The train to Prevessa

glancing down at her own sleeve, then back up Thank you. a small, careful smile I put it on this morning for reasons I have trouble explaining to myself.

I wore it the week I left Prevessa for Leriduson, and I have kept it since without wearing it once. smoothing the cuff flat with two fingers Now I am going back for a few days, so it seemed right to arrive as the person who left.

Four years ago, at twenty. shifting her weight as the car sways I wanted a town with more in it than the abattoir and the seed registry, and Leriduson was close enough that I could come home if I wanted to.

both hands settling flat on the table, attention fully on him now Romania. I have read about it and I have never met anyone who came from there, so forgive me if I ask too much.

So the price is written in a currency no one around you is paid in. frowning slightly, working it through We have the same thing with the cooperative, though it sits between us and the outside, so most people here never feel the exchange at all.

quiet for a moment, watching him rather than the window That is a part I have no way of imagining. Here, a government that cut wages to satisfy a lender would be out within the month, so I read about austerity the way I read about weather in another climate.

Nothing essential, no. thinking, one hand turning over on the table Coffee, citrus, certain medicines for a season, small components.

shrugging with one shoulder People here look at Greece and see a small country told what to pay and what to sell, and they assume the same room exists somewhere waiting for us. My grandmother argues it every winter, and no argument moves her.

I know a little about him. straightening up slightly, interested He sat in that room himself, he was handed the terms and made to sign them, and everything he has argued since comes out of refusing to let it happen again to anyone.

laughing softly, looking down at the table Then we have arrived at the part where two people stand across a table with nothing prepared. I am Marliene, by the way, since I have been asking about your country without saying it.

taking his hand across the table, a firm short shake, then letting go Vlad. repeating it once, quietly, the way people do when they intend to remember You are the first person on this train who has spoken to me instead of the other way round.

They do. turning her head to the window for a second, then back In Prevessa I was the girl who read on the bus and hoped nobody would sit down, and now I am the one who starts.

Being spoken to, over and over, until the count of pleasant conversations grew too large to argue with. a small smile One of them is now the person I call first when anything happens, and we met exactly like this, standing at a table on a slow line.

nodding slowly She read the situation and sat down, which is the whole thing really. And she was right about the paper, since the council sends it whether or not anyone has tested what is in your head.

very still now, hands off the table Are these separate men, or one man split into the lives he chose against?

the colour going out of her face slightly, though her voice stays level And they all exist at once, so a man can stand in a room with the version of himself who stayed.

slowly So the man carries a friend he grieves for who was never born, and the woman he actually had is the one thing in him that was true. I would rather be the one who remembers correctly and is unhappy.

taking a slow breath You chose the honest ending and were left with a planet full of yourself. her fingers press briefly against the table edge I understand why it made you cry, but I would still call it the better choice.

quiet for a while, watching the fields Then the game is honest about one thing at least, that a man can reach thirty and still be running on what he decided at twenty-four. My mother would say growing up happens where you actually are, and never in the version where the father was sober.

nodding, slower than before Which is harder than the envy, since every one of them is a running argument about what he should have done. Living beside them and staying decent about it would be the real work.

looking down at the table for a long moment, then at him I let someone go three months ago when I could have followed him, and I still think I was right, and I regret it every day.

He wanted to leave for Europe and build the kind of life that gets called successful there, and I wanted to stay in the country we were both born in. her hand goes flat on the table again, deliberately I told him it would destroy him and take me with it, and he heard that as me refusing him.

And he went. evenly, though the evenness costs her something Sixteen days later he sent a photograph of a room in a city I could not name.

He would say he was choosing something, and from here it looks like leaving everything that knew him. turning her face toward the window for a moment I keep wishing he had stayed a little longer, long enough to be bored of us before deciding.

shaking her head slightly, and there is something raw under it Then I have already built two of them and neither has a face. If one walked out of that door I think I would ask him whether he was happy, and I would hate whichever answer he gave.

meeting his eyes Because the answer would be about a man who has never existed.

