“How much are you going to tell them this time?” Tamsin asked her husband, already knowing the answer.

“Just enough.” replied Vic, who was staring out of their living room window waiting to see two familiar bikes turning into the graveled driveway.

Undoubtedly, something had changed. The bubble had burst, their kids eventually got old enough. Old enough to know at least part of a truth that was not meant to be known, for their own good. Not because it wasn’t important, but because it hadn’t been relevant to their lives, up to that point.

“We wanted a better life for them. They said this was the way to guarantee it. They weren’t wrong I guess, for the most part. But now things are changing, and so we may as well tell them what they need to be at least aware of, before they go. But remember, only if they-”

“…only if they ask, of course. I just hope they won’t ask too many things. And Finn… he does not really mean what he says with words, remember that. He will be upset, especially because of the whole job thing…” continued Tamsin.

“Let’s hope we won’t get to that. And here they come!” Vic sprung up from the sofa with excitement, like always did when someone was coming to visit. Tamsin smiled: they were both very much introverts but she felt like Vic had become a bit more extrovert over the years. That quiet country life mostly away from the newly-reborn civilization made him long for human contact, even if he would never admit it himself.

“Mum! I could literally smell the lasagne when we turned into the driveway” exclaimed Fae as she hugged both her parents. Finn did too, but there was obviously something that bothered him, and like his father he was never able to conceal his true feelings.

They all went into the kitchen/dining room, and put down their backpacks on the big wooden bench on one side of the big room, next to a small wooden stove. Not that they ever lit it, especially not when Tamsin was preparing one of her social meals: the big, cream, cast-iron cooker was putting out way more heat than they needed.

Tamsin put in a big tray of homemade lasagne back into the oven for re-heating, and Vic opened a new bottle of what looked like proper Italian wine.

“You should really get used to this.” Vic said looking at Finn “you will be passing through Piedmont… and never mind crossing France!”

Finn did his best to put on a smile, and Vic knew that the evening had some very real potential of becoming very awkward, very fast.

“Oh… what is that? May I?” said Vic as he immediately grabbed the binder that his son had just took out from his backpack and put on the table. He looked at the re-photocopied cover page and immediately recognized the title:

What a fantastic way to break the ice and cut the crap thought Vic.

“You know about this don’t you? For sure you must have read it. Mum? You too maybe? You could probably teach me most of this stuff right? You… I mean, all this years! Were you actually faking not understanding when I was telling you about configuring DigiTerms at work?! I am not an idiot, even if I was brought up like one, I guess!”

“Oh here we go again…” Fae sighed as she had been in the middle of similar arguments in the past.

Tamsin was about to tell her son how inappropriate that all was, when Vic unexpectedly put his hand on her shoulder and looked at her saying “I got this.”, and then turned to Finn.

“Son, just give me a couple of minutes.” said Vic very calmly, as he walked out of the room. And that was highly unusual, at least for the women in the room who were kinda used to the testosterone clashes that had been happening not too infrequently for the past decade at least. Father and son had short fuses. Especially when arguing with each other.

Vic’s reaction was a clear sign to Tamsin that he had foreseen that move from his son, somehow, and he knew how to counter it. We were still in planned territory for Vic, that’s why he was still able to keep his cool.

Sure enough, exactly two minutes afterwards Vic came back from the basement with an old ring binder with just xywOS written on it by hand. He handed it to Finn to examine.

Finn was still surprised that he hadn’t been shouted at yet, and he opened the binder, which contained a lot of handwritten pages enclosed in very thin, cheaply-made transparent plastic sheet protectors. Finn noticed the feel of the sheet protectors against his hand: they were really thin, very much unlike what he was used to.

“Oh of Heaven’s sake Finn, stop playing with those cheap Chinese sheet protectors and read what’s on the sheets inside them!” said Vic jokingly.

