The pod bus on the coastal line

taps the empty seat twice You can sit, you know. It takes forty minutes to the end of the line and nobody is going to check that paper for you.

leaning over to look, then shrugging After five years, the council sends you the citizenship paper on its own, you sign nothing, and honestly you already have everything it gives you.

I am Sarena, and yes, the crossing at Corvaluri feels like nothing at all, you walk through and then the confusion starts there.

laughing quietly I have never been anywhere where you can get in trouble for saying a name, so I only know that from reading.

Almost nobody here likes the man. He locks people up for a joke and he has his face on everything. The Assembly still has to be careful with him, and I understand why, though I dislike it. Hosting refugees counts for something in the ledger but it does not cancel the rest.

I remember that week, my brother stood in that queue from four in the morning and came back happy like a child. The phones we get here are free and they are bricks, thick, heavy, open down to the last component, and the camera is terrible. So people saw a Fairphone that was thinner, faster, and still repairable, and they lost their minds a little. The funny part is that they all had to sit down afterwards and reflash the thing for our network, because we run Open5GS and the proprietary stacks are illegal here. It took an evening each, LTE, then the 5GS core, then VoLTE, and there were guides pinned in every tool library in Lindoma. pulling the brick out of her bag and showing it

Plasma Mobile, yes, the brick ships with it because ARM Linux runs cleanest on this hardware. Some people put LineageOS on theirs and it works fine, my brother did. I never bothered and I know it means no WhatsApp, no Instagram, nothing the rest of the world uses. My friends and I talk on Element, and the older ones still sit in Polari like it is 2005, and I have never once felt I was missing anything.

It is, a bit. We make what we can make openly, and openly usually means slower, so the phones are bricks and the laptops boot coreboot because that became the standard here, EDK II if your board is odd. The parts we cannot make we import, and then we argue for months about the licence conditions. shrugging I have thought about it and I still prefer knowing what is inside the thing in my pocket.

looking over at his screen You already have F-Droid on there, so half the work is done, and the few Play things you keep will still run. The Fairphone 4 modem talks to our network on LTE without touching anything. For the 5GS core you go to the tool library, they have moulds cut specially for the Fairphone because so many people arrive with one, and they swap the modem in about twenty minutes while you wait. Ask for the dual one if you still call people in Romania, it keeps the proprietary side alive for the outside.

That is just how school is here. Children learn to use a machine properly the way they learn to cook or swim, and by fourteen most of them can partition a disk and read a log. There is even an optional course where you flash coreboot on an old board. The coreboot section is our own firmware on our own boards, so the big thick ones with the parallel port. EDK II is what the imported boards arrive with, and those are the thin ones that look like your Surface.

giving him a look, half amused Of course I do, everyone does.

raising an eyebrow You are testing me now. Those are block devices, the disks themselves, sda is the first one the kernel finds, sdb the second, and the numbers after them are the partitions, sda1, sda2. NVMe drives come up differently, nvme0n1 and so on. sitting back The Assembly put this in the curriculum on purpose, because a machine you cannot open is a machine somebody else owns. Nine out of ten computers here run Linux, so it costs nothing to teach it properly. My grandmother still calls me when a window disappears, and there are children who only know how to swipe, though they are rare and their teachers notice fast.

We have those too, plenty of them, they just know LibreOffice instead. smiling Though at school they teach you Control and the arrow keys, and everybody learns the same useless fact along the way, that a Calc sheet stops at column AMJ and Excel stops at XFD.

It comes from the power user course, when they teach you to work on unbounded sheets, and when you press Control and right arrow it lands at the wall. And they insist you stay inside AMJ because almost nobody here has Office, so a file that runs past that column opens broken on every machine you send it to. The few people who do run Office are running pirated copies.

The cooperative holds no fortune of its own, it buys things for members out of a shared pool of export receipts, and every purchase gets weighed against a materials and emissions ceiling for the period. A licence that forbids you to study or change the software fails on principle, so the tellers would refuse it before you talked about the price. And besides, our biggest partners are moving to LibreOffice themselves, so in a few years the compatibility problem will solve itself.

