By the time anyone met aliens, arguing about Irish history on the internet seemed adorably quaint.
Not that they'd stopped. They'd just upgraded platforms.
The first confirmed non-human civilisation humanity contacted didn't look like little green men.
It looked like a distributed coral reef of machines and microbes, drifting slowly through the outskirts of a stellar nursery, wrapped around an asteroid belt like a luminous necklace.
They called themselves, roughly translated, the Weave.
Talking to them was… complicated.
You couldn't just sit one down in a chair on The Late Late Show.
You had to ping patterns into shared simulation spaces and hope you weren't accidentally insulting someone's entire lineage by drawing circles when their core philosophy was triangles.
Still, it turned out some problems really were universal.
"How do you decide things?" one Weave cluster asked in a joint sim, its "voice" shimmering as a shifting pattern of colours and tones.
Human delegates glanced at each other. A Nigerian urbanist, a Brazilian bio-engineer, a Martian council chair, a representative from the old Earth-based UN-that-wasn't-quite-the-UN-anymore.
Aoibhín O'Shea, great-something of Saoirse and now head of the Interpolity Learning Council, smiled.
"Badly, sometimes," she said. "But we're getting better at it."
She gestured, and the sim space filled with snapshots:
– A Dáil vote in 1921.
– A Lagos sea wall control room.
– A Martian charter ratification meeting.
– A citizens' assembly in a VR hall, avatars raising digital hands.
"This," she said, "is what we call 'patch notes'. We keep track of where we buggered up, and where we made things a bit less terrible. Then we try not to repeat the first and build on the second."
The Weave cluster pulsed.
"Pattern resembles our own 'reef accretion record'," it said. "We also document flows. What is 'buggered up'?"
Aoibhín winced.
"Technically profane," she said. "Informally: when we do something that hurts more than it helps, often because we didn't think things through."
"Error state," the Weave agreed. "We have term. 'Destructive resonance cascade'. We also keep record. We upweight nodes that warn before repetition."
Aoibhín grinned.
"Promotion for the professional worriers," she said. "We do that too."
The Weave flickered with what their cultural interpreters had decided was amusement.
"You share this record with our young?" it asked. "We share with yours. Comparative patch notes."
"Deal," Aoibhín said.
A small icon pinged at the edge of her awareness.
You have gained a new skill.
[Cross-Species Governance:] You can map human messiness onto entirely different ways of being—allowing you to explain why arguing about bus routes is, in fact, a profound act of civilisation.
She did not flinch.
She'd grown up with these pop-ups. They appeared when she pulled an all-nighter over a tricky mediation, when she finally understood a bit of old legislation, when she realised that the story about "how things are" in her neighbourhood wasn't actually that old.
Her grandmother had called them "the family bug".
Aoibhín had once run tests to see if it was a mild inherited neural quirk, a half-conscious gamification layer her brain had built because she'd read too many historical sims. The scans were inconclusive.
She'd settled on calling it a narrative tic.
It helped. That was enough.
The patch notes they shared with the Weave did not start with Michael Collins.
They started with simple things:
– "We tried letting only property owners vote. That led to riots."
– "We tried letting religious leaders run schools unchallenged. That led to abuses."
– "We tried ignoring climate models. That nearly killed coastal cities."
They marked where they'd turned.
– "We created independent election commissions."
– "We separated church and state more clearly."
– "We built walls and changed energy systems."
In a footnote somewhere, there was an image of an old copybook page.
The Weave, for their part, shared their own records:
– Times when they'd over-prioritised stability and stifled necessary change.
– Times when they'd followed a charismatic cluster's vision into resource depletion.
– Times when they'd learned, painfully, to down-weight certain impulses.
To an outside observer, it might have looked incredibly nerdy.
To the people in that sim, it felt like standing on a cliff and discovering, across the chasm, another cliff with someone waving, equally baffled and excited.
"We also have 'heroes'," the Weave cluster said at one point, surprising everyone. "Individuals or sub-clusters whose patterns recur. We model their choices. Do you… worship yours?"
Aoibhín thought of Laser-Eyes Collins on Cian's worksheet, of statues, murals, cheap pints named after dead men, endless essays.