Finn had never seen Chinese sheet protectors. He hardly ever saw anything made in China apart from old pre-pulse stuff. Mostly pulsed out electronics and plastic things. He never understood why his parents and their generation were relying so much on stuff made so cheaply and so far away. He did wander off in often-unimportant thoughts like that, typically triggered by physical contact with objects.

He started reading what was unmistakably his father’s handwriting:

This book is a short but hopefully useful and practical introduction to xywOS, a small, free operating system for the rebirth of computing. xywOS can run on all the processors that survived the Pulse, including the 6502, the 6800, the 6809, the Z80 and many others, thanks to the xyw virtual machine…

He stopped. He had read that before. It was slightly different maybe and there were some corrections, but that was the start of the Preface to the very book he had in his binder.

He fucking wrote it! thought Finn, timidly raising his eyes to meet his father’s, which were already looking at him, and were… well, slightly watery perhaps.

He picked up his binder to compare the text, and indeed it matched, minus a word or two. His eyes landed back on the third line of the cover page:

by consul8

consul8… Consulate… Consoli. Right. That also had to be a Mesh nickname. Strange that he didn’t think of that! It would have been way cooler and more family-bound. Again Finn’s thought started to spontaneously wander off for a split second when he fully realized he was standing in front of… a mythical figure in his eyes. A real programmer. More than that, someone that actually shaped the current neo-digital underground in Ireland and possibly elsewhere, too?

“Yes, son” said Vic before Finn could utter a word. he really was enjoying that moment: the revelation in the eyes of his children! He had fantasized about it so many times, he imagined so many ways that it could have happened: while seeking shelter underneath the remains of a bombed house, or right before the Garda came to arrest him… or on his deathbed. He thought he wouldn’t have had to reveal much to his children unless it had been an exceptional circumstance. After all, that was the whole point: being able to live a fairly normal and uneventful life without having to worry about what was going to happen.

“…You got paid off to shut up about all this?!”

Now, that he still kind of expected, but he always hoped that it would have come quite a bit after discussing Vic and Tamsin adventurous past as neo-digital pioneers. But no, of course not, Finn had to ruin everything, as usual.

“Let’s eat, shall we? I quite fancied mum’s lasagne, and maybe a little wine will help” stepped in Fae, right before her mother did.

The family quietly went back to the table and finally started going through Tamsin’s homemade lasagne. No one said no to a glass of that particular Nebbiolo that was on the table either, and that really did help.

“The early 2030s were interesting, to say the least” begun Tamsin, as the others forced themselves to remain quiet to avoid arguments “especially here, in Fermoy. Cork was a mess, still, there were still bricked cars all over the place and only then utilities were restored properly throughout the city, so people who lived in city flats still had bigger fish to fry than country folks like us. Things were much easier in the country, and your father and I were pleased that we had made the right call when we decided to move here, before the Pulse. We were basically self-sufficient: my uncle Padraigh and his wife always kept some animal on the land, and back then they had a few cows and about twenty sheep. And of course we had pretty much any vegetable you would want” continued Tamsin.

“Of course, when we came over we thought it was all going to be somewhat temporary. We were going to wait out whatever was going to happen for a few months, and then go back to Italy after a few weeks. Or months. A year, tops. But in truth we didn’t expect it to be that bad, and we had no idea everyone was basically going to remain cut off from other countries!

After the first five years, Fermoy was possibly better than it ever was pre-Pulse: the town was buzzing with life and a lot of people started re-inventing long-lost trade, mainly related to fixing machinery, or adapting what no longer worked because most of the circuitry was too specialized to withstand EMP.

Your father an I started tinkering pretty quickly. We did have a head start, having brought a few things with us, and knowing ahead was was going to happen. I actually quite enjoyed putting together rudimentary but fully-functional devices based on those few circuits that were still working. Basically we ended up setting up an improvised electronics shop right here: I was doing all the hardware work, the soldering and putting together of circuits, and your father did the software. First there were some circuit boards used by agricultural machinery, and then slowly more sophisticated devices, until we basically ended up building – and selling! – full-blown computers to schools, the town hall, and private individuals that could afford it.