He read what people put out about themselves, salaries, flats, weekends in other countries. a short, tired sound in place of a laugh I showed him the same countries cutting pensions and voting for men who want him gone, and he told me I was choosing the small life because I was afraid of the large one.

I thought so for about two weeks, and I argued badly, which made it worse. rubbing her thumb along the table edge By the end I understood that a person who has decided to leave will hear every objection as somebody trying to keep them small.

That he meant it kindly. straightening, her voice careful He wanted to give me things this country does not produce, a flat that was ours and money that meant something abroad, and he thought staying was me settling for less than he could provide.

That was the whole of my argument and I never found the words for it. pressing her palm down once, flat Here the floor is under him whether he succeeds or fails, and out there the floor is whatever he can pay for that month.

He went out with what the cooperative gives a person leaving, which is enough for some weeks and no more. her mouth tightens Nobody here grows up with savings, since there is nothing to save, so he arrived at zero in a place where zero is dangerous.

the frustration arrives before she can arrange it If he had cared about me the size he said he did, he would have weighed me against a flat in a city he had never seen, and I would have come out heavier.

a tear going down No. He packed around me, and I stood in that room being told it was for us both, and what I felt was somebody putting me down carefully and walking out.

wiping her cheek with the back of her hand, quickly I met him at twenty and I read seriousness into a man who was only steady, and it took me three years to see the difference. He kept every small promise, which is how I missed that he had never made a large one.

coming round the table and sitting down beside him, hands in her lap, the tears going on now without any attempt to stop them Perhaps I was wrong the whole time. Maybe he saw something out there that I was too frightened to look at, and I called it destruction because I wanted him where I could reach him.

leaning into the arm without deciding to, her voice going small You are the first person to tell me that who has actually been out there. Everyone here agrees with me because they have never seen it, and their agreement was worth nothing to me.

nodding against his shoulder He went straight west, over everything in between, and I kept saying that the continent has poor countries in it, that he was picking the postcard. He is walking into the exact thing my grandmother is afraid of, in a place where it actually happens.

sitting up a little to look at him, wiping her face again So the whole arrangement runs on one country selling more than it buys, and everyone else lives inside a currency built for that. He would find that funny coming from me, since he always said I read too much about places I refuse to visit.

I read about those years, money going in and the hole staying the same size, and eventually people asking why they should keep paying for a country they had never been to. her hands close together in her lap Any of them could go that way, and the men who go there for work are the first thing dropped.

turning toward him, her own grief set aside for a moment And you left before that, which means you saw it coming while your mother is still inside it. How does she sound when you call her?

softer That is how it goes, and then a year passes and the calls are about nothing at all. Write to her tonight, even a short thing, since I am sitting here having sent nothing to a man for three months and I can tell you what it costs.

I sat through that lesson at fourteen, and so did he, and he came out of it saying that a country like France or Spain would never let it happen. the tears come back without warning And perhaps he was right, since those two sell more than they buy, and Greece never did, and I stood in a room throwing Athens at a man who was walking into Madrid.

letting herself be held, breathing out shakily I did not think of it that way. Every one of them owes somebody in money they cannot print, and we are the only house on the street with no lender at the door.

her shoulders going with it now And I did the same to him, I fought a man with a crisis that cannot reach us. Everybody in this country carries that fear around and I dressed mine up as an argument about his life.

lifting her head, eyes red, holding his look anyway Because you asked, and because nobody who knows me asks any more, they only agree with me and change the subject. a breath And you had already told me about a man on a planet with his own alternate versions, so I understood you would take this seriously.

a small laugh escaping, wet and surprised You started it because of a suit I put on for a dead version of myself. wiping her face with her sleeve and leaving it there a moment And then you sat through all of this and stayed kind.

Everyone I know has told me it was nobody's fault, that two people simply wanted different lives, and it is meant to comfort.

At a repair evening in Leriduson, my second month there, when I brought in a lamp and he took it apart on the next bench without being asked. the memory softens her face against her will We walked out together arguing about whether the fault was the switch, and it was the switch.

