In 2145, the first Irish-built habitat on Mars had a pub.
Of course it did.
The Gráinne Uaile wasn't much to look at yet—just a module with low ceilings and a hatch that stuck when the temperature swings were bad—but the pint printer worked, the music was loud enough, and someone had stuck an old tricolour on the wall that looked like it had already survived two planets.
Under the flag, there was a framed page.
On it, in blown-up facsimile, a line of old handwriting:
Ensure that every child born in Ireland has more choices than their parents did.
Underneath, someone had added in marker:
APPLIES OFF-WORLD TOO
Rían Kelly-Collins floated rather than walked in, pushing off the bulkhead with casual practice.
He was, technically, distantly related to that Collins—half the country claimed that—but mainly he was on Habitat WEX-01 because he was cheap, clever, and willing to live somewhere your spit boiled if the door seal failed.
He hooked his feet under a rail by the bar and nodded to the printer.
"Black, not too synthetic, thanks," he said.
The machine whirred. The bartender, a woman old enough to remember Earth oceans that didn't regularly hop the embankments, shook her head.
"Waste of a good shift, watching you drink reconstituted nostalgia," she said.
"You love us," he replied.
"I love your rent," she said. "How's the oxygen farm?"
"Still making oxygen," he said. "Mostly."
He took his pint and drifted toward the corner where the framed page hung.
He'd read it a hundred times. It still made something hum in his chest.
"You're staring at your grand-uncle again," a voice said behind him.
"Not my grand-uncle," he said automatically, turning to see Samira, one of the structural engineers, anchoring herself beside him with one hand.
"Fine," she said. "Your spiritual admin ancestor."
He snorted.
"Accurate," he conceded.
Samira tipped her head at the page.
"You really think he'd approve of us flinging ourselves at another planet," she asked, "instead of fixing the mess on the first?"
"Bit late for either/or," Rían said. "We're well into 'both/and' now."
He took a sip, then gestured loosely around them.
"Besides," he said, "this place exists because people on Earth spent a century learning how not to drown their own coasts. That infrastructure, those systems, all the boring commissions and councils—that's the only reason we had the slack to try this."
"That and a lot of rich people wanting somewhere new to hide," Samira muttered.
Rían shrugged.
"Revolutions and space programmes, both funded by dodgy money half the time," he said. "Job is to turn it into something useful before they wreck it."
He'd grown up on stories of the old fights: independence, land reform, the climate transition, the "Data Wars" of the late 21st century when people had finally insisted that their information was not just a commodity.
To him, they were all patch notes.
Ireland 1.0, 2.0, 2.7 climate hotfix, 3.3 territorial expansion pack: Now With Bonus Mars.
It was stupid to think of it that way. It was also the only way that made sense in his head.
He squinted at the handwriting.
"I always liked," he said, "that he didn't write 'every Irish child' there. Just 'every child born in Ireland'. Place, not blood."
Samira grinned.
"Trying to claim Mars as Ireland now?" she asked. "Bit colonial of you."
"No," he said. "I'm saying if we're going to make little bits of Ireland out here, we don't get to make them small. Or mean."
He nodded toward the page again.
"'More choices than their parents did,'" he said. "That bit's the key. Not the flag."
She was quiet for a second.
"You're thinking about the vote extension," she said.
He grimaced.
Outside, barely shielded by regolith and clever engineering, lay the thin-breathed, dusty world that would kill them in under a minute without the right gear.
Inside, arguments about who counted as a "Martian resident" for the new governance charter were tearing through message boards and common rooms.
"Half the Earth-based funders," he said, "want weighted votes based on investment made. 'We paid for this, we decide.'"
He rolled his eyes.
"The other half," he went on, "want to tie it to passports. 'Citizenship of founding nations only.' As if aliens like us can afford nationalism when our nearest neighbour is a thirty-minute light lag away."
Samira frowned.
"And you?" she asked.
He took another sip, thinking of Sãoirse O'Shea's essays he'd skimmed in school, whining about it at the time; of the Commission patch notes that had saved cities in storms; of a line he'd once seen in some old scanned document from the 1920s.
Make it harder to do the worst things, easier to do the decent ones.
"I think anyone who has to breathe this recycled air should get a say in how often we change the filters," he said. "If you live here, you vote here. Whether you got here on a scholarship or a shareholder shuttle."
A tiny icon flickered at the edge of his vision.
His AR contact lenses, linked into Habitat WEX-01's network, normally only popped up alerts about oxygen levels, work shifts, or his mother ringing from Galway.
This one looked… odd. Old-fashioned. Blocky.
You have gained a new skill.
[Franchise Design:] You understand how rules about who gets a vote shape everything else—allowing you to spot when someone's trying to rig the future in advance.
He choked on his drink.
"You all right?" Samira asked, thumping his back.
"Fine," he wheezed. "Wrong pipe. Or right one. Dunno."
The message blinked once more, then folded itself into his usual UI as if it had always belonged there.
He stared at where it had been.
"Okay," he said softly to himself. "That's… new."
Samira was already talking about bulkhead stress and expansion joints again.
He tuned in and out, mind half on ship loads and half somewhere stranger.
His grandmother had joked, when he left Earth, that the Kelly-Collins line had some weird ancestral blessing for "meddling with systems".
Maybe, he thought, that blessing wasn't about magic at all.
Maybe it was just a habit.
Episode after episode, generation after generation, someone looked at a set of rules or structures and thought, This is stupid; we can do better.
