The thing about "under construction" is that sometimes the construction site floods.
In 2083, the sea tried to take back a chunk of Dublin.
Storms weren't rare anymore, but this one came in with the tide stacked just wrong—surge, wind, pressure, all lining up like a badly-planned budget.
On the screens in the National Resilience Centre, the map turned more and more shades of alarming blue.
"South docks overtopped," someone called. "Pumping stations at capacity. Evac route C jammed."
Aoife Collins—not that Collins, just unlucky enough to share the name—swore under her breath and dragged the window for the coastal wall sensors to the foreground.
She'd been on shift for ten hours. Coffee had given up on her. Her eyes felt like they'd been sandblasted with PDFs.
Still, [Systems Thinking]—if that's what you called the knack she'd always had for seeing the patterns—whirred on.
Storm track. Flood defences. Live public transport data. Hospital bed capacity. Social media spikes of "help" and "is anyone stuck near…".
"We need to flip more lanes to outbound," she said, already tapping routes into the system. "And we need a clear update to the feeds—everything, all channels. People are moving because they're scared, not because they're supposed to. We match that flow or we're going to have a mess."
Her supervisor glanced over. "You're rewriting the evac plans on the fly," he said.
"Plans are guesses," Aoife said. "Reality is feedback."
He grunted in what, from him, was high praise.
Outside, the storm punched the city. In here, servers hummed and people muttered at screens and maps.
She dragged up the South Circular district: old Collins-era houses, newer infill, a controversial new co-op tower that had been savaged on talk radio for "ruining the skyline".
Flood depth projections pulsed.
"Okay," she said aloud, more to herself than anyone. "We can't stop the river here. But we can stop this turning into a full-blown disaster."
Her fingers flew.
– Limited closures on this bridge, not total.
– Priority bus lanes opened for emergency access.
– Drone network deployed to check on rooftop solar rigs doubling as emergency power.
– Text alerts targeted to specific streets, not the whole city. Don't scream at everyone; whisper to the right ones.
A memory floated up through the layers of focus: some old quote they'd made her memorise in school.
Idealism needs infrastructure.
She'd rolled her eyes at the time, more interested in her band than in dead statesmen. Now it lodged somewhere under her ribs.
"C'mon, you awkward old eejit," she muttered to the air. "Let's see if your century of boring pipes pays off."
A tiny notification flickered at the edge of her peripheral vision—AR overlay, half the city wore them now. She almost ignored it, then glanced.
For a second, the tag looked oddly like text in a very old UI.
You have gained a new skill.
[Triage:] You can tell, under pressure, which problem will kill people first—allowing you to ignore screaming side-quests and hit the right target.
She blinked hard.
The overlay resolved into its normal icon: a reminder about her break.
"Right," she said. "Hallucinating software messages. Great. Later problem."
But the word triage hung there, handy.
She zoomed the map out, looked for the thing that would kill people first.
Not the Instagrammable knee-deep water where lads were already surfing on bits of pallet. Not the headlines about the sea wall "failure" where it had actually performed exactly to design and just been overwhelmed by a once-in-a-century peak that now showed up every fifteen years.
Hospitals.
She dragged up the east-side hospital cluster.
"Route 12 is going under," she said sharply. "If we lose that, ambulances are either detouring for thirty minutes or trying to swim."
Her supervisor swore.
"Can we get mobile hubs closer in?" he asked. "Pop-up field units?"
"Already pinged them," she said. "But we need to keep this bit of road alive for as long as possible."
She stabbed at the screen.
"Divert non-essential traffic. Get the Council to push the 'stay put unless you're told' messages hard in these zones." She circled three blocks with her stylus. "I know, 'nanny state', 'can't tell me what to do', yeah yeah. Do it anyway."
He nodded, relaying orders.
Somewhere out there, people cursed at their phones, at the government, at the rain. Somewhere else, a paramedic shaved ten minutes off a trip that would otherwise have ended in a body bag.
You never quite knew which.
You just made your best call.
When the storm finally blew itself empty, Aoife staggered out of the Centre into weak, washed-out daylight.
The city dripped.
There were flooded basements. Broken windows. A few collapsed sheds. But no mass casualty lists. No tower blocks blacked out for days. No grim helicopter shots of people on roofs waving bedsheets.
It wasn't perfect. It was… less bad.
She'd take it.
At home, in her small flat up on higher ground, she microwaved leftover curry and tried not to fall asleep in it.
Her partner, Mei, sat opposite, newsfeed projected on the wall.
"…Collins Commission praised for rapid integrated response," the newsreader said. "Evacuation orders optimised through real-time modelling, according to—"
"Turn it off," Aoife groaned. "I cannot with the Commission tonight."
"Hey now," Mei said, smirking. "That Commission pays for our curry."
"Our ancestors' Commission pays for our curry," Aoife said. "We're just the exhausted goblins pushing buttons in the control room."
Mei flicked the feed off with a finger gesture.
"Goblin," she agreed. "My favourite goblin, though."
Aoife let her head thunk back against the chair.
"You know what's mad?" she said. "I can trace the line from some bloke doodling tram routes in a notebook in 1920-something to me rerouting buses in a storm in 2083. Like this whole chain of "Oh, that's a bad idea, let's not do that again" lessons."
"That's history," Mei said. "A long list of 'ah, feck, maybe don't.'"
Aoife laughed, then winced as something in her back twinged.