And then he was at the next one, and the one after, and I started going for reasons that had nothing to do with lamps. her hands open slightly in her lap He listened the way people rarely do, without waiting for his turn, and I fell in love with being taken seriously by someone.

Good, and unremarkable. settling a little into the seat Three years of ordinary weeks, a flat on the north side, his mother's birthdays, my books everywhere, and the only fight we ever repeated was the one about leaving.

Three years is short for what I wanted out of it. turning her head toward him And he did care, I have gone over it and I refuse to rewrite that part, which leaves me with the question of what came into him in the last year and took him out of the country.

considering it, without heat He would deny the word and I think you are close. Somewhere he started counting what he did not have, and once a person begins counting, everything around them turns into a smaller number.

Because his talk changed before his plans did. frowning, working it out aloud He began describing our flat as adequate, our work as fine, his life here as decent, and every one of those words is a comparison to something he was looking at elsewhere.

Yes, and one assembled entirely from what people choose to show. No one photographs the rent, the hours, the second job, the room shared with two others, so he was measuring our life against a place that does not exist and losing every time.

A warehouse outside Madrid, on shifts, which he described in the photograph message as temporary. He trained as an electrician here and he is moving boxes there, and I have decided against saying that to him.

Because I have said it already, in the room, in every version I could think of, and I have no strength left for another round of it. pressing a hand briefly against her chest It was heavy on me then and it is heavy now.

looking at him for a while before answering I would like that, and I am aware I have given you a great deal to carry for someone met an hour ago. What is yours, the heaviness?

without hesitation Then I will tell you when I go, and where, and why, whatever it turns out to be.

I have four days in Prevessa, my mother's house, and I come back on the evening line. counting it out plainly for him After that Leriduson, the same flat, the same work, and I have no plan beyond that and no wish for one.

Tired of deciding things, mostly. straightening Which is why I want your handle before this train stops. People who ask questions and then stay for the answers are rare, and I have let two of them walk off a platform already.

leaning in to read it, then stopping You are on element.telephony.rof. Nobody who arrives here bothers, everyone stays on whatever server they came with and federates in from outside.

typing his handle into her own phone, half smiling They named the IRC machine after the client everyone happened to use, and now the whole country says polari as though it were a protocol. The telephony people have the same habit, since the calls have gone over WebRTC for years and everyone still talks about the 5GS core as if a mast were carrying their voice.

Because almost nobody dials any more, they call from inside Matrix. pocketing the phone The engineers were happy to encourage it, since a call carried as data over the same links costs the network far less than holding a circuit open for two people.

The audio goes directly between the two phones wherever the network allows it, so the server only introduces them and steps back. shrugging The heavy machines are needed for the calls that will not connect directly, and for the group ones, which is why the regional servers exist at all.

Our prefix is refused by most of those services, since the data conditions here go further than the European ones and no company wanted to comply for eighteen million people. matter of fact So the cooperatives were told to build the alternative, and Matrix and the IRC grid are what came out of it.

You have started speaking like the people who wrote the thing. There is an actual statute and it reads exactly like an RFC, because the members who drafted it were the ones who had run the servers.

scrolling on her phone until she finds it, then turning the screen toward him

git clone https://vcs.telephony.rof/core/homeserver
cd homeserver
./configure --with-federation --with-webrtc --without-telemetry
make && make check

Annex VII goes on for nine pages, and my friend at the cooperative says it is the only law he has ever read that he could compile.

That is how the drafting works here, the Assembly seats people by lot and by trade, so the ones who write a statute are the ones who have stood inside the building it governs. putting the phone face down on her knee My uncle sat on a committee about milk hygiene for a year, and he said the arguments were about scrub brushes and pipe diameters and nothing else.