Sometimes they had a "skill" pop up in the corner of their vision. Sometimes they just had a headache and too much coffee.
Either way, the effect was the same: small pushes, re-written lines, updated defaults.
"Hey," Samira said, poking his arm. "You spacing out? Sorry, bad joke."
He shook his head.
"Just thinking," he said. "We should write a charter proposal."
"For…?" she said.
He pointed at the page on the wall.
"For not building 19th-century politics on a 22nd-century rock," he said. "For 'if you breathe here and pay rent here and scrape ice off solar panels here, you get a say'. For the kids who'll be born into this tin can and not know what real rain feels like."
Samira made a face.
"You and your projects," she said. "Do I at least get co-author credit?"
"Obviously," he said. "We'll put it in nice bullet points so they think it's boring."
She laughed.
Boring worked. Boring was what got coded into governance documents and forgotten about until it mattered.
Boring was what stopped someone, fifty years from now, from waking up in a habitat where their choices were constrained by investors' whims instead of something resembling a republic.
He grabbed a napkin, because some traditions were too good to lose, even in 0.38g.
At the top, half as a joke and half as a promise, he wrote:
Strategic Plan for Martian Self-Governance and Decent Housing
Underneath, almost without thinking, his pen continued.
Aim: Ensure every child born here has more choices than their parents did—on Earth, Mars, or anywhere in between.
He stared at it.
"Cheesy," Samira said over his shoulder. "But I've seen worse mission statements."
"We'll punch it up in the draft," he said, ears warm.
He didn't see the tiny notification that pinged, deep in the administration system's logs when the napkin, later that night, got scanned into his notes and tagged with a keyword.
PATCH NOTED: Governance Framework – WEX-01
The system didn't really "understand" history.
But the people who'd written it had built little hooks in for that kind of thing.
Human pattern, encoded in software: notice when someone tries to push the story on.
Back on Earth, in a house by an increasingly tamed but still occasionally rude Atlantic, a very old museum curator watered a plant.
The house had been Michael Collins's once, then a relative's, then a state guest house, then, somehow, a quiet office for the National Archive's outreach programme.
On the wall over the fireplace hung a copy of that first copybook page, the ink almost illegible now without augmentation.
Visitors were rare these days. Most people met history through immersive sims or curated feeds, not long drives to old houses.
That was fine.
History didn't need to be housed in old bricks to matter. It lived wherever people argued about how to live together.
The curator set the watering can down and sat for a moment, knees complaining.
On a side table, her tablet glowed with messages.
One was from a Mars account, flagged "Priority Cultural Exchange".
She tapped it open.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Historical Precedents: Franchise Expansion in Early Irish Free State
Dear colleagues,
We are currently drafting a foundational charter for Habitat WEX-01 and associated settlements. Many of our debates mirror those you've had: who gets a vote, how to integrate newcomers, how to prevent capture by narrow interests…
We'd be grateful for any documentation on early-20th-century Irish approaches to suffrage, especially around moments of expansion and inclusion.
With thanks from a slightly dustier island,
R. Kelly-Collins, Governance Working Group
She smiled.
"Of course," she said aloud.
She sent the request on to the right archive staff with a few tags.
Then, on a whim, she attached a high-res scan of the old copybook page. No commentary. Just the handwriting.
Strategic Plan for Irish Independence and Governance
Underneath, just visible if you zoomed in far enough:
Don't ask "What would Michael Collins do?" Ask "What can I do with what I know now?"
She added a brief note.
P.S. He'd probably tell you to get enough sleep and not sign anything important at 3 a.m.
Then she hit send.
On Mars, much later, in a cramped meeting pod as red dust whispered across the habitat shell, Rían opened the file.
He zoomed in, frowning at the old script, then huffed a laugh at the handwritten PS.
"Cheeky old crowd," he said.
He read the line twice.
What can I do with what I know now?
He thought of the Commission in old Dublin rerouting buses in a storm; of Saoirse arguing with ministers in ugly rooms; of Aoife squinting at flood maps; of Cian drawing four circles on a board.
He thought of the kids who'd someday grow up under this pale pink sky and never quite get used to how light their bones felt.
He pulled up the draft charter on his own screen.
In the section marked FRANCHISE, he deleted a paragraph that hedged heavily around investment levels and "stakeholder tiers".
In its place, he wrote:
Any adult resident of Habitat WEX-01 and associated settlements who has lived within the jurisdiction for more than 180 days, regardless of origin, shall have the right to vote in all local governance elections and referenda.
He added, in a comment for the inevitable fight:
(We're not recreating 19th-century property franchises in space. Read literally any Irish history patch note.)
He hit save.
In the corner of his HUD, a small notification chimed.
You have gained a new skill.
[Follow-through:] You act on what you know, even when it's awkward—allowing intentions to actually become structures.
"Nice," he said softly.
Outside, the dust storm eased a little.
Inside, a handful of words moved one small future a few degrees away from a worse path.
The universe, for its part, remained enormous and mostly indifferent.
Stars burned. Planets turned. Somewhere, a distant galaxy collided with another, unfazed by one small species' experiments in self-governance.
But on one tiny, damp island, and in one tin-can town on a rust-red desert, people kept doing the only thing that had ever really distinguished them:
Looking at the way things were.
Feeling the itch of "this isn't good enough".
And then, in fits and starts, with skills and stumbles and arguments and updates, writing the next messy line in the never-finished patch notes of their republics.
Ireland, Earth-side and off-world, still very much under construction.