machine slowly stopped.

Fae came back from the lunch back early as usual, so that she could check her mail on her office DigiTerm. It was pretty standard for employees to do that, and Pete didn’t mind as long as she was doing it outside of office hours: the business subscription they had was pretty expensive, but it claimed to offer “virtually unlimited” mail fetches and sends, so it was no extra cost for him. It was in fact considered one of the de facto perk of the job as a journalist.

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

** Mail download 2 of *.
** Downloading 1 message...
** You have 1 new message.
   1 - fincon25@cork.eire - France + St Joseph
>> read 1
** Date: 2050-12-06 @ 19:51:09
** From: Finn Consoli <fincon25@cork.eire>
** Subject: France + St Joseph

   Hey sis!
   I sorted out the tickets for France. in the end it is not exactly cheap, as they charged me £82 for everything, but I didnt feel we were in the condition to shop around... there may be other agencies, but I suspect that in the end we wouldn't have saved much, as they operate in the same way: apparently France has this Minitel thing which is similar to our DigiNet but they also provide a way to pay for things, even internationally, which was kind of mind blowing!
   
   Anyhow, the only thing I couldn't book was the train from Lyon to Turin. Some weird rule about Minitel not working for international services... it felt like the agent didn't want to sell it to me, but anyway... I thought we would ask our new friends if they can help! I was told to go check out St Joseph's Church down in Wilton, apparently they are very helpful. Wanna come? I will be there this evening at about 6:30pm.
   
   love,
   Finn
>>

Fae rolled her eyes when she read that her brother, once again, was only able to complete his only task partially and also she felt she definitely got ripped off for the tickets he managed to buy… and maybe he should have been more careful about mentioning our new mutual friends like that, and also include a place and a time. Maybe she was just paranoid though. Wilton was a good half an hour by bike, but she was worried about the weather as it was due to rain in the evening. Perhaps she could have crashed at her brother’s though, although the idea of sleeping a night in an apartment rented by two guys, unannounced, meant that they probably didn’t even bother to wash the dishes.

She managed to fill her remaining time at work with a couple of boring fillers, had an argument with Pete over some petty stylistic issue in one of them (which also helped to fill her time), and she managed to line up more boring work for the next day, as she didn’t want to start any new big story before leaving for her trip. At about 17:20, she decided she was done for the day, and left.

As she started cycling southward, she noticed another of those EDS advert that had been appearing all over the city in the last few days:

Oddly though, the text was partly crossed out and scribbled over. “In the future” was crossed out and replaced with “in hell”, and some text was added underneath:

Do NOT buy DigiCoin! It’s a huge scam. The future is DigiPunk

Fae wondered what DigiCoin was, but someone was definitely not buying it. And she smiled when she read the word DigiPunk… it was sticking after all, thanks to her article. Pete was probably going to file a trademark for it, but she felt very proud that she was the one to “give a name to the resistance”, or something like that.

Fae didn’t know the area very well, but as she arrived in the neighborhood she noticed a long, pointy almost circular bell tower made out of red brick and limestone. It wasn’t circular, but perhaps hexagonal, which was interesting, and the tip of it reminded her of a tower out of a fairy tale castle rather than a bell tower. She decided to check it out, and sure enough, it was the right place as confirmed by an old signpost mentioning it by name, and the fact that Finn was just securing its bike to it.

“I didn’t think you’d come!” said Finn as he noticed his sister approaching.

“Once I heard how much we are going to spend to go through France, I decided that it was best…” Fae replied as she also secured her bike in the same place.

The big main door right in the middle of the central nave was closed, as presumably the last mass of the day was over. So they rang a buzzer and waited patiently for a few seconds. When a voice answered the old intercom, they said that they were looking for Father Joshua, and the voice on the other end told them to wait there because they’d let them in shortly. Sure enough, after a couple of minutes, a small, old, and slightly chunky bald man in his late 70s opened the big door and let them in.