To be perfectly honest with you, this new, alternative future that no one had imagined except for a few didn’t turn out to be that bad: we were making a honest living in a world where a lot of people were struggling, and even as far as 2032 or 2033 tinkering and mending of electronics was actually encouraged, not merely tolerated.

After then, things changed. Especially within the local government, things became more tense: more laws, more regulations, more paperwork… long story short, it was clear that our job as makers of resilient post-Pulse electronics was no longer viable, at least not in the open: once the Berlin framework was actually put into effect here in Europe (it took a few years, and even then it was patchy) there was so much red tape involved with computers and anything with a screen or monitor of any kind that basically only specialized, government-backed companies could afford to produce anything in that space. It only took months… we went from literally supplying most of Fermoy and nearby towns to nothing, just because we didn’t have all the licenses, apparently.

However, while we couldn’t sell our electronics and repair services in the open, there was still very much a market for it… unofficially. If the number of regulations increased, so did people who wanted to get around them. In the mid 2030s, while the regulated trade was barely starting to impact the masses, and people just started to be brainwashed into thinking that they needed to pay subscriptions and license fees to be safe, a lot of people didn’t really care, and had no problem in buying underground electronics, especially if that meant saving a few pounds…“ At that point Tamsin stopped talking for a minute to get another tray of lasagne out of the warm cooker, so Vic decided to continue.

“You could say that the Mesh was basically born back then. Once people got more comfortable with the new post-Pulse constraints, it became clear that packet radio was going to be the future of communication: some folks started standardizing a simple protocol reminiscent of X.25, and within a short time those of us who were skilled enough started sending text messages to each other, and organized crude but working server nodes to store-and-forward content. It was like being in the 70s and 80s, or at least that’s what some of the old folks kept saying.

While we did keep going for a while providing our services in a sort of gray market, we were starting to get worried on how long that would have lasted: no guarantees, no pension or retirement fund, …and two kids to raise."

“But what about xywOS? You already created it by then? How did you…?” Asked Finn, as if he wanted to hear something good about his father before what he knew was coming.

“Right! Well, that was initially our signature software: when we started putting together ‘artisan computers’ running on anything from the 6502 to the z80, we always set them up with xywOS as a sort of crude but good enough facility to interact with the machine.

The great thing about xywOS was that it was able to run on pretty much any post-Pulse microprocessor, because xyw did…"

“What is exactly? A programming language?” asked Finn, who was genuinely curious.

“xyw… well, I wrote it back at the beginning of ‘25… yes, before the Pulse. It was a sort of weekend project. Or better, it was meant to be a weekend project but that turned out to be several weekends.

There was this weird thing call Uxn back then. It was a simple virtual machine that was able to run simple games and graphical utilities… the creator of it, a guy who called himself Devine and apparently lived on a boat often sailing across the Pacific Ocean, said that it was meant to be something you could understand an reimplement in an afternoon…. well, he was definitely smarter than me, that’s for sure! He called it an ‘emulator’ because it was able to run some common bytecode like an emulator for old NES games did… you probably don’t know what Nintendo is right? Nevermind… it was a virtual machine, behaving like a microprocessor with its own instructions and all, but in software. It was supposed to be simple to implement, and different ports existed for different systems and architectures. I was fascinated by it. I wanted to understand how it worked and learn it but… well, it was probably too much for my brain, at least at the time. Plus I suffered from ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome and I just had to implement my own thing. And so I did. xyw was inspired by Uxn but much simpler: it supported less devices and it was not geared towards graphical games a tools, it focused on the terminal and the command line. If you went through the book at all, see" he opened it at a random page and showed one of the many example programs:

.include "lib/macros.xyw"

; Main program: calculate and print factorial of 5
$05 fact JSRw 
putd JSRw
NL
end JMPw