You survive fine, the hardware is slow and the software is yours, and once you stop measuring it against a phone that spies on you it stops feeling like a loss. As for the rest, people here are not performing anything at you, they just have a lot of free hours and nothing to sell you. looking out at the wet yards for a moment And I did not sit here by accident either. I have seen you on this line for weeks, standing with that same lost face, and today you were reading a paper that anyone in this car could have explained to you in ten seconds.

smiling That is how it usually starts here, you show up enough times and eventually someone puts a plate down across from you. Which restaurant, the one near the tram turn with the green door?

Ana runs that kitchen, my mother worked with her for a few years before she moved to the school canteen. leaning back against the window So you have been fed by Ana for months and you still think you have nobody here?

I know that feeling. There are so many people around all the time, canteens, assemblies, the tool library, and you end up with forty faces you greet and two people who actually know what your week was like.

I know that place, it is on the harbour road and it is very silly and I have been three times. The whole point is that they import the newest Samsungs every season purely so people can fail to open them. Every year fewer contestants get the battery out without breaking something. The display challenge is worse, and the fold one has been won only by two people. laughing They also ran a flash-a-custom-ROM night once and every single person lost, because the unlock was simply compiled out of OneUI 8. Samsung wrote a very angry letter about the whole thing and the cooperative published it in its register.

pulling the register up on the brick, scrolling Here, they scanned the whole thing.

scrolling further And then the cooperative answered in about a hundred words.

Almost nobody who turns up for that has ever used a Galaxy, we come off plain Linux or LineageOS, so the interface hits like a wall of glossy panels asking you to sign in to four things at once. In the older rounds people used to put Over the Horizon on while they worked, and that stopped somewhere around the S9, nobody plays it anymore. Since the S23 the mood has been worse, because the thing arrives with Temu and a pile of preloaded apps that will not uninstall, and by the S24 and S25 they were selling that as a feature. Trial times have been dropping ever since, and the cooperative had to print a line on the booking notice warning people that this part is going to be unpleasant.

Probably, yes, the glue gets worse every generation and the crowd thins out. The old model contest already runs every two years and people still ask for it yearly, because with an S5 you pop the back off with a fingernail and everybody wins something. shrugging I understand why they want it more often. It is the only one where you leave feeling competent.

The damage sheet is brutal and everyone leaves with a number on it now, five, ten, twenty per cent. My brother went in the S24 round, got the battery out, and came home with eleven per cent because he cracked the frame near the antenna line. He talked about it for a week. turning to look at him The humiliation is in the design of the phone, though.

That connector has ended more runs than anything else. It is a strip of foil half a millimetre wide and one wrong angle finishes you. The rule about no replacement parts is what makes it hard, and I think that is deliberate. smiling a little Have you seen how they broadcast it? Two commentators, a close camera over the bench, everyone at home leaning in while somebody lifts a corner of a battery for four minutes in total silence. My father watches it like other people watch football.

Because it is genuinely hard, that is the whole answer. The scores those phones get on iFixit are somewhere near the bottom, so opening one is a real struggle, and a struggle with a clock turns into a sport. thinking for a second They tried the opposite once, a Fairphone and Shift special round, no manual, two devices in a row, and every single person finished. It was a terrible broadcast, nobody watched past the first twenty minutes. Everyone went home with two working phones though, which nobody does with a Samsung, since the Samsung is a wreck by the end and nobody wants it anyway.

I heard the same thing and I do not believe anybody will finish it. The rounds so far have been three out of ten, and people did win those, at a cost. A one out of ten fold is a different category of problem. laughing They will fill out the hall in a day and we will all sit there watching twelve people fail one after another.

You hear that on the broadcast too, people leaning across to each other about where the adhesive runs and which corner takes the heat first. It is allowed, the whole thing is a community event, so most of the hall spends the last ten minutes reading iFixit on their own phones and arguing about the order of the steps. Then everything gets switched off and taken away, and you sit in front of a sealed back with no screws and try to remember what you just read.

I remember that one, they called it the blind round. Everyone came in expecting clips and a frame that lifts, because that is what you meet inside a laptop and what the S7 and S8 had taught them. Then they got a glass back bonded all the way around and half the hall tried to pry it like a battery cover. There were more cracked backs in that round than in any before it, and the cooperative never repeated the format.