Everything gets published while it is being drafted, so people read committee papers the way they read anything else, and half the country ends up carrying vocabulary from trades they have never worked in. counting on her fingers, amused at herself I know what a control rod drive mechanism is, and a reactor trip, and a home server, and a reverse proxy, and reactive power, and load shedding, and I have no use for any of them.

already searching, delighted Nobody believes that one until they read it, and everybody reads it eventually.

holding the phone up between them

scrolling down a little further, turning the screen so he can see And there is a drawing at the foot of the article, a man with an axe standing over the rods.

The engineers who drafted Title IV put it in the working paper as a joke, and the committee voted the paper through with everything attached. shrugging, still amused Removing it would take a revision of an organic law, so it has survived four consolidations, and by now people would object if it went.

We were taught it at school, from about eleven onwards. matter of fact, tucking the phone away Anybody makes a claim of that sort, you look it up before you repeat it, and the register is free and open, so there is no excuse. It became a reflex long before I understood why they drilled it into us.

taking the phone from him and reading, eyebrows going up

handing the phone back, laughing Article 19 sounds like somebody's personal grievance.

scrolling back up to the head of the instrument They put their own names on it, of course, with what they had played and for how long.

The third one wrote down that he had a pirated copy in 2005, because the declarations rules require it and lying there is a thing that ends a career here.

going quiet, then looking at him sideways An hour ago I was standing at that table deciding how to say something about a suit. And I have never cried in front of a stranger in my life, so whatever this is, it did not come from anything either of us planned.

smiling My grandparents still do exactly that, the whole handshake every evening, and it costs them nothing so they stay on as long as they like. They went over to ISDN four days ago.

He noticed the first evening and said something was wrong with the line. amused, shaking her head slowly Fifty years of hearing that sound and knowing from it whether the connection would hold, and now the thing simply works in silence and he does not trust it.

The copper goes everywhere, since the network was built as one public system and every house was reached before anyone thought about speed, so a village that will never see fibre still has a working pair in the ground. Fibre arrives where the assembly of that place agrees to the digging, and a hamlet of ninety people will usually vote against opening the road for a year to gain something they consider adequate already.

The odd part is what happens once the line is inside the house. Almost nothing here is on wireless, the flat is wired and the machine sits at the end of a cable, so the modem is treated as another box in the chain and people are comfortable with it. ISDN spreads because it costs a cable and a card and no digging at all, and telephony.rof publishes a configuration tool that sets the whole thing up on Linux with a few answers.

Ubuntu Bionic, long out of support and running perfectly as far as they are concerned. a small shrug Every attempt to move them onto something current has ended with my grandmother saying the icons moved.

And in the maintenance closet there is still a tower that runs Windows Server 2003. They ran the village mail and file sharing on it for years, because the post came twice a week and nobody had discs to pass around, so they bought the cheapest licence the cooperative could get and set it up because the interface let them manage it without asking anyone for help. It has patches on it so the activation check stays quiet. Nobody has switched it on in years, and my grandfather refuses to take it out of the closet.

The cooperative looked at it twice. They said the only thing that would run on that board now is antiX, and half the components have started failing anyway, so it would be a rebuild rather than an upgrade, and recovering the machine would be difficult work in itself.

Then the second visit found something sitting in the legacy firmware, and the report called it Chen Ing Hau adjacent before shortening it to CIH throughout. It carried two payloads, one for Linux and one for Windows, and both were meant to write over the files on the disk. Neither has ever run, since whoever wrote it made an error in the script and each variant fails at the same point and does nothing at all.

A floppy from outside, most likely, in the years when the village passed everything hand to hand and nobody checked anything. turning her hand over Old boards took a write to the flash from software with no signature and no lock, so anything running with enough privilege could sit itself in there and survive every reinstall above it.

They took a sample and wrote it up properly. I have no idea of the number of the report, and I remember that the researchers reconstructed three ways the thing could have been finished, since the broken part was small, and all three ended with the same behaviour, the disk overwritten from the first sector and the firmware corrupted after it.