"Some people treat them like that," she said carefully. "But mostly, we're learning to treat them as… patch note authors. Not gods. People who wrote a good update or two, and some bad ones, which we have to revise."
The Weave pulsed in what their interpreters now confidently labelled agreement.
"Useful," it said. "We will add this metaphor. 'Hero as patch author, not root code.'"
Aoibhín smiled.
"We'll steal your 'destructive resonance cascade' phrase," she said. "Sounds fancier than 'we fecked it'."
Back on Earth, years after that sim, a kid in Cork—because some things come back around—sat in a classroom that smelled of old VR rigs and new marker pens.
On the wall, the teacher had projected a simple timeline.
1922–23. 1950s. 2008. 2083. 2145. 2300.
"At each of these points," the teacher said, "we had choices. Sometimes we chose well. Sometimes we didn't. The point of looking back is not to feel smug or ashamed. It's to see that choices existed."
She tapped 1921.
"Treaty," she said. "Collins, de Valera, others. What were their options? What information did they have? What did they get right? What did they leave us to fix?"
Hands shot up. Opinions clashed. The names were old, but the arguments felt surprisingly fresh.
Later, the exercise moved on.
Storm Niamh. The Commission. People shouted at each other about compulsory evacuation orders vs personal freedom.
Martian Charter. A kid at the back, whose parents had emigrated back from WEX-01 when she was five, argued passionately that off-world colonists should have more say in Earth decisions.
Lagos wall 2.0. Sea levels, migration, shared responsibility.
By the end of the class, the board was a mess of arrows and question marks.
"Notice anything?" the teacher asked.
A quiet student, who'd spent most of the period doodling in the margins, looked up.
"There's no one finally 'right' moment," they said slowly. "Just… layers. And you can't fix everything at once."
"Exactly," the teacher said. "So what do we do with that?"
The class shrugged, grumbled, offered half-formed answers.
The student who'd spoken sat back, eyes narrowed, seeing—just for a second—a little pop-up in their mind's eye.
You have gained a new skill.
[Temporal Humility:] You realise everyone in history, including you, is making decisions with limited info—and you still have to choose.
They rolled their eyes at themselves.
Then, at home that evening, when a local youth council meeting came up on their feed, they did not scroll past.
They clicked "Attend".
It wasn't glamorous. It was about bus timetables and park maintenance.
But somewhere in their head, ghost voices—human, Weave, and otherwise—murmured approval.
Patch notes, kid.
No one else will write these ones.
In a quiet corner of a museum—physical, because some things are worth getting sore feet for—two artifacts sat side by side under glass.
One was the original copybook, ink flaking, paper fragile.
The other was a scuffed, laminated napkin from a Martian hab, edges stained with something that might have been reconstituted stout.
On it, in hastier handwriting, was written:
Strategic Plan for Martian Self-Governance and Decent Housing
The label below them read:
"Two early examples of 'patch note thinking': the Collins Copybook (c. 1913–24) and the Kelly-Collins Napkin (c. 2145).
Neither document was magic. Both were just humans, at specific moments, trying to think beyond their immediate crises.
Their true legacy is not the details they got right or wrong, but the habit they model:
Write it down.
Argue about it.
Try it.
Adjust."
Visitors moved past.
Some barely glanced. Some read every word. A few took pictures they might never look at again.
But one or two, somewhere, would absorb enough to feel a tiny tickle at the back of their mind the next time someone said, "That's just the way things are."
A tickle that sounded suspiciously like a pop-up.
You have gained a new skill.
[Refusal 2.0:] You understand that "the way things are" is just "the way things have been patched so far"—allowing you, irritatingly and gloriously, to ask, "So what's the next update?"
And so, in classrooms and council chambers, on seas and in domes, under old rain and thin new skies, the work continued.
Not because a man a long time ago had laser eyes.
Not because history guaranteed progress.
But because ordinary, flawed, over-caffeinated people kept:
– Learning new skills.
– Writing new notes.
– Building, breaking, fixing, rebuilding.
Ireland, and everything that word had stretched to mean by then, remained exactly where it started in this whole wild story:
Under construction.
Excuse the mess.
Help yourself to the tools.