"So you're basically Michael Collins with better hair," Mei added.
"Wow," Aoife said. "History teachers would cry if they heard you say that."
"They already cry," Mei said serenely. "Have you seen the state of the Leaving Cert?"
Aoife grinned despite herself.
"Fair."
Her gaze drifted to the small bookshelf by the wall.
On it, between climate models and cookbooks, sat a slim volume: Infrastructure & Imagination: The Collins-Saoirse Papers.
Some editor decades ago had thought it cute to bundle Michael's copybook pages and Saoirse O'Shea's early-21st-century policy essays together. At school, Aoife had underlined bits half out of obligation.
Now, eyes gritty, body buzzing with adrenaline let-down, she remembered one line:
Our job is to leave behind fewer stupid traps.
"We did okay today," she said quietly.
Mei followed her gaze, softened.
"Yeah," she said. "You did."
In a seminar room in the same city, a bunch of first-year students were, at that exact moment, arguing about hero worship.
On the board: "Great Man" History vs Systems History – Ireland as a Case Study
At the front, Professor Cian O'Shea—grown taller, not much calmer—waved his hands.
"I'm not saying Collins wasn't important," he said. "Or Saoirse O'Shea, or any of the others. But if you tell history like it's just these big lads with flags, you miss the whole machine they were tinkering with."
A student with blue hair raised a hand.
"But it's easier to care about stories than about… commissions," they said, making a face. "Like, my granny bangs on about the Treaty debates. She never once talked to me about sewage upgrades."
The class laughed.
"Right," Cian said. "That's the challenge. How do we tell the story of pipes and planning in a way that doesn't make people's eyes fall out of their heads?"
He scribbled four words on the board:
PEOPLE
POWER
PAYOFF
PAIN
"Every system," he said, "has these. Who it affects, who runs it, what it's for, who it hurts. You can build a narrative around that."
He paused, then added, almost absently, below it:
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
On impulse, he turned back to the room.
"Okay," he said. "Thought experiment. Let's say Michael Collins, when he wrote that first plan, had some weird… brain thing that let him see a bit further ahead than his peers."
The class perked up. Weird brain things were more interesting than footnotes.
"Cheats?" someone said. "Like a game?"
"Sure," Cian said. "He gets a few 'skills'—money, politics, reading people. He uses them. Does that mean he single-handedly built modern Ireland?"
"No," Blue Hair said promptly. "He needed money, and other people, and also British mistakes, and… like, World War One."
"Exactly," Cian said. "Now say some girl a hundred years later—no relation—gets a similar 'boost' in how she sees systems. She helps build the Commission that saved half your parents' houses in Storm Niamh. Does that mean she owns the future?"
"Also no," someone said.
"So what do we do with these stories?" he asked. "How do we honour individual effort without pretending they were wizards whose spells fixed everything?"
A thoughtful silence.
Then a lad at the back said slowly, "Maybe we treat them like… version updates."
Cian tilted his head. "Go on."
"Like," the lad said, warming to it, "Ireland 1.0 was colonies and landlords and stuff. Then Collins & co pushed an update. Didn't fix all the bugs. Created new ones. Then Saoirse's lot pushed another update. And now we're working on 3-point-whatever and the climate patch keeps breaking the rest."
Laughter.
"But," he added, "having those old update notes helps. 'Cause we don't have to rediscover everything."
Cian stared at him for a moment, then grinned.
"I'm stealing that too," he said. "Heroes as patch notes. Love it."
He turned back to the board and, under UNDER CONSTRUCTION, wrote in big letters:
PATCH NOTES
Somewhere in the building's wiring, power flowed from a grid that had been slowly, carefully decarbonised over sixty years. Out the window, students locked bikes to racks, checked bus times, cursed rain that now came in more intense bursts thanks to a disrupted jet stream.
Inside, they argued about dead men, live policy, and whether the new Citizen Climate Council was genius or a joke.
History, as always, was happening quietly in small rooms.
On certain forums in the noisier parts of the net, there were perennial threads with titles like:
"Time travel: If you could go back to 1920s Ireland, what's the one thing you'd tell them?"
The answers ranged from "Buy land in Dún Laoghaire" to "Vaccinate everyone" to "For the love of God, don't let the Church run the laundries".
Every so often, someone would post a long, impassioned comment about structures instead of slogans.
"Don't just shoot the bad guys," they'd write. "Build boring institutions. Train civil servants. Set up independent watchdogs. Create housing bodies that can't be casually privatised. Agree, in principle, that a republic owes its people decent shelter."
Most people would scroll past.
A few would read to the end.
One or two might click a link to an old scanned document: a copybook heading in fading ink.
Strategic Plan for Irish Independence and Governance
It would look, frankly, underwhelming.
No laser eyes. No drama.
Just lists. Timelines. Arrows.
The bones of a patch note written by a man who'd once been two people, then became one, then became a story, then became a push in a thousand other people's minds.
In the margins, if the scan was high-res enough, you could just make out a final, scratched line.
Ireland, still under construction. Please excuse the mess.
If you squinted, you might imagine that another hand, decades later, had added underneath in a different ink:
That's how you know we're still alive.
And somewhere—in arguments, in policy drafts, in crowded council meetings and quiet planning offices and living rooms where kids did homework about Irish heroes—that construction work went on.
No finish line.
No perfect version.
Just the next update, written by whoever had their hands on the tools and their eyes on the mess.
Exactly as it should be.