Finn kept reading that book on the history of Nouveau Minitel so avidly that he almost skipped lunch. Not that he would have missed a huge amount: although they did pay for a full meal, the staff of the Shamrock & Fleur handed out just a couple of sandwiches per passenger because they were barely on the ship for a couple of hours until lunch time. Plus, they probably assumed that people had a full Irish breakfast that morning before setting off for such a long journey.

And they were right: neither of the siblings was particularly hungry (probably the adrenaline was still enough to keep them going, at the time), and none of the passengers complained to the staff really.

Now the rain, on the other hand, that was annoying. It had been raining constantly since they god on board, and Fae in particular was getting restless. Her journalistic curiosity simply couldn’t accept being confined to a tiny cabin with her brother. She tried to read, but didn’t work as well as it did for Finn. She tried to write, but she needed something to write about, and just imagining what the ship life was like wasn’t really enough.

They both decided to go to the bar/canteen around 5pm, about an hour before dinner was due, and as they got there they realized that most of the passengers had the same thought: the plain bar counter was buzzing with people asking for a pint of something, and the poor barkeep did his best to satisfy his avid customers as quickly as he could.

Finn and Fae decided to take a seat at the big long table ahead of time. Maybe because they didn’t want to wait for the place to get too busy, maybe because there was simply no stools left at the counter. Finn gestured to her sister that he was going to get her a pint of cider, and he got himself a pint of ale. Although they knew better than getting drunk at sea, especially with the weather was clearly not going to be merciful, by the looks of it, they both unconsciously felt the need for some liquid courage: there were no assigned seats, no separate tables, or table cloth for that matter… they most certainly would have had to sit next to strangers and depending on their luck, either talk to some railway workers or maybe some family of migrants, or perhaps merchants.

Finn, for some reason, decided to bring his Minitel book with him. Fae didn’t say anything but she was wondering whether his brother was just being so naive to think that he could get away with reading in such a social setting, or he wanted a conversation starter of some kind. Apparently, it worked out very well at the latter:

“Ahhh Minitel! Our greatest pride and biggest accomplished in this fucked up world…” said a male voice with a rather strong French accent, that reminded Finn of Gaspard at the travel agency. And sure enough, a fairly obvious Frenchman came to the table and joined them, probably as awkward as they were about the whole seating arrangement, but because he was French he tried to conceal it with a good does of healthy national pride.

Mr Jules was a middle-aged, average sized, gray-haired man wearing a heavy raincoat and a berret he visibly struggled to take off as he joined the sibling at the table. He apologized profusely for putting his wet coat next to Finn, perhaps as a way to keep an initial cautionary distance while seating. That, Fae noticed, was basically what people were doing all over the place when they wanted to be polite and engage in conversation with strangers, but at the same time they wanted to signal that they weren’t part of the same group. Mr Jules was as cordial as a French who has had a couple of pints could be, and he genuine seemed to enjoy discussing the topic of Finn’s book. Although he couldn’t have used the old Minitel extensively to be truly attached to it, he seemed to be fascinated by the whole idea of it, and of how is country managed to pioneer a nationwide digital network after the Pulse, while most other countries had other things to worry about.

Although he didn’t know as much of the technical details about the system as Finn had hoped, the two had a good discussion about it, with Fae occasionally nodding automatically in agreement or asking the odd generic questions, mostly about Mr Jules himself rather than the terminal he used in his home country and whether he really had an AZERTY keyboard. Mr Jules was employed by a small logistic firm focusing on Irish and French trade, and his job was basically making sure that what was declared to leave Cork actually made it to La Havre and vice versa; he was checking ship manifests for a good chunk of the cargo that was sent across and he had to specifically deal with discrepancies on either side. He was French, but he mastered the English language as well, as he frequently liked to point out, and he wasn’t wrong about it really.

It turned out that the reason why he decided to sit next to Finn wasn’t only that he was reading a book about something he knew very well, but rather that he was essentially sitting in his spot: he was so well-known on the Shamrock & Fleur that he nearly always sat in the same place: at the end of one of the first tables, not too near the counter but not too far either – the perfect spot, which would guarantee an early-served meal but also keep him away from the usual crowd of shouting workers who normally sat directly at the bar counter for the whole journey.

He was very peculiar about his spot, very much so that Finn had to physically shift fractionally so that he could be exactly where he was meant to be – those were his words.

