By 2300, most people who quoted Michael Collins had never set foot on the island he'd fought for.
They didn't need to.
In Lagos, the sea wall was a work of art.
Not in the old sense—no marble angels, no heroic statues—but in the way its curves bent wave energy, in the murals that climbed along its length, in the way it doubled as a promenade at sunset.
From the control tower, you could see the old city's towers behind it and the new floating districts beyond, glittering on the swells like necklaces.
Efe Adebayo loved this view.
She also knew exactly how much concrete, graphene mesh, labour, and political capital it represented, down to the decimal.
"Storm front ETA eight hours," the wall AI said in her ear. "Category: grumpy."
"Your grumpy and my grumpy are different things," she muttered.
"Updated category: very grumpy," it replied. "Better?"
"Much," she said.
She flicked her wrist and brought up the dashboards: wave forecasts, tide cycles, shipping traffic, tourist density along the promenade.
A small, less urgent alert blinked at the edge of her vision.
NEW MESSAGE: Galway Urbanism Centre
She almost ignored it. Then curiosity got the better of her.
"Open external," she said.
A window popped up over the sea.
Dear Dr. Adebayo,
We're convening a virtual colloquium on "Patch Notes Urbanism"—how cities learn from past mistakes fast enough to keep up with climate realities. Your work on the Lagos wall and floating districts is central to this conversation…
Patch Notes Urbanism. She smirked.
Some Irish academic had discovered the phrase and made a career out of it. Fair enough. You could build worse careers out of worse metaphors.
Attached to the invite were reading materials. She flicked through titles idly as she adjusted the storm mode settings.
"From Collins to Co-ops: A Century of Housing Governance"
"The Saoirse Schools: Teaching Infrastructure as Civics"
"Mars, Martyrs, and Municipalities: Exporting Republics Off-World"
And, tucked among them, like an old man hiding in a modern crowd:
Scan: Strategic Plan for Irish Independence and Governance (c. 1913–1924)
Efe snorted.
"Oh, him again," she said.
Everyone in their field knew about The Copybook by now. It was required reading in first-year infrastructure governance everywhere from Dublin to Delhi.
Not because it was perfect. Because it was the first time anyone had found, in one place, someone trying to think the whole thing through: war, peace, pipes, housing, schools, money, power.
She'd rolled her eyes at it in uni. Spent whole nights arguing with friends about how "this guy" had missed whole dimensions of race and gender and empire, about how "that guy" had been too cautious here, too reckless there.
But she'd kept her dog-eared copy.
There was something comforting in seeing even a mythic hero scribble half-baked to-do lists.
Now, as the wall AI muttered politely about optimal gate sequences, she opened the scan almost without thinking.
The handwriting was still a pain.
But the lines were familiar.
Make it harder to do the worst things, easier to do the decent ones.
She'd underlined that back in school, biro nearly tearing the page.
Storm mode 2 engaged, the AI reported. Tourist traffic down 60%.
"Show me street level on segment 14C," she said.
The promenade view appeared: food stalls battening down, kids tugged away from the railings by anxious parents, a stubborn old man refusing to leave his bench.
She pinged the nearest steward drone.
"Get him inside," she said. "Offer him whatever bribe works. And quietly close the restrooms; people linger there."
"Yes, Architect Adebayo," the system said.
She winced at the title. It made her sound more glamorous than the job warranted.
Her job was not glamour. It was, as she'd once told a bored journalist, "being professionally anxious about water."
Still, there was a line of continuity here she couldn't ignore.
She tapped the copybook scan with two fingers, highlighting a different bit.
Idealism needs infrastructure.
"Tell me about it," she murmured.
A small icon nudged the corner of her sight.
For a moment, it wasn't her usual sleek AR glyph. It was an old, blocky notification style she'd seen only in retro sims.
You have gained a new skill.
[Bridge-Building:] You can translate local fixes into global lessons without flattening differences—allowing Lagos to learn from Dublin, and vice versa, without either becoming a clone.
She blinked. Then laughed out loud.
"Okay," she said to the air. "That's either a very weird glitch, or my subconscious has a sense of humour."
"Did you say something?" the wall AI asked.
"Just negotiating with historical ghosts," she said. "How's our very grumpy friend?"
"Five hours out," it replied. "Wind picking up. Fishing fleet returning."
"Good," she said. "Let's give your Irish friends something to talk about. Start logging decision trees. I want a clean dataset for the colloquium."
"Already compiling," it said. "Shall I attach annotations with your colourful language removed?"
"Yes," she said. "Please don't send them three hours of me shouting at tide tables."
She paused, then added, "Actually, maybe send them a bit. Atmosphere."
