“Hey you two, come over here!” Said Mr. Jules at one point, while Fae and Finn were sipping through another pint of ale in the canteen. The two joined him looking through one of the big windows, and were glad to see land getting closer and closer, finally.

In the complete darkness of the night, the orange sodium lighting of La Havre harbor were visible from quite a distance, and Mr. Jules seemed eager to give the siblings a quick introduction of their first encounter with the French coast.

“Of course, it would have been better if we arrived in the morning… but the captain must have been in a hurry this time, as we were able to get back on schedule despite the storm. Anyhow, as you see there, that’s Cap de la Hève, the main lighthouse” Finn followed Mr. Jules finger and easily noticed the unmistakable rotating light of the lighthouse,e easily set apart from the other lights around the coast, both because of his bright, yellow color, and intensity. “Then over there… you can see many of the big cranes, oui? Some of them are nearly eighty years old. Still fully operational. Only stopped for a couple of years after the Pulse. And then over there, above the dimmed lights of the city… that’s tower of the Église Saint-Joseph, fully lit up. That is actually closer to a hundred years old, Auguste Perret’s masterpiece. 110 meters tall, designed to be seen from the sea, as a clear sign that you arrived at La Havre.”

Fae and Finn were excited to see a foreign country. It was the first time for Finn but not for Fae, of course, who was quite well-traveled for a four-year-old, before the Pulse. But she didn’t remember much of that. One thing she did remember though were the lights of a big city at night: she had been arriving at airports in Ireland, England, and Italy and everything seemed… more luminous, crisper, definitely not the fading orange lighting she was witnessing as the ship entered the harbor.

As they finally got off the ship, the passengers of the Shamrock and Fleur were told in broken English to enter a very large warehouse-like building, and form an ordered queue to wait for their passports to be checked.

The smell of burnt rapeseed that accompanied them for two days was slowly getting replaced by an even worse smell of body odor, as a lot of passengers presumably from another liner joined them in the queue. It took another hour for Finn and Fae to get to the desk, where an officer of the Direction générale des douanes et droits indirects was finally, and very reluctantly, ready to process them.

“Passeports. Formulaires de déclaration.”

He said, mechanically, without looking up. Fae understood and handed her passport, and Finn did the same. The officer, a young French man with a tidy black goatee that would have been in his mid-thirties at most, quickly grabbed the documents and repeatedly lifted his eyebrows to compare the pictures with the people he had in front of him.

“Irlande.” he uttered, briefly, almost like a virdict. The siblings attempted to smile, but the officer didn’t acknowledge them.

“Objets à déclarer? Electronique?”

Luckily they understood at least the last word. Fae produced the form she neatly filled previously, listing all the pieces of electronics they were both carrying.

“DigiBook” the officer paused, and looked at Fae “C’est irlandais, ça? Licence — vous avez la licence?”

Fae showed her DigiCard to him. He actually took it and inserted it into a small little device connected to the terminal he had on this desk. When that didn’t produce the expected result, he took it out – and that’s where the siblings froze and started sweating for a few seconds – he blew on the contacts and gently polished them with a cloth, then tried again. This time he was able to get it to work. After he finished processing the DigiCard, he then continued asking more questions.

“Et l’argent. Vous avez de l’argent à déclarer?”

“Yes, it’s on the form — we’re carrying jewelry and some small gold pieces as travel currency.”

A long pause. He looked at the form again.

“Combien… how many — quel montant?”

Fae gave him a rough figure, which was promptly written down, as she made a mental note of actually using some of the good to get some franks from the exchange desk she could see further on.

“Bijoux. Les bijoux, c’est pas… c’est pas” He stopped himself, consulted a laminated card on his desk, and tried again: “Jewelry is not… pas garantie. No guarantee of value. At the border.”

“We understand.” replied Fae, who was essentially doing all the talking at this point.

He didn’t look convinced that they understood, but be continued with the questioning.

“Vous restez combien de temps en France?”