The first course that was served at about 6 PM was a think potato and onion soup. Not exactly very exciting for Fae, who inherited her mother’s reluctance for stodgy, heavy foods, but quite enjoyed by Finn, who really didn’t mind. The sibling also ordered a second pint to go with it, now that they were certain they would have needed even more liquid courage to engage in proper conversations. To be clear, Fae didn’t really need that, as her job was essentially about talking to strangers, but she didn’t mind the alcohol, even though it had basically no effect to her, unless we are talking serious amounts of the stuff.

“Bernard! Hey! Ici, ici” shouted Mr Jules out of the blue, trying to get the attention of another Frenchman. Mr Bernard, slightly older but still very much of the same breed of Mr Jules, was a seasoned wool merchant who traveled between the two countries mainly importing wool into France, and making the occasional sell of linen in Ireland. Although he traveled much less frequently than Mr Jules, the two had known each other for years, since, apparently, Bernard tried to declare less wool then he was carrying as an attempt to avoid taxes. That was Mr Jules favorite ice breaker to introduce his friend to complete strangers, it turned out, and Mr Bernard was used to it although not completely comfortable about it.

Mr Bernard was a heavy Minitel user. Addicted, one may say. He explained that he obviously used it for work, but also to talk with his family who lived in the suburbs of Paris, for reading anything from the latest news, to booking train tickets, even to play some sort of textual games with some friends he never met in person. When Fae asked how he could cope with the lack of Minitel in Ireland, his face lit up with a big smile as he took out a small device which immediately captured Finn’s attention.

“You don’t know this?” said Mr Bernard with a hint of fake surprised, as he proudly showed his gadget knowing that Finn probably wouldn’t have seen one before “Ahh! This is a Petit Tablette, a… small pad, if you want. Don’t be fooled by the small keyboard and its six-line screen, this is the most advanced device on the market you can buy. With my international Minicard I can connect to Minitel from Ireland, with minimal overprice. It has a full AZERTY keyboard you can type on, a screen that is comfortable enough for reading and writing, and a battery life of several hours. Look…, see?”

He then proceeded to show off the device to Finn, who was genuinely excited. Especially when he managed to actually connect, albeit nominally, to the French network in well under two minutes right there, on the ship. On the other hand, Finn wasn’t too pleased to hear from Bernard that the Minitel guest card he had been sold by Gaspard wasn’t actually going to be useful at all:

“Ahh well! It is good for getting a feel of Minitel. Maybe news titles, maybe partial weather forecast. It is designed to make you want to sign up, while abroad, for the Forfait Touristique. Which you… totally should get, by the way!” explained Mr Bernard with an obvious wink to Finn, who realized wasn’t too keen on French humor.

Meanwhile, the galley crew brought out the main course: some wildly overcooked beef stew with potatoes that really made Fae long for whatever food they had in France, even if she didn’t have any clue about it, as it would have been certainly better than that.

The one thing that she noticed, while the guys were deeply engaged in yet another conversation about Minitel services, was that the staff served that course very quickly. Sure, serving stew was going to be faster than serving soup, but something was definitely off. Fae was certain about it when she noticed other details about the ship staff: the bar keep seemed to put away some of the bottles from the higher shelves, and took extra care to secure the beer kegs he had ready to swap behind the counter. He actually reluctantly swapped one that had a few more pints in it, for some reason.

Just as the staff finished going through the tables and ensuring that the entirety of the guests had a full plate in front of them, the reason of that behavior became immediately clear: suddenly the ship started to pitch much harder than before, and the rolling wasn’t encouraging either. Some beer glasses on the tables that were fuller than others started tipping over and immediately the unfortunate patrons started cursing.

Within a few minutes, the deep, loud horn was signaling that something was about to happen, and that was confirmed shortly afterwards by a public announcement:

“Attention please. Attention please.

This is the captain speaking. We are currently approaching an area of heavy weather and expect increasing winds and sea swells over the next several hours.

For your own safety, we request that all passengers remain inside the vessel. Access to the open decks and the promenade is now prohibited, and all exterior doors have been secured.

Please ensure all loose items in your cabins are stowed away. When moving about the ship, use the handrails at all times. We expect these conditions to persist until tomorrow morning. Thank you for your cooperation.“

It was clear, at that point, that a storm was imminent.

To Fae and Finn’s amazement, Mr. Jules and to some extent Mr. Bernard as well didn’t seem too perturbed by that announcement. As they were both frequent passengers onboard the Shamrock and Fleur, they had their fair share of gales, storms, and alike. They continued eating their stew, although at a visibly faster pace than before.