“You’re early!” he said. “But you are also new, so I guess they probably didn’t tell you how this works. That’s OK. Eric told us you may join us one of these evenings. You must be the two siblings traveling across Europe, right?"

Finn nodded, and the two followed the man inside.

“I am Father Michael, and I run the parish. There is no Father Joshua, actually, but that’s the name we use when young fellas like you two come here to get access and learn. Mr. Ronan, the Sacristan, is just turning on the equipment. We normally start around 7 p.m. on weekdays.”

Father Michael took the two “young fellas” through the big central nave, which was scarcely illuminated via two rows of half-turned-on, feeble long lamps hanging down from the high Gothic ceiling. As they approached the big altar, they turned left and went through a side door, and then down a set of stairs going down. They were now underneath the church, and as they approached a semi-closed wooden double door, they could hear the unmistakable humming of powered-on terminals. As the door opened, Finn and Fae were presented with a rather unusual sight, especially considering they were inside a crypt underneath a church: in the large room that was only partially lit by a big chandelier with only a few lights actually on, there were about six rows of desks with four old-looking DigiTerms on each row. On two sides, large bookshelves were filled with books, but they didn’t look like theological texts, more like cheaply bound textbooks and manuals and binders. Closer to the wall opposite the door, some food was placed on a large rectangular table, along with a few bottles of wine and other bottles that looked like bottled beer or cider. The food wasn’t meant to be eaten sitting down, also because the seats had been moved to the rows of desks with the terminals, it looked more like snacks of various kinds, from simple ham-and-cheese sandwiches to crisps and similar. Overall, it felt more like a room suitable for some evening gathering of computer geeks than anything related to religious functions.

Father Michael introduced them to Mr. Ronan and then headed back up as someone else buzzed the door: the siblings felt they were only slightly earlier than usual, but considering they didn’t even know there was a set time to be there for whatever was about to start, it was remarkably well-timed.

Within the next ten minutes, the room filled with many different types of people: there were the curious “young fellas” like themselves, but also a few middle-aged couples and more senior members, well in their sixties or seventies. Finn and Fae looked around as everyone sat down in front of terminals; some people grabbed a sandwich and a drink, others exchanged a few words with Father Michael, but mostly they just inserted their DigiCards and started typing into the terminals. There were no introductions, and no one took any particular notice of the siblings in particular.

Once he finished chatting with one of the older guests, Father Michael went to the bookshelf on the right, next to where Finn and Fae were sitting, grabbed a binder, and handed it to Finn.

“Sorry, I know this is not your copy, but Eric didn’t manage to come by yet. I hope you don’t mind.”

Finn looked at the binder; it was a copy of An Introduction to xywOS. He thanked Father Michael and put it down on the desk in front of him. As he did that, one of the oldest guests that happened to sit next to him couldn’t help but comment on how that manual helped him understand post-Pulse computing. He introduced himself as Paul, and was basically around the same age as his father, with the same rough “old-programmer” white beard but with less hair on his head than he would have liked.

“I was what you called a Frontend developer before the Pulse hit. I knew everything about JavaScript frameworks and web-based UIs, and when the Pulse hit, everything was gone in an instant. Everything I knew and loved was basically useless. Well, not quite. I knew how to program enough to be willing to re-invent myself, as many did after Instant Zero. After the Hard Years, I got back into computing, and I tell you, it was very different from when I was working in my flashy startup office with four flat-screen monitors using memory-hungry code editors and gigabytes of RAM to waste!”

Finn introduced himself and told him that he reminded him of his own father, as he had mentioned he was working on similar technologies before the Pulse. He told him he had difficulty in grasping what the Web or web UIs were, but he was wondering if the Mesh was anything like it.