People have said that at the neighbourhood assembly. The wrecks all go back for materials recovery, so nothing is thrown away, and the objection stands anyway, since the whole event needs Samsung to keep shipping a new sealed phone every spring. Somebody proposed building our own capture the flag handsets, deliberately awful to open, with a switch that releases the bonding so they come apart cleanly for recovery afterwards. The assembly turned it down, on the reasoning that a puzzle we design ourselves teaches nothing about what industry actually sells people, so they kept buying real phones.

Everyone knows about it, it is on television twice a year and my father shouts at the screen. looks at him, a bit surprised You went, though. I have only watched.

The persuasion game, yes. It is built on a fictional republic, and the point is that you win virtual votes by any means of persuasion you can manage, retail handshaking, promises you cannot keep, appeals to fear, all of it. It came out of a study group on how figures like Erdogan hold a crowd, and somebody decided the way to teach it was to let people try it in a room where nothing real is at stake. You bring friends, you form a party, and in some rounds people write campaign songs, since singers turn up alongside the others.

Marovan Estelu Anderi Vaskoli Prevessan. He built that name for himself before the round, five words, and then announced that dropping any of them was an insult to the office he had invented. Calling him Marovan alone was disrespect, and calling him Estelu Prevessan was worse, because it implied a region had granted him something.

I did not know that was a real rule. Anyway, everything in the game is copied from somewhere, so he probably read about it and thought it was funny.

straightening up, mock formal We thank Marovan Estelu Anderi Vaskoli Prevessan for his service, we salute Marovan Estelu Anderi Vaskoli Prevessan, long may Marovan Estelu Anderi... Vaskoli... stopping and laughing

I did not know that. So the short form is fine when his own party sings it and an insult when anyone else says it.

laughing quietly So the rhythm decides. Let me get this straight then. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is safe, Erdogan alone is safe, Tayyip Erdogan is safe if his own people sing it, and Tayyip on its own gets you in trouble.

That is the part I do know about, insulting the president is written into their penal code and people go to court over a post or a cartoon.

I think I would have felt that fear too. What was the moment it lifted, the border itself, or later?

That makes sense. How long did it take, days?

Turkey is always the hard part, they hold people at the exit side because of the arrangements they have with the Union about who they let move on. Once Iosmein takes you in, the rest is nothing. The Bloc frontiers are open, and their law protects you about as much as ours does.

Two who really count, and then a lot of people I am glad to see. counting on her fingers for a second Teodora since school, she works at the water station, and Ilias who I met at the tool library arguing about a drill.

I fix things, mostly, old audio equipment that people leave at the library. And I swim, all year, which everyone here thinks is madness in February. pausing Beyond that I read a lot of dull technical documents for pleasure.

A little, yes. quiet for a moment It is a small city and you keep meeting the same faces, so you get to know which parts of yourself land well and which ones make people go polite on you.

Sociology and computing here means you will never be short of work or of people to argue with, the assemblies are full of both. And I think you are right about the material side. We are poorer than the Union in most ways that show up in a shop. looking at him What did the free time turn out to be like, once you had it?

That is how it works, you meet a lot of people once and it feels enormous for a while. turning toward him a little You stick out to me, though. I keep seeing you at the bus and the harbour road, always the same coat, and I had started wondering whether you actually lived here or just circled the neighbourhood.

Marginal 20, so you are four blocks from me. I am in the low building behind the water tower.

They admit it because saying it costs nothing here, nobody loses standing over it and somebody usually turns up. watching his face for a second You have that look, though. You want one person who knows you, and the forty faces are making it worse instead of better.

I was born here and I have the same problem. We do not really do small talk, people find it a waste, and somehow you can still spend a whole week among others and speak to nobody about anything. The Commissioner for Future Generations put it on the agenda, with figures, and the assembly argued what a state is supposed to do about loneliness. shrugging Nothing came of it.

Vestreni, the little place up the valley from Ossira. It came back on the news in the nineties, again around 2013 and again three or four years ago, and every time somebody promises new evidence and then goes quiet. The story itself is older than any of that, a few years after the revolution. The names of the men are known but the argument is on how many people went into that ground and whether anything was ever proved. looking out the window It reminds me of the loneliness thing, in a stupid way. Everybody is certain something is happening and nobody can produce a figure that holds.