Fae looked at Finn. That, they didn’t understand at all.

“Combien de… how… long. Jeurs, en France.” the officer tried to explain.

“About a week,” said Fae. “We’re continuing to Italy.”

“Italie.” Another verdict. “Par où?”

“Sorry?”

“Par où… which.., route. Comment?” He traced a line on an invisible map on his side of the counter. “Lyon? Alpes?”

“Lyon, yes. Then the Alps.” confirmed Fae.

“Vous avez… un Minicard? Carte Minitel?”

Finn showed him the guest card. The officer examined it, turned it over, and then looked at Finn with an expression that was between pity and disappointment.

“Accès invité,” he said. “C’est… limité. Très limité.” He held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. “Petit peu.”

“We know,” said Finn.

The officer handed it back, visibly bothered that they obviously didn’t really understand what they were missing out.

“Bienvenue en France,” he said, stamping both passports vigorously and closing them before handing them back.

“Hang on a minute sis, please, let’s get one of these, I am hungry” said Finn pointing at a vending cart that said Crêpes. He then tried to utter something in some sort of broken French to the best of his abilities, and the street vendor pointed to a sign that said 80 cents.

It took a while and a lot of pointing for Finn to order two savory crepes, and some additional time to figure out the foreign notes that he had been given at the exchange office, but in the end the two managed to walk away with two freshly cooked, hot crepes filled with cheese of some sort and tomato, and a load of French coins. For sure Finn didn’t quite figure out the notes, but at least now they had some spare change.

After quite a bit of walking while dragging their suitcases, the sibling finally reached the Hotel Le Gare in Rue Haudry, where they booked. This time Fae told Finn to sort things out, since he had booked everything at the agency. Surprisingly, everything went smoothly, and the two were finally in a relatively cozy room, and both collapsed on their beds, exhausted.

The other good thing about the small but cozy Hotel Le Gare was, as the name implied, its proximity to the station. When the siblings entered the building, Fae immediately had a flashback of her early childhood memories: when she was three or four, she actually used to catch the train quite regularly, accompanying her mother to visit the street market in La Spezia, every Friday, a tradition that Tamsin used to honor even since her parents moved to Italy at the beginning of the century, close to La Spezia.

While the overall atmosphere was comparable – really high ceiling, people waking around quickly to the platforms, frequent public audio announcements, and so on — one thing that was notably different was a frequent mechanical flapping noise every few minutes. Fae had no clue about what it was, also because she hardly caught the train herself while in Ireland, as the Cork to Dublin line took many years to fully recover.

It was the noise of the split-flap displays that were in multiple places, to list departures and arrivals. While there were a few, well-placed orange dot matrix boards for important information, the split-flap displays were dominating when it came to train times.

The Paris train called at 07:38 on voie 2, so they didn’t have long. Finn had been way too keen on savoring his first French breakfast, and Fae’s anxiety kicked in pretty quickly when she noticed that they only had less than fifteen minutes to board.

“Sis, it’s right there. Chill!” – said Finn trying to be rational about the whole thing.

Like her mother, Fae hated to be late. More than anything, she hated the prospect of being late, and always wanted to make sure to have a few minutes to spare, no matter what. At least, she was glad that his brother managed to already pre-pay the tickets.

Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was that they didn’t have the actual tickets, just some receipts they had to exchange for the real thing. When Fae showed those to the chef de train who was slowly walking towards their train, he shook his head indicating the ticket area they came from before reaching the track.

It took Fae a single look at her brother to get him to rush back, find some excuse in his very broken French to skip the small queue at one of the ticket desks, and finally get back to voie 2 at 07:35. He thought about using his three minutes to spare to walk the last few meters to catch his breath, but he knew his sister too well, so they were both seated at their exact seats when the train started to depart.

Their carriage was, like rest of the train, packed with mainly business travelers that had to reach Paris before lunch time. It was divided in separate compartments, and they were sharing seats with another four people. As it often happens in such a setting, no one was saying a word, so Finn decided to continue reading the Minitel book, while Fae decided to turn on her DigiBook booting xywOS to see if by chance she could connect to the Mesh.