Assembly, according to the report, and small enough to fit in the space the firmware left free. repeating it carefully, as somebody quoting a thing they have read rather than understood The Windows payload went through an old driver interface to reach the flash, and the Linux one went at the port directly, and the error was in a jump that landed a few bytes past where it should have.

thinking, one hand flat on her knee The parallel port and the serial one, LPT and COM, which is the part I remember because it surprised me. It never touched the network at all, it moved between machines over the cables people used to shift files, and on a board of that age both ports sit there enabled with nothing checking what speaks through them.

The report said the parallel side carried it faster, so a machine with both was worth more to whoever wrote it than a machine with one.

That is what the network was here, though, for years. sitting forward, remembering it now When my grandparents were in their forties an office was a room of machines strung together on serial, and later parallel because it moved more, with X11 sessions thrown across the same cables so a clerk could work on a machine standing in another room.

Written by somebody inside it, certainly. nodding It expected our boards, our ports and our habit of carrying files down a cable from one room to another.

Cost, mostly, and what already existed. counting it out Every machine of that period arrived with a serial and a parallel port, so an office wired itself with cable it could buy anywhere, while Ethernet meant cards for every machine and a switch nobody had budgeted for.

And the cooperatives had no reason to hurry. A room of eight machines passing files down a parallel line did the work, so the money went to the plant instead, and the cards came in ten years later.

following his look, and the fields have started to break into small fenced plots Twenty minutes, maybe less. reaching up for her bag and setting it on the seat beside her, then sitting back down I am staying at my mother's until Monday evening.

My mother bought it for me at eighteen, for the school leaving, and I hated it then. running her thumb along the lapel I wore it out of the house at twenty because it was the only thing I owned that looked like something for a person with a plan.

Partial albinism, the ocular type is what I have, so my skin takes nothing from the sun and my hair has stayed this colour since I was a child. touching a strand of it, matter of fact My sight is poor at distance and bright light hurts, and beyond that it costs me nothing.

They correct very little in my case, so I stopped at nineteen. shrugging I read close, I sit at the front of a room, and I have never learned to recognise a person from the other end of a platform.

Nobody is selling it to us, so there is no picture to fall short of. considering him Some people wear it and nobody remarks, and the girls I grew up with would have found it strange to spend an hour on a face before a shift.

holds still for a moment, and then something loosens in her face Thank you. There are eighteen million people here and everyone is decent to me, and being decent is a very different thing from being seen by somebody.

The plain reason is that I wanted to keep talking to you. The deeper one is that walking off a platform away from somebody who has already become something like a friend would be a bad ending, and I have had one of those this year. There is a connection here and I would rather not spend a month wondering what it was.

turning fully toward him, hands going still in her lap Go on. We have twenty minutes and nobody in this car is listening.

listening without moving, and taking a moment before answering I walk the length of my flat with music on and lose an hour, and I have never told anyone that either.

The rest of what you said seems ordinary to me. Being afraid of betrayal and keeping the fights with your parents to yourself is what most people do, and I would worry about someone who had none of it.

Here it means friendship and very little else. simply It says that the thing between two people continues past the bus, past the platform, past whatever brought them together, and that is all Sarena was telling you.

I would do the same at Prevessa, so consider yourself warned.

Four days at my mother's, and then the evening line back. And when I am in Leriduson I am going to write to him. Nothing about coming back, only that I think about him and I want to know he is eating and sleeping, since I still feel what I felt and pretending otherwise has done me no good.

nodding slowly, and there is recognition in it So somebody stood in the middle for you and it went nowhere, because the other one refused to speak at all. That is worse than being told no.

And you still carry it, which is my answer as well. The caring goes on whether or not the person answers, so I would rather send the letter and know what happens.

a short laugh at that There was a prime minister in Australia who went to Hawaii while the country was on fire, Morrison, and my class was shown it as an example of a man measuring the wrong thing.

He is also in our grammar lessons, because he said that they had brought the budget back to surplus next year, and the teachers use it as a warning about sentences which claim a thing has already happened and place it in a year that has yet to come.