“You should try to eat as much as you can now, trust me, later is going to be much worse,” said Mr. Jules as he noticed Finn just froze staring at him gobbling down as much of the meat and potatoes as he could.

The sibling tried to follow that advice, at least for a few minutes, but then gave in to the general panic of the most inexperienced travelers and concentrated on getting back to their cabin.

“Ah! Les débutants…” said Mr. Bernard with a smirk to his friend, as he saw the siblings standing up and making their way out of the canteen.

While the two Frenchmen tried to remain calm and finish enjoying their dinner still sitting at their table, the majority of the other passengers weren’t as calm and started moving quickly towards the exits of the large room, their movements severely limited by the tables and chairs. The group of railway workers insisted on bringing their pints with them, or at least tried their best to do so, only to spill them on a table or another passenger as the ship kept rolling and pitching irregularly.

After a few minutes going through the narrow corridors, apologizing to others for being pushed around and all over the place by the unpredictable movements of the ship, Fae and Finn got back to their cabin, and immediately tried to secure their belongings back in their luggage, and the luggage itself under the bed. Finn, who was the least experienced at sea, thought that trying to read his was going to be a good idea, but quickly found out the hard way that it wasn’t the case: luckily though, he managed to throw up in a bucket that he was quick enough to grab as soon as he began feeling off.

As the captain said, that storm persisted for basically the whole night. The siblings even tried to sleep a few times, but the movement of the ship, the noise of the sea coming from outside, added to the adrenaline that was in their system anyway for the excitement of the trip, made that essentially impossible. Eventually, they both managed to fall asleep, exhausted, early in the morning, and woke up again around 9am.

Again, they decided to go back to the canteen for a simple breakfast of a cup of tea and some soda bread with butter. Mr Bernard was there and invited them over, mostly curious on how those newbies had managed the storm, but also because he actually wanted to make some conversation, and there was something about Finn and Fae that piqued his interest.

“We are going back to visit our childhood home, in Genoa. I haven’t been there since before the Pulse when our folks arrived in Ireland. I still have some memory of the city, and I am wondering how it changed… plus I am journalist for the Irish Examiner, and this gives me a chance to write a column or two on France and Italy in the neo-digital age.” Explained Fae, and the beauty of that story was that it was essentially the truth, only with a few key details omitted.

Mr Bernard eyes lit up when she mentioned Genoa. He explained he had been there a few times, and how the city slowly came out of the degradation spiral it had gone through right after the Pulse. He said it probably felt more like the maritime city it used to be centuries prior, now that the port again made the difference again, for supplies, and general trade within Italy and the whole Mediterranean.

“Of course, it is nothing like La Havre, you’ll see. But again, Italy is not France, oui?” Remarked Mr Bernard with a good dose of pride.

When Finn looked perplexed at that comment and asked him what he meant with that, the Frenchman jumped at the chance of telling them all there was to know about his wonderful country, of how it survived les années de silence thanks to a useful legislative framework that allowed immediate response for the catastrophe. Article 16 was invoked and renewed continuously for the first two years. Until mid-2027, the French president single-handedly introduced emergency measures to ensure that the entire population was able to satisfy basic needs: food, water, shelter. After that, the country transitioned into a three-year period of état d’urgence, during which the country slowly started its reconstruction that lasted until nearly the 2040s. Mr Bernard emphasized how a steady, and firm government had been essential into all this:

“That’s what the population needed, oui? Safety. Control. There was no room for anything that could… how to say, destabilize the country. Some didn’t like the house searches and arrests, sure, but I say… why? If you have nothing to hide! Then it’s OK, right? I have always believed in the Force de la Reconstruction Nationale, and always will. And yes, some say you need other political views, an opposition for healthy democracy. Sure, but I ask you: who would oppose la Reconstruction? None. And look at Europe now! It is no coincidence that the Accords were signed in Lyon, after all!”

When he heard all that, Finn was trying to understand what Bernard was saying between the lines, although he seemed vehemently embracing the establishment.

“Are you saying France is… a single-party dictatorship?!” He asked point-blank.

Mr Bernard looked at him, surprised.

“Dictatorship? No! What are you sayin? It is the purest form of democracy. The population always voted, the parliament always deliberated on laws. All I am saying is that if you want to reconstruct a country, like we did, there has to be Unity! There has to be firm laws to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. We understood that first, and thank God most of Europe followed.