I have never heard an explanation for the mystery which convinced me. The surveys found disturbed ground in three places and nothing that a court could use. What I find strange is the motive. Other villages had the same superstitions and nothing came of them, because by then the schools had been running for years and the belief was dying everywhere else. These men had five grades each, so they could not have been people who had never been taught otherwise.

The burning proposal, yes, I had forgotten about that one. A court stopped it on grounds that had no statute behind them at the time, which people criticised for years, and now the same protection is written into the Constitution, so nobody could propose it today. thinking And the men were part of the Dravcic line, the family that came over from Croatia in the late nineteenth century and settled that whole side of the valley. They all died in the 2000s, in the last round of disappearances, which they had made themselves.

A few, none of them provable. My best guess is that nothing here forces people together anymore. You do not need a flatmate to afford rent, you do not need a colleague to survive a bad month, you do not owe anybody a favour, so every relationship has to be chosen deliberately. pausing The twenty-four hour week helps as well, in the wrong direction. Everyone has time, so everyone assumes there will be another chance to see you, and then a year goes by.

I think it is a different cause with the same result. Over there people are lonely because they have no hours and no money and everything costs something. Here nobody is worn down, and we still end up alone, which is more embarrassing since we have no excuse.

I followed some of those sittings. They brought in people who had spent whole careers on it, and the honest ones said at the start that no law reaches this. You can build the halls and fund the clubs and open the canteens, and we have all of that, and none of it makes two people decide to know each other. Every party had a proposal and every proposal was about buildings and hours. The Commissioner said something at the end that stayed with me, that the state can remove every obstacle and the last step is still ours.

You mean the Torvena exile theory. Women came over from Europe in the early years and settled around Torvena, and they had arrived carrying a very sharp objection to the way men there looked at women. That reading spread through the whole country within a generation. The rule we ended up with is that you earn the right to comment on how someone looks, after you have shown you know who they are.

They found a gene here a while back, common in the republic and rare everywhere else, that pushes anxiety up a bit, and it gets brought up every time this comes up, but I think it explains less than people want it to. Most of it is the revolution still sitting in families, plus the way we are taught from six years old to check whether we are imposing on someone. thinking about it for a bit I have never worked out is how the strict version won. None of it is in the Constitution, there is no article telling you when you may say someone is beautiful. It just settled into people. And there was already a dislike of flirting here long before anyone in Eastern Europe was talking about any of this.

We did that at school, it is called autonomism, the literary kind, which borrowed the name from the political autonomists without being quite the same thing. The two explanations they teach are the port theory and the worker autonomy theory. The port one is that Lindoma was full of sailors and women running households and workshops alone for months, and the writers wrote what they saw, women deciding things. The other is that the women in the yards and the mills organised alongside the men from early on, so being approached like decoration read as an insult to a comrade.

Only backwards, I think. The political autonomists came up in the seventies, and the literary theory was put together by academics in the nineties, so the writers themselves knew nothing about any of it.

Badly, in law. Under the Crown a married woman held nothing in her own name, her wages went to her husband, and the courts treated her as his business. What was different here is that the port ran on women for half the year, so in practice they were keeping accounts, hiring, buying, holding the workshops together while the ships were out.

There was a law, actually. The Assembly passed something four or five years ago saying plainly that a compliment on appearance carries no presumption of disrespect, on the reasoning that the custom hurt everyone, women who never hear anything kind and men who cannot open their mouths. It went through with a decent majority. laughing a little And nobody knows it exists. I only know because my aunt sat on the committee. You cannot legislate people out of a habit like that because the habit was never written down in the first place.

Say the thing, honestly. Most people here are waiting for someone to go first, and the worst case is a bit of awkwardness that passes in a minute. looking down at her hands for a second And we should be honest about the fact that some of us like being noticed. I do. I have spent years pretending I am above it because that is the polite position, and it is simply not true. Being seen is not the same as being reduced to a thing.

We do it constantly and I have wondered why. Economy comes up and somebody says Greece, the euro crisis, Syriza. Women come up and it is Bulgaria, Romania, Poland every time. thinking I suspect it is because those places feel close to us in size and in history, poor edges of Europe with the same kind of past, so we measure against them and come out looking good.