Weeks later, in a virtual meeting space that looked suspiciously like an over-designed café, Efe sat at a long digital table with people from five continents and two planets.
Their avatars varied: some realistic, some stylised, some cheeky. A lecturer from Galway had chosen one that looked like a slightly more kempt version of Michael Collins, which was either brave or deeply annoying.
"Thank you all," the chair was saying, "for leading us through your local 'patch notes'. What emerges, I think, is that—"
They talked about Lagos, Amsterdam, Dhaka, Sao Paulo, Galway, WEX-01.
They compared notes on commissions, councils, charters. On how to avoid elite capture. On how to involve people without burning them out. On how to build enough slowness into big decisions without getting paralysed.
At one point, an earnest student piped up.
"Do you think," they asked, eyes wide in their cartoon avatar, "that the 'skills' metaphor helps people feel empowered? Like, if folks could see little 'You have gained a new skill' pop-ups in their own lives, would they be more likely to engage with infrastructure politics?"
Efe grinned.
"I think some people already see the world that way," she said. "Gamers, mostly. And civil servants who cope with the monotony by pretending they're levelling up their paperwork abilities."
Polite chuckles.
"But honestly," she added, "the important thing isn't whether the UI in your head says 'New Skill Unlocked'. It's whether you recognise that you can change the system. That it's not a monolith handed down from the gods. It's the sum of a lot of human choices."
She nodded at the Collins-lookalike avatar.
"Your man in the copybook had an absurd amount of context and guts," she said. "But he was still just a person making lists. The real 'skill' is taking responsibility for the patch notes in front of you."
The lecturer smiled.
"Nicely put," he said. "And perhaps that's the biggest export from Collins' time: not a specific structure, but a habit of mind. A refusal to stop at complaint."
A small notification pinged in Efe's private view.
You have gained a new skill.
[Refusal:] You no longer accept "that's just how it is" as the end of the conversation—allowing you to be an absolute nuisance in ways that move things.
She didn't flinch this time.
She just saved it, somewhere under her tongue and behind her ribs, where stubbornness lived.
Outside the colloquium, in ordinary days, life went on.
In a midlands Irish town, someone argued at a council meeting about the placement of a new flood retention pond, armed with a stack of data and an inherited sense that "we are the state".
In a Martian hab, a teenager rolled their eyes at a civics lesson about charter amendments—then secretly bookmarked a page for later, because some of it made uncomfortable sense.
In Lagos, kids did wheelies along the sea wall promenade at low tide, the spray catching the light like confetti.
In classrooms, in sims, in quietly desperate homes, people kept encountering some version of the same idea in different clothes:
– In a scribbled copybook.
– In a policy brief.
– In an AR overlay.
– In a grandmother's story.
– In a glitchy pop-up only they seemed to see.
You can learn how this works.
You can change some of it.
You won't fix everything.
Do it anyway.
The names changed. The crises shifted.
Independence. Civil war. Housing. Climate. Data. Off-world governance. Back again to basics: food, water, warmth, dignity.
The pattern held.
If you stood far enough back—say, on a satellite screen or in a historian's obsessive wall chart—you could draw a very long, wobbly line.
From a young man in a farmhouse mirror, startled by a floating message about [City Design]…
…to a planner in Dublin nagging ministers about commissions…
…to a crisis manager rerouting ambulances in a storm…
…to a programmer wiring democratic defaults into a Martian charter…
…to an engineer in Lagos, watching waves smash themselves harmless against a wall humanity had learned, painfully, to build higher and smarter.
The line wouldn't be straight. It wouldn't be neat.
It would look, appropriately, under construction.
Along it, if you zoomed in, you'd see a thousand tiny notes.
Some literal, in margins.
Some metaphorical, in laws.
Some invisible, in the quiet shift of someone's belief from "nothing will change" to "maybe, if we…"
You would not see a single "The End".
Just a lot of "Next:" with arrows.
Somewhere—now, later, earlier; time is untidy in stories—someone opens an old document.
They read a line that makes them snort, or wince, or think, That's obvious, why is that even written down?
A little ping goes off in their head.
They roll their eyes. They keep reading. They add their own scribble.
They don't think of it as gaining a skill. They think of it as "I'll do that differently" or "We should try this."
But for the sake of tradition, for the ghosts who like a bit of flair, let's write it the old way:
You have gained a new skill.
[Stewardship:] You see yourself not as a spectator of your country (or habitat, or city), but as one of its temporary caretakers—allowing you to act with both urgency and patience.
What they do with it is, as always, up to them.
Ireland—on its rain-slick rock and in its dusty offshoots—remains exactly where it has been since the beginning of this story:
Not finished.
Not ruined.
Just… in progress.
Please excuse the mess.