; Factorial subroutine
; a8 -[xy]-
.label fact
  ; Save argument to both registers
  POPxy
  .label fact.loop 
    PSHy $00 EQU fact.end0 JCNw
    PSHy $01 EQU fact.end1 JCNw
    ; Decrement y and multiply
    DECy PSHx PSHy MULx POPx
    fact.loop JMPw
  .label fact.end0
    ; Edge case: factorial of 0 is 1
    $01
    CLRxy
    RTS
  .label fact.end1
    ; Return result
    PSHx
    CLRxy
    RTS

.include "lib/putd.xyw"

.label end

“…it actually looks similar to assembly, but it is actually a stack-based programming language…”

Vic continued digressing on xyw and xywOS for a while, hoping to distract Finn enough to avoid having to discuss more important things but at one point Fae decided to bring those two back to the analog world and asked, bluntly:

“You were telling us how you and mum managed to raise us with essentially no legit job…”

Vic looked at her, worried about how his kids were going to react to what he was about to say.

“Right…, no job. But we did, in the end: we were able to start working for the town council in Fermoy, as you know”

“Both of you. Right when you said you basically had no steady, legal job, you both got hired to work for the council? That was unbelievably well-timed and lucky.” said Finn, who already figured out what had happened but wanted his father to say it with his own words.

…and as of next Monday, June 14th, the United Republic of Ireland will join many other European countries and territories in enforcing the dispositions of the Lyon Accords, signed not even two months ago. With this swift, unprecedented move, the government hopes to…

click

Vic turned off the radio, visible altered.

What a lot of bull… he thought, only to be interrupted by a familiar voice, immediately followed by the cutest and mischievous smile that he knew far too well.

“Daddy! Zio Jerry is here!” Shouted Fae, as she run into his father’s shed. Her little girl was now eleven going on twelve, and she grown up way too quickly, thought Vic. Still, she kept calling grown-ups that were well known in the family “zio” or “zia” – the Italian for “uncle” or “aunt” – something she always did since she was three years old. It was cute, in a way, one of the few things she did that still reminded her father of her early childhood.

Zio Jerry, specifically, had been a close friend of the family since they moved – or better, got stuck – in Fermoy right after the Pulse. So he really did earn his title, in a way.

Vic went towards the main gate, and Padraigh was talking to him. The two knew very well and were both well in their sixties, but again, that could have been said for many people in relation to Padraigh.

“Sorry Padraigh, but this time I am really here to see your niece and her husband really… but we can catch up tonight at Morty’s if you want, OK?” Jerry said to Padraigh, as he desperately tried to make is way into the house.

“Vic! We gotta talk. Is Tamsin here too? It’s kind of important…”

“Sure I am Jerry, what’s up?” Said Tamsin, who also came out from the house just as Fae went back to chasing her little brother in the field behind the house.

“Let’s go inside. This may take a while.” replied Jerry, who looked visibly worried.

The three got in the big kitchen-dining area and Tamsin started making some strong tea.

“Is the new council server working by the way? I guess you can call it that now” asked Vic, referring to a recent job that his wife and he completed for the town hall, who had been looking for a way to partially restore their digital records.

“Of course it is, right Jerry? And the soldering I did are holding, right?” jumped in Tamsin, smirking at her husband who had the habit of somewhat getting overly worried of some of Tamsin hardware jobs, and always ended up regretting it.

“Yes Tamsin, the new server is working fine and… and… well, we gotta talk about this, really. I… I.. am really grateful of the work you are doing for me, and the council… everyone is really. Really grateful. You know that right? Literally everyone appreciates the passion you both put in, and your mastery… and… and…”

“Cut to the chase Jerry, what is this about? Is this about the treaties? Is it about the certification? It is a boatload of crap and you know it. Everyone knows it, right? They just cannot expect everything to be certified and stamped! Or produced in Ireland! That’s just fiction. There are still loads of chips from China or the US that work just fine. Hell, they didn’t get fried, which should be worth more than any certification you could possibly need!” interrupted Vic, as if he knew where that conversation was going. And he did, really, for the most part at least.