“Oh dear boy, no. It is better, actually, in so many ways, even though it is so much simpler. See, before the Pulse, we took computing power and memory for granted. In hindsight, it is absurd now that we had machines that were an order of magnitude more powerful than what we have today, and we wasted them on bloated software. You guys think these new DigiBooks are cool, but back in my days, we had these mobile phones that could be unthinkable today. And guess what, you could install these apps like a to-do list or games, and they would take up several hundred megabytes or even gigabytes of hard disk. I don’t think there’s more than a gigabyte in the whole Mesh to be honest! Think about how much text you could write with one gigabyte of data!”

“Paul… leave the poor kid alone. He probably heard all those stories from his old folks already! He probably came here to actually use a computer, you know!” said another voice nearby, and Paul went off arguing with him. At that point, Father Michael encouraged the siblings to try something on one of the DigiTerms. Because Fae already had access to xywOS and the Mesh on her “unbricked” DigiBook, she agreed to give her brother a chance, and he inserted his DigiCard in.

*** Mesh key detected ***
PIN:> *******
* PIN OK
* Welcome, berry~finn
$>

Finn quickly checked his xywOS book for a command that could help him learn more, and then continued typing:

$> man
*** xywOS Manual ***
* xywOS provides the following native 
* commands that can be used to access the 
* files on your computer and perform basic
* tasks. Type man <command> for information
* on a specific command:
*
* - asm -> assemble .xyw file
* - cha -> change storage area
* - cls -> clear screen
* - dir -> list files
* - dsp -> display a file
* - edt -> edit file
* - get -> copy file from storage area
* - man -> show manual
* - new -> create new file
* - off -> turn off
* - put -> copy file to storage area
* - rem -> delete file
* - ren -> rename file
* - rst -> restart
* - run -> run .xim file
* - sys -> show system info
$> dir
* Area: 0 Files: 1768 Page: 1/177
* - aaa.txt 
* - aaaa.txt
* - abacus.xim
* - access.xim
* - adbook.xim
* - addresses.dat
* - addresses~1.dat
* - alarm.xim
* - all~programs.txt
* - amazing.bas
Continue [y/n]:> n

Finn spent a good few minutes playing around with the filesystem on that DigiTerm. It got used to it, although it felt odd to be able to simply access the contents of his computers: there was hardly a concept of a filesystem on ordinary DigiTerms, because you typically accessed only specific types of data through programs, not the other way around. Overall, it seemed quite a powerful concept to him, just different.

He kept reading about core xywOS concepts, like the fact that besides the default commands, you could even create your own programs! Typically you could use a dialect of Basic, or assemble programs written in low-level xyw code, a sort of cross between an assembly language and a concatenative language like Forth.

$> dsp helloworld.xyw
*** helloworld.xyw ***
; include device macros 
.include "devices.xyw" 

; main program
hello print JSRw

; a16 --
; printing subroutine
.label print
  ; store top of stack to register XW
  POPxw
  .label print.loop
    ; dereference address in XW and print 
    LDBxw terminal.output STB
    ; increment address, dereference 
    ; go back to loop unless zero
    INCxw LDBxw print.loop JCNw
    RTS

; store null-terminated string
.label hello
.string "Hello, World!\n"
$>

“Did you guys read the DigiPunk Revolution article?” said a voice at one point “a lot of people are leaving comments on #freetech~culture! I cannot believe someone in Cork wrote it”

“Well, of course, my sister wrote it!”

“Finn! There was absolutely no need…” Fae hit him hard on his arm, as pretty much everyone in the room stopped talking and turned their way.

“Is that true? Did you really write The DigiPunk Revolution? Kathleen did say she was a sympathizer, but I didn’t expect to meet you here!” said father Michael, surprised but extremely happy that he had the chance of meeting the person who essentially wrote their manifesto.

Fae couldn’t help but wandering why everyone was so fixated with her article. Of course it was a great article and she felt really lucky to have had the chance to write it, but she failed to understand why it was such a big deal.