*** Welcome to xywOS v3.7.23 ***
* Checking devices...
* System...   OK
* Clock...    OK
* Terminal... OK
* File...     OK
* Beeper...   OK  
* Network...  OK
* Crypto...   OK
*** System Ready ***
$> run echo
*** Echo Global Messaging v3.5.8 ***
* Waiting for radio signal...
* ...
* ...
*** Connection Failed ***
> 

Seen that it didn’t work as expected, she turned to the woman that was sitting next to her in the carriage who was tapping away on her terminal, and tried asking:

“Excusez-moi, … un signal radio sur cet itinéraire?

The other person, a neatly made up 40-something, executive-looking brunette turned towards her, lowered her glasses, and and just, in a condescending tone, “Anglais? No… no radio. Wired connection is much better here.”

Coincidentally, Finn couldn’t help but nodding his head in agreement, having just read in his book that over 87% of the Nouveau Minitel network was deliberately delivered over copper wire, to be was easily billable (and identifiable) to single households. While AX.25 was technically supported, it wasn’t really viable as much as it was in Ireland.

After a few minutes, the business woman stood up and left her seat, only to come back with a constable in uniform, who stopped at the carriage door, exchanging a few words with the woman, who seemed visibly nervous and somewhat embarrassed at the same time. They both looked at Fae while the other passengers (except Finn of course) didn’t even look up and continued reading their papers and books.

“Mademoiselle could you… come… ici with your… ordinateur, sil-vous-plait?” said the constable.

The business woman went back to her seat deliberately avoiding Fae’s eyes. Finn was about to get up and say something, but his sister made him understand that he should remain there, so he did.

Fae followed the constable, a gendarme by the looks of it, all the way through the narrow corridor to the very beginning of the carriage, and entered a compartment that was obviously reserved for the police, with only two extra seats and a small fitted desk taking up half of the available space. To Fae’s surprise, it was equipped with terminals and other devices, as well as some not very promising tools like screw drivers, pliers, and similar.

She was instructed to hand over her DigiBook who actually had quite a different form factor compared to standard-issue portable Minitel Terminals, which were rather boxy-looking, and bulkier than the small, foldable device was which was also brand new. The other constable that was sitting down behind the small desk briefly inspected the machine for obvious sign of tampering, and after having found nothing obvious he asked Fae to turn it on.

** Éireann Digital Systems
** DigiBook Operating System
   v2050.6.61.11
   Licensed to: Fae Consoli
>>

The sitting constable, who seemed more used to talk to foreigners, asked Fae to repeat the same commands that she entered a few minutes prior, in exactly the same sequence, saying that he would have noticed any discrepancy. He deliberately sounded extremely firm and never lost eye contact.

Fae, whose anxiety was kicking in, felt very surprised by such a request. How could they possibly notice if she entered different commands? She didn’t even boot DOS earlier. Although she was able to rationalize that pretty quickly, it didn’t seem to help her anxiety as she was visibly shaking when she started typing the commands that realistically she would have typed:

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

** Mail download...
** ..
!! Download failed. Unable to connect to DigiNet.

She looked up to the officers pointing at the screen, that seemed a very plausible thing that could have happened to her: she was not able to download her mail because of course there was no DigiNet to connect to.

The two officers took a few seconds to understand what was written on that foreign terminal, and Fae played dumb Irish blonde insisting that she couldn’t fetch her email, until the officers understood and seemed more relaxed. One of them even started snickering at the naivety of that beautiful young woman who has the presumption that her foreign device could work in France. And without a Minitel card, even!

Shortly afterwards, Fae was accompanied back to her compartment and the two officers, visibly relieved, greeted her jovially and wished her luck for her journey.

Finn looked at Fae, somewhat relieved by that ending, waiting for Fae to say something. Fae didn’t say anything, and just handed him a blue plastic card:

Carte d'accès invité Minitel gratuite, d'une valeur de 5 francs

He chuckled.