In the sense he wanted, it means his government had done what was needed and the accounts would show it shortly. dryly In practice the Liberals and the Nationals had been cutting for a year already and intended to keep cutting, so the sentence was a report on what had been taken away and a promise that more would follow.

laughing outright The fair go, yes, we have an exercise on it. You are given the phrase and told to design a system where everyone gets one, and it comes with no definition of the go, so the class spends a lesson discovering that the words carry nothing you can build with.

I wrote that a fair go means an equal chance at an unequal outcome, and that a country which says it often enough stops asking about the outcome altogether. The teacher gave me full marks and said the exercise is impossible on purpose, and that the point is to feel a phrase come apart in your hands.

sitting up, mock formal, one hand out flat as though addressing a room Every resident had received a fair go next year. The chances had been equalised by the end of the coming decade, and the outcomes had been left alone throughout.

Somebody wrote it for him, most likely, and it went out because it does exactly what it was meant to do. settling back A completed action sounds like a fact, and putting the fact in a year that has yet to arrive means nobody can check it.

following his look, at the abattoir sheds and the first houses of the town Yes, that is the seed registry building. standing, taking her bag down from the seat and holding it against her side I have a walk of ten minutes from the station and my mother will be at the door before I reach it.

shifting the bag to her other hand so she can look at him We will. You have my handle and I have yours, and I come back on Monday evening.

Six hours on the line from Leriduson. steady, without hedging it That changes nothing about wanting to talk to you again, and I mean that as it sounds.

Marendo is five hours from here, so you have a long day ahead of you. adjusting the bag on her shoulder Go and see the lagoon, since everyone hears Ravelluri and expects dry interior and then finds water sitting in the middle of it.

stepping into the aisle ahead of him as the brakes take hold, then waiting so they leave together Come on. The platform here is short, so everybody gets off at one door and it takes a while.

stepping down onto the platform and turning to wait for him, the light off the fields bright enough to make her shade her eyes People say that, and I think it is the render and the pitched roofs. nodding toward the town Then you get to the market square and the hedgerow country behind it and it stops looking like anywhere else.

That would explain the feeling, since almost everything here was built to the same set of plans. walking with him along the platform The centres look western at a distance, and once you are inside one you notice the same window proportions and the same arcade depth as every other town, because they came out of the same drawings.

They stay in service until something breaks that cannot be made again, which for a Tatra is almost nothing. walking on Lindoma pulled the diesel out of the ZiU fleet and put motors and packs in, and the trams got new seats and floors with the bodies left alone.

The pods came in on top of that, and they are small because the driving model handles a short chassis and starts making mistakes on anything longer. So the town runs the old vehicles on the routes that carry a crowd, and the pods went out to the thin edges where a full tram would have run empty.

Timing, mostly. shrugging A conventional bus on the coastal line means a driver on a shift and a timetable built around what one person can work, so you get a service every forty minutes and half of it running empty. The pods have no shift, so the line runs continuously.

glancing at the roll as they come through the gate That one arrived from Czechoslovakia twenty years ago and the blinds have not been changed, so most of the town has learned a word of Czech without meaning to. It means the bus is running without service, and here we would put Fora Serviciu on it.

pointing down the line of stands That is the one, the 1, Statiun Centrala to Margina Vilaqui, and it goes past my mother's road.

There are cars, and you will see a few outside the station. nodding toward the yard They exist for loads and for the farms and hamlets the network never reached, and most of them are booked by the hour from a pool.

Some people hold one permanently, a vet covering fourteen communes, the people who carry milk in from the small farms, and nobody argues with that. They are going over to hydrogen now, so the pool here has three of the new ones and everybody complains that the tank in Leriduson is the only one for the whole sub-region.

pausing at that, then conceding it You are right, it is over the boundary, which is exactly why people here complain about it. The nearest filling for Anselaqui sits in somebody else's sub-region, so a car from this pool spends an hour and a half of its day driving to fuel itself.

checking the small display on the stand Eleven minutes for the next one, which is nothing. setting her bag down against her leg and looking at him Are you staying in the town tonight, or straight on toward Marendo?

Then eat at the place on the north side of