Visibly embarrassed, Jerry carried on explaining that with the enforcement of the new treaty, even local governments were expedited to crack down on illegal digital tinkering – those were the words he used, and neither Tamsin nor Vic were too pleased to hear them. The two had been working relentlessly for half of the town to repair and rebuild what was left of their digital infrastructure. Despite being a lot more cut off from Cork than it ever was before the Pulse, the little town ended up being quite ahead in their digital rebirth than many similar towns or small cities. And that was thanks to their work, no doubt. Jerry knew that very well, and that was making it very hard for him to tell them what he came there to discuss.

“You know about Éireann Digital Systems, right? I know that for some reason you don’t think highly of it, but especially now… they setup a place in Fermoy, you know, the old warehouse just out of town. They want to build a center of excellence! Here, in Fermoy! Can you believe it? They say the town is uniquely qualified for it, probably due to everything that you two did in the last few years. And they recognize that. They really do! And I actually have a written offer here look…” Jerry handed out what looked like two typewritten letters to both Tamsin and Vic.

They both read them carefully, till the end. It was only a couple of pages long and they also noticed there were some corrections at the end, where the salaries were mentioned. The couple didn’t even talk, they just both lifted their eyes and looked st Jerry, visibly not pleased. Jerry mumbled something about fighting for their cause and getting them to raise the salary that was written down, how that hadn’t been easy given their… “status” and reputation.

“There is just NO WAY IN HELL that we could ever agree to this” said Tamsin, bluntly, as her husband nodded in agreement. “You are basically saying that as of Monday we have no job, no way of supporting our children. You are saying that despite everything that we did for this town over the past five years at least, what we did is now effectively ILLEGAL and that we could even risk jail time if we continue to… to just do what we are best at, unless… we do it for them?”

Jerry became extremely uncomfortable and was now unable to look at them in the eyes. He nodded, and explained that for some reason EDS was the only company that was licensed to do any digital work, both hardware and software, and that they were only authorized to use locally-sourced components, that of course were notably inferior in both quality and specs, but they were safe and certified for use. And of course EDS knew of their work, and they saw how Fermoy was using cutting edge equipment – albeit of questionable provenance and safety.

The job that was offered to them was not a bad deal, given the circumstances, but it did come with a lot of strings attached. They would have had to only work using approved equipment, only in EDS labs, and only with “legally-sourced, fully-certified components”. They were also expected to sign off the rights to everything they ever invented and created, both hardware and software, to EDS. Now that was what bothered them the most: the fact that despite considering their work illegal, EDS and the government actually wanted full rights to it!

Jerry explained that it was the only way for them to continue doing what they were doing for the community, just in a proper and lawful way, according to regulations.

It would have been inaccurate to say that the couple didn’t actually consider this for a while. A few seconds, maybe minutes. After all, the money wasn’t bad, and that would have helped raising the kids for sure. But they just could not give away everything they built, not only for Fermoy but effectively for the larger community of hackers that had formed throughout Ireland (and Europe at least) over the past few years. They always suspected that something was off about the Pulse, that there were too many coincidences, too many things that were suspicious… but now they had the certainty that something wasn’t right. The truth, unfortunately, was that they realistically could not do much about it. Especially with two young kids to feed and keep safe in an almost-post-apocalyptic world.

“EDS is desperately looking for people like you two. They need someone able to truly help rebooting our digital world, the right way this time. With the accords finally signed, a lot of things will change, hopefully for the better. You can’t deny that while there are capable people like you two that can do wonders with a salvaged processor and some spare components, a lot of other people are just cobbling things together hoping to get something barely working. And that’s what EDS (and the government) want to avoid: the proliferation of untested, potentially dangerous electronics. I am telling you, you two will get certified in a couple of days, and you could continue to do wonders, but in a proper, legal way. Think about it!” continues Jerry.