Once Fae settled back into her seat after her brief and luckily uneventful encounter with the gendarmerie, she decided to have a look at their Paris guide, to be prepared for the next part of their journey: getting to the hotel booked by her brother through local transport.

They would have arrived at Gare Saint-Lazare at around 11:30, and from then the hotel was about… well, it looked far on the map. But at least it was close to Notre Dame, so that was one thing her brother did right – she thought. According to the guide, which was a 2048 edition so should have been up-to-date, the best way to get to places in Paris was the metro, the fully-electric city-wide internal railroad network, that was one of the first thing the capital struggled but succeeded in fully restoring by the late 2020s.

She checked the amount of Francs the two had exchanged in La Havre, and she concluded that they should have been more than enough for a few metro tickets. From Gare Saint-Lazare there were different ways to get to Notre Dame area and the Latin quarter where their hotel was, but the most direct seemed to be the line 12 for six stops till Serves Babylone, and then the line 10 for four stops till Maubert - Mutualité.

Gare Saint-Lazare was a big station. Cork always felt big, but this was a whole new definition of big. A completely different scale: extremely high ceiling, very spacious, and so many tracks… there must have been nearly thirty, Finn estimated. People were buzzing around everywhere, busy, determined to go to places, like in a well-organized beehive.

For some reason, Fae was expecting a more familiar smell of burnt diesel or rapeseed – trains in Ireland were still partially running on combustion, which made everything much more messy and smelly, but, to her surprise, there was none of that smell there: French trains were 100% électrique, something the French were extremely proud of, and as a result train stations weren’t terribly smelly at all.

Another thing that caught the attention was the frequent patrols of 2-3 soldiers, in full mimetic gear and carrying… assault rifles! They were most definitely not ordinary police or Gendarmerie, for sure, they were unmistakably fully-armed, ready-for-battle infantry. No one was worried or alarmed in anyway, so it must have not been a one-off thing either, it was clear that they were meant to be there, patrolling the station, and occasionally stopping passengers. Maybe it was some sort of anti-terrorism deterrent, or simply part of their national protocol for what concerned crowded public places. As one of the soldiers noticed them and followed them mechanically with his gaze, Fae grabbed her browser and redirected him toward a big Sortie sign above one of the exits of the station.

They weren’t sure on whether they were meant to exit the station to get to the metro, but once out in the open they started scanning for some sign for it. Again, the whole scale of the buildings in Paris seemed to be off: huge blocks of historical-looking, 100-150 year old buildings all around a very spacious square full of people going about their business. Right in the middle of the square, they finally spotted an arch with red lights at the sides and a big sign that said Metropolitain in the middle. That must have been it: it was positioned near a curved 2020-style glass enclosure and they could see some electric escalators going down. That was indeed it: the escalators were obviously pre-Pulse, maybe even retrofitted 1990s escalators judging by the wear and amount of vibration they caused while in operation.

Fae looked down at the steps forming and going downwards and she had a flashback from her childhood

“Daddy, go ahead… one more… look, I am taller than you!”

That was probably four-year-old Fae back in Genoa. They must have had escalators there somewhere too. She stopped for a second, smiling while staring downwards.

“Come on sis, let’s get going!” said Finn grabbing her arm.

They finally figured out which track they were supposed to go on, after walking around the rather spacious metro station. Unlike what they imagined, everything there was white: the flooring, the ceilings, the round pillars, and the walls, which were covered by small shiny white tiles. Once they finally found where line #14 was leaving from, they only had to wait a couple of minutes for the following train, which they boarded confidently after double checking the name of the destination displayed on the side of it with what was written on their map.

The journey on the underground was remarkably fast, as the fast train was zipping through stations at incredible speeds. It took them about thirty minutes to get to their last stop, Maubert - Mutualité, including one change. And just another 15 minutes of walking after that, the siblings arrived at Hotel St. Germain, including going the wrong way for about half that time thanks to Fae being absolutely sure that she was reading the map right.