Personally, I am relieved I don’t have to worry about politics anymore. The government is helping us prosper, and for a merchant like me, that’s all I need."

After that clarification, Finn decided to back off on the whole politics angle for the time being, and Fae quickly steered the conversation to Italy, seeing that Mr Bernard mentioned Genoa specifically, and seemed to enjoying a good discussion anyway.

“Ahhh… Italie… They were lucky. A lot of cities got really hit badly. I am talking about the North, right? Not sure what happened to the South, but in the North there was – and still is, to an extent – a lot of, how to say, fragmentátion. Some big cities didn’t do that well, at least initially. Some better than others: Turin, Ivrea, Parma. Genoa… well, for sure I wouldn’t have liked to be there in the 20s and beginning of the 30s! It was just not safe, a lot of people said. Now… It’s OK. It became richer now that the port is fully operational, for sure.”

Mr. Bernard explained that he and his wife decided to visit Italy on two different occasions in the last fifteen years, part for business, part as a family vacation. Both times, they regretted it on the basis that traveling there was too expensive, especially including the crossing of the Alps through the tunnels: whoever operated them on the Italian side could simply ask for whatever fee they wanted, and most of the time, people who got there ended up paying it, as it would have still been cheaper than finding another route. He did reassure the siblings that things were getting better now, or so he was told.

After about an hour spent chatting, Mr. Bernard told the siblings that he needed to get back to his cabin and that he would have probably been back to the canteen for lunchtime, and he said he would have been delighted with their company if that so pleased them.

Finn and Fae looked out of the big glass canteen panels while nibbling their last bits of food and sipping their… third cup of tea: it was a glorious day, and despite the sheer wind that was blowing outside, they deduced it was worth exploring the main deck. Finn had brought his Polaroid after all, and he wanted to use it.

They closed up their coats and ventured outside. The wind was blowing strongly from the West, and that caused Finn to feel colder than it actually was. He snapped a couple of pictures of the sea from two different directions, a few pictures of the deck, plus a few sneaky shots of some of the passengers that he deemed picture-worthy, and then he put his camera back in his bag, mainly to be able to keep his hands warm inside his coat pockets. They greeted a few different passengers on their way, but the fierce wind was making it impossible to hold a conversation with anyone, so they went back in and walked closer to the engine room. At least there it was warmer, but again not ideal for conversation because of the noise and the stronger smell of fried oil that was becoming more and more intense. The sailors and workers didn’t seem to mind either, and they shouted bits of unintelligible words to one another regularly, laughing about something no one was able to understand. Fae’s only comment as they went through the corridor near the engine room was that she felt like she was about to get thrown onto a huge frying pan: the noise, the smell intensifying, and then the heat as they got closer to the engine room really contributed to give her that feeling.

The siblings went back to the canteen by midday, after wandering around for a while and spending some time in the cabin. For the first time in her adult life, Fae felt annoyed that she was effectively cut off from the DigiNet. She even tried booting xywOS, but she soon realized that they were simply too far from the coast to be able to get any meaningful packet radio speed.

The canteen was again full of life like the prior evening. The table of the Irish worker was already very noisy as the young men were through their second pint while waiting for lunch to get served. As expected, Mr. Bernard waved at the sibling from a table near one of the windows, and so did Mr. Jules who was sitting beside him pointing at the two vacant seats in front of them. Fae and Finn instantly agreed that it was going to be easier to sit down with their fellow travelers rather than finding a random place next to strangers.

Mr. Jules explained he had spent more for less the entire morning on the cargo deck, doing his routine check of the goods and mail that was stored on the ship. That was part of his job, and although he was not required to do it, he found that having logged an extra inspection would sometimes come in handy in case of disputes, later on. He recommended the sibling to take a look around, if they were curious and never saw what the cargo hold of a liner looked like. Fae made a mental note of that as a possible afternoon activity.

Mr. Jules asked what their plans were once they got to La Havre, and Finn said that they were probably going to go to grab something quick to eat, assuming that they got there around dinner time, and then go straight to the hotel, which was – he checked his notes – in Rue Haudry. Mr. Jules nodded and said that it was a good location for them, as it was about fifteen minutes on foot from the harbor, and no distance from the station. The four kept chatting through their entrée, a kind of French onion soup that Finn reluctantly forced himself to sip through, and the main course, which was again some sort of stew – probably part of the same lot most of the passengers didn’t get to eat the evening before because of the storm.

This time, they also got plenty of time to drink through a couple of pints of ale each, which would have made any food go down much more easily for sure.