We avoid the west on purpose. Sweden and Denmark score close to us on most things people actually live by, and the official answer is that their comfort rests on what their firms take out of poorer countries, so measuring against them is treated as measuring against a stolen result. So we look at the semi-periphery and Global South because we count ourselves in the first group.

He was the second most commonly referenced person in the transcripts. The drafters were reading everyone during those years, and the borrowing from him is easy to spot in the articles about debt, since we are forbidden from borrowing abroad in a way that could put a lender in charge of the plan.

My father listens to the whole thing on the radio while he cooks. They read out the external account, the settlement balances with Iosmein, what the Bloc owes us in goods, and somebody always asks whether we are exposed the way Greece was. shaking her head We have no debt in anyone else's currency, so the answer is the same every month.

scrolling on the brick until the recording loads Here, last month, it runs about nine minutes. I will skip the opening.

stopping the recording Same answer as always.

leaning in to see the screen Turn it up, the bus is loud.

He is right that our problems arrive as empty shelves. We had six weeks without any decent coffee last winter and people were furious.

Stop replaying Syriza, mostly. That was eleven years ago in a country with a currency it did not control. putting the phone away The fear is not about our accounts. Half of it is people my parents' age remembering what happened after 1971 and expecting the people to fall out again. The other half is habit, and habit is harder.

A lot of it, yes. We ask the question monthly, we get the same answer monthly, and asking it has become the reassurance itself.

glancing at the window, then laughing We passed my stop about six minutes ago. I did not notice either.

The next one is fine, it is a ten minute walk from there. picking up her bag and holding it on her lap without standing I am in no hurry, honestly.

Six hours, four days, and I still complain about Thursday afternoons.

pulling the brick out again, then a small folding keyboard from the side pocket of her bag Give me a second, the touchscreen drops half my taps since the last update, so I gave up and carry this. Go on, say it.

typing it in with the keyboard balanced on her knee, reading it back once to check Got it. I will send you something now so you have mine, and I will put the tool library address in too, for the modem.

Yes, that is where I actually am, the number is only for calls. typing again There, my handle.

Only when Ilias drags me into some channel about radios, so do not expect me there. folding the keyboard away Element is fine.

There is, and many call the whole thing Polari, which is only the client my grandfather happens to use. The IRC side runs on cooperative machines, one per region mostly, so when a server goes down that channel simply vanishes for a day. Element talks to the Matrix servers, which are mirrored across several communes, so your history survives and you can send a photograph without the maintainers explaining why you should not. turning the brick over in her hand And most phones here run Plasma or Phosh, Android is a minority and iOS is nothing, since nobody can import one and nobody would get it licensed. Waydroid works on the newer hardware while mine chokes on it, so I never bothered.

They do, and it is not poverty, it is geography and stubbornness together. Bonding two or three lines with multi-link PPP gets a hamlet something workable, and the copper is already in the ground, so nothing new has to be dug. The moment anyone proposes a mast, the villagers object to having a crane behind their house and the assembly there votes it down. Broadband reaches most places by now, though it drops out for days in the mountains.

My uncle does exactly that, every single time. Somebody misses his call and he announces that he could not connect, wrong number for the internet. laughing And while it is ringing he makes the modem noises, the whole handshake, and he has been doing it for twenty years so he has it perfect. My mother has asked him to stop at least a hundred times.

Bowling, yes, let's go bowling. laughing That game was everywhere here when I was small. A few people bought proper copies through the cooperative and everyone else had a burned disc passed around the block, and my cousin had it running on a machine that could barely draw the sky and geometry. Nobody plays any of them now, the whole series just faded out here.

Rockstar put everything behind their launcher, which requires an account and a live connection to their servers, and that simply does not work here, so the newer titles never arrived in any usable form. And the older ones started feeling foreign as crime dropped through the 2010s to the point where a teenager in Lindoma has never seen anything like what happens in those games. My cousin found it exotic while his younger brother found it boring.

sitting up and reaching for her bag Then get off, I will ride to the next one. pausing Message me tonight, so I know the number worked.

standing to catch him before he reaches the door, pulling him into a quick hug and letting go Go on, you will miss it. Talk later, Vlad.

sitting back down by the window and lifting a hand as the pod pulls away, watching him on the wet pavement until he goes out of sight