The St. Germain was a relatively small hotel in the middle of the Latin quarter, an area that was well-known for its many ethnic restaurants and shops. As they walked around the area, Finn was constantly tempted by the unusual but very promising smells of the freshly-cooked street food that seemed to be available everywhere they looked, or at least that’s what it seemed to Finn, who was obviously hungry. As they finally made their way to the hotel, Fae had to concede that they should have grabbed some lunch, and so they did: Finn was desperate to try a couple of burritos that at least looked – and smelt – truly delicious. As he put them in his backpack before entering the hotel, he couldn’t help but noticing a very prominent label attached to the packaging that said:

Plat sud-américain sous licence - Autorisation spéciale n° 1526

Was a license required to sell non-French food? Finn immediately showed it to his sister, who at first didn’t quite process what that label meant, also because she got distracted by something happening nearby. It looked like two gendarmes were stopping at one of the food stalls and talking to the owner, an old, friendly-looking South American guy who was frying different types of vegetables. They could only hear bits of the conversation between the three:

“Pas de licence, pas de cuisine. Désolé.”

“Non s'il vous plaît, je… je ne peux pas me payer la licence… Je gagne à peine de quoi survivre…”

And soon enough the officers had the man turn off his cooking stall, and pack away everything. Whatever they said to him, it was clear that he was not meant to be there or something like that, because he didn’t have a license.

As soon as they checked in the hotel and got to their room, they avidly ate their freshly-cooked burritos while they were still hot: they were both really hungry after the journey.

As they finished their quick lunch and settled in their room, Fae decided to try again to see if she was able to connect to the Mesh with her DigiBook. She wanted to send a quick message to Kathleen and also her dad, or course, letting them both know that they were OK.

She noticed a serial cable coming out of the desk in the room, and she remembered that they had started to fit those in hotels in Ireland as well – it was a convenient way to provide fast DigiNet connectivity to customers. She was about to try it out on her DigiBook but she hesitated for a second: she realized she had always been using her DigiBook via radio connection, especially when connecting to the Mesh. She let go of the cable and booted it without connecting it.

*** Welcome to xywOS v3.7.23 ***
* Checking devices...
* System...   OK
* Clock...    OK
* Terminal... OK
* File...     OK
* Beeper...   OK  
* Network...  OK
* Crypto...   OK
*** System Ready ***
*** Echo Global Messaging v3.5.8 ***
* Connecting to nearest HubLink...
* ...
* Still working...
* ...
* Connected to node @frpar via HubLink 86.
> fetch
* Connecting...
* ...
* Fetching 2 messages...
* OK.
> list --unread
* 1 unread message
* 1 - Bienvenue en France! - valj3an@frpar
> read 1
* ID:
  3E6BE446AE9D8366B7D5DA04B01DC57E
  6A834256EB31493E14CC894B516B8A49
* From: valj3an@frpar
* To: free~phaerie@ieork, berry~finn@ieork
* IZT: 806163897 (Sun 2050-12-11 22:54:09)
* Subject: Bienvenue en France!
Bienvenue!

I believe you have something I need. You can find me every morning in _Square Jean  XXIII_, the park behind Notre Dame, except on Sundays. I have a small stall selling used books and magazines. 

Ask for Valerie Jeán.

Valerie

P.S. I hope you are reading through a radio connection. Do not use serial cables in France, as they are are starting to track non-Minitel usage and the gendarmerie may be coming for you if you did!
>

After reading that, Fae felt really lucky she didn’t try wiring up her DigiBook. She looked towards Finn’s bed to tell him, only to realize that her little brother had fallen asleep while reading the Nouveau-Minitel book. He looked so peaceful with his natural blonde curls and his mouth half opened… that was her baby brother, now taller and bigger than her, and she remembered how he used to sleep in the same way when he was just a little boy.

She smiled, happy to be on this journey with the dearest person in her life.