“You talk about people cobbling things together hoping that they work, but I have seen what comes out of EDS labs: they are selling certified stuff that is deliberately crippled by design, in the name of safety. That’s not progress, that’s the worst way of establishing a legalized monopoly that is truly damaging for consumers. And the seals they put on those terminals! If anything goes wrong, if a battery needs replacing, you have to call out their technicians to do it. This is insanity! People should have the right to repair what they pay for, in the easiest possible way.” said Tamsin, and Vic nodded in agreement. There was simply no way that they could become part of that world.

“Alright. Let me be really open with you. We have known each other for years, and I have known Padraigh for a lifetime… things are changing. Give it a week or two, and there is going to be Garda at your door telling you that you simply are not allowed to carry on. They will confiscate all your illegal equipment, parts, and anything that is not certified. This is happening, no matter what. At least if you join EDS you could get something out of it. That firmware you made… it is a masterpiece, Vic, and it could become EDS’s foundation for a whole new range of terminals! You could become a department head, or even a director there. Think of the money!”

The more Vic and Tamsin heard about this, the more they became convinced that they would have never become part of EDS and their way of doing things. They said that to Jerry, and they told him that they understood that changes were inevitable at that point, but there had to be a better alternative

And there was. Although Jerry was not to happy to discuss it: “If you don’t want to be employed by EDS, there is simply no way for you to continue your work. Not only everything here will be confiscated, there are going to be checks in your family, to make sure that you are not working on anything digital, ever. There is a plan B though. Not for everyone, but in your case I think they’ll agree to it. I could give both of you a nice job in the council. Maybe something related to agricultural development, something as far from technology as possible. It will be well-paid, ensuring you and your family a good income and a future here. But you will have to basically never touch a chip again, in your life. Never contact any of your buddies inside or outside of Ireland, you have to basically disappear from the digital community that you are helping to build. And they will be watching you, all the time, you gotta trust me on that…”

Tamsin and Vic looked at each other, then looked around in the house, at the terminal they were building at the moment for one of their many customers, and then outside at their kids playing in the field. They were the most important thing.

“Plan B is bad. But I suspect there is no plan C…?” asked Vic.

Jerry looked at him, pale and visibly worried: “You don’t wanna go there. You really don’t”.

“What do you think of mom and dad’s story, sis?” asked Finn, looking at his sister that was sitting next to him in silence.

“I believe them. And I understand a lot of things now. Everything makes more sense. I guess I kinda knew there was something off at the time, but I guess over the years I dismissed it and focused on the fact that mom and dad had a steady job and they seemed content about it.” said Fae.

The sibling continued discussing their parents, still trying to process the amount of information they gathered that evening. About the fact that his father was probably one of the most well-known legendary figures in that weird digital underground they suddenly both became part of. And her mother, that besides making outstanding lasagne used to spend her afternoon soldering chips and testing that hardware was working properly, while their father was typing code that was still run to this day, and that had been improved upon by many others after his forced retirement.

They realized how much they were risking simply by owning some illegal equipment and using it in their house. They knew that feeling now, themselves, but thinking that their parents managed to sneakily set up a networked terminal in their basement and use it to communicate with people in Italy, despite being essentially under surveillance by EDS… that was both remarkable and terrifying.

“Apparently mom wasn’t too keen on that, and dad really shouldn’t have done it. I hope he doesn’t do anything reckless.” said Fae, who was already worried about the upcoming trip, and also a lot more worried about her parents.

“Dad knows what he’s doing. He’s consul8, for heaven’s sake!” said Finn, who came back from that dinner with newfound pride about his father, in particular. Something he had never felt, to that extent.

“We’ll make it, sis. We have to! We will not let our parents down.” concluded Finn, looking at his sister. She lifted her eyes and let out a big smile for her little brother: she was proud of him, and how much he grew up, only in the last few hours.