“Child… these are difficult times. We kept quiet for so many years because of the gentlemen’s agreement with DigiTech, but lately things are deteriorating. Kathleen and others wanted this to happen, they wanted an identity, they wanted people to know what we do, and why we do it, because they didn’t believe we could continue our work peacefully, without involving the normies… I mean, in a way I can’t blame her, when you hear about what is going down in continental Europe right now: they are starting to search people for illegal tech, making surprise inspections. People talk a lot about this on the Mesh these days… especially you young fellas.”

“Don’t make this about age.” Interrupted a woman in her thirties “Your generation had it easy: you could learn and use computers before the Pulse, and you were left alone afterwards. Some of you even got money to stay quiet and don’t rock the boat as you Millennials keep saying. Look at Gen Zero normie dude here” continued pointing at Finn “I know it’s not your fault, and I don’t mean to pick on you, but I am just making a point… he hardly ever saw source code before today! I saw his eyes when he was reading through a simple hello world program… he felt he should have know that, righty?”

“Well… we don’t normally have to inspect code at work but yes, that’s probably what I felt” admitted Finn.

“And where do you work, out of curiosity?”

“I am a System Configurator at EDS…” replied Finn, with a hint of pride.

“Ha! He even works for DigiTech, and let me guess, your folks were programmers before the Pulse, and now they are farmers or something similar, and you had a happy childhood running in the fields…”

“How did you? Who are you? Why do you say I work for DigiTech? How do you know that my parents were programmers?” asked Finn, who was now feeling uneasy and agitated by the whole thing.

“I rest my case! Gen Zero here is our textbook example of why we must act now, as… DigiPunks!” said the woman, as more and more people started discussing animatedly on whether she was going overboard or not. That room that was very quiet and peaceful just a few minutes prior, it had become a very noisy town square with people of different factions debating over very sensitive issues.

“Can someone please explain us what is going on here?” shouted Fae, as the silence suddenly fell and most people turned to a Father Michael, as if it was his primary job to do all the explaining.

“I am really sorry you had to witness this. Nora has got a point here too, I guess. It is important to realize that we are all in agreement when we say we want things to be better. The disagreement lies solely in how we choose to act. But as pointed out, things are changing: DigiTech is acting as if they want to control the narrative, and it’s true, we cannot afford that, not anymore.” said Father Michael, calmly.

“What is DigiTech? I think I saw that name on some boxes, is it an American company or something?” asked Finn, who wanted to understand how that was relevant.

“They are shipping stuff here? Just like that?!” shouted another voice.

“Let’s not get overly excited. One thing at a time,” said Father Michael, continuing his explanation. “You can read all this on the Mesh, but I can give you a summary now so we can also save some kilobytes. Yes, DigiTech is an American corporation that focuses on producing standardized hardware and software. It is government-accredited over there, and basically like our Éireann Digital Systems. In fact, we can probably say at this point that strong evidence points to the fact that EDS is a subsidiary of DigiTech here in Ireland.” Shortly after the Pulse, once things stabilized a little bit, we all know that European governments and a handful of other nations met in Berlin and agreed a framework to regulate digitalization and any innovation in the field, though plenty of the world’s bigger players signed up in name only, or not at all. At the time, most people agreed that such measures were necessary and very much needed to prevent technology from going haywire on us and, God forbid, cause another Pulse. Those were the golden years of salvaging electronic components and tinkering: people were putting together basic but still extremely useful devices using the few chips that were spared by the EMP, so first the governments accepted that and even fostered such post-Pulse ingenuity, but after the Treaty of Berlin, things started to change. You just couldn’t put together a radio receiver, for example, without registering with the local authorities that you did that.

At the same time, government-accredited monopolies like EDS started to appear. As you all know, and especially you Finn I believe, EDS is the only authorized company and legal entity that can manufacture, sell, and provide support for digital electronics in Ireland. Now… in the 2030s it was the birth of the neo-digital age as we call it today, and EDS really gave a lot of people a job here in Cork, as well as many other sites in Ireland. A lot of people of my generation who knew a bit about computers obviously jumped at the idea of using their skills again! But after a while, it became clear to those of us who worked there at the time…“ —a few graybeards nodded in agreement— "that EDS was going to deliberately cripple their products by introducing backdoors, ways to monitor users, license keys, artificially-set hardware limits, hardware seals, and other deliberate measures to keep technology under tight control, effectively reducing people’s freedom to own devices and innovate. Furthermore, they were mandated to do so by the government!

Of course, it all happened gradually. At first, people who programmed some of those measures as something similar to what pre-pulse companies were doing to ensure vendor lock-in, and kind of accepted them, also knowing that they could circumvent them if they wanted to. That’s basically when a lot of groups like ours started out: EDS knew about it, but they let us be as long as we didn’t disrupt their business and essentially stayed quiet with the general public.

When things became more blatant about controlling how devices were meant to be used, some programmers became more vocal about it and threatened to divulge information publicly. At the time, legislation was not so clear-cut, so EDS started approaching them with payoffs in exchange for silence. Some of those payoffs were actually quite substantial, and in the first half of the 2030s, a lot of very good programmers decided to retire into a life away from technology: some became farmers, others got involved in local communities… that became the popular choice for those of us who had kids, especially. Plus… the whole thing went down very smooth, I gotta give EDS that: they never needed anyone to do their dirty work, they just got real good at convincing people. They were very persuasive on many different levels."

As she heard those words, Fae couldn’t help thinking back to her youth. She wasn’t even a teenager when they had a lot of discussions at home, talks about changing lifestyles… and that was essentially when her father stopped playing with electronics: before he was all about trying to get both her and her brother into tinkering with small, home-made devices: she distinctly remembered some simple digital game he created for her to play and… modify! She realized she may have been exposed to programming firsthand. And then nothing, all of that stopped, but she also remembered both her parents becoming more involved with them, from her early teens on… Did their parents accept a payoff? Were they part of that generation of programmers who agreed to stay quiet in exchange for money?

“…then things went downhill from there. After the Lyon Accords, and after more and more legislation was passed throughout Europe (and the world, probably) to limit how people could interact with digital devices, things became harder. If someone threatened EDS, they were simply reminded that anything illegal was going to be reported to the authorities, and that would have meant hefty fines if they were lucky, or jail time. People like us still gathered together and still managed to tinker with devices, but it all became much more dangerous, and also frowned upon by the general public: within a decade, propaganda brainwashed people into thinking that EDS, and similar companies throughout Europe, were the only way to access technology safely and legally.

But still, we retained our identity: even in much smaller numbers and marginalized by society, we could still carry on tinkering. EDS knew about us, but as long as we kept to ourselves, they let us be."

“Until that was no longer OK for them, and they started with the inspections, and the raids…” said another voice.

“Correct,“ continued Father Michael. "And that, Fae, that is why your article is so important, so relevant right now. EDS wants to portray us as criminals and wipe us out. Our silent agreement of mutual non-intervention no longer applies.”

That was a lot to take in. Fae had a lot of questions to ask her parents at their next dinner together, and Fae was still wrapping his head around the fact that the company he was working for was a lot more powerful and a lot more deceitful than he ever imagined.

They made a lot of friends that evening. Even though they were just getting started in that world of forbidden tech and free communication, they felt they belonged, and the more they thought about it, the more they couldn’t believe how naive they had been for most of their lives, in believing that EDS was protecting society from the dangers of unregulated technology.

They exchanged Mesh nicknames with a lot of people, and some even told them that they would have been in touch soon with a way to get from France to Turin.

They left the church at about 11 p.m., and cycled back to their flats thinking back about everything they had learnt, and all the people they had met. From that night on, they started looking at the world around them with new eyes, eager to learn more from their new DigiPunk friends, and to embark on a journey that was going to be probably a lot more dangerous than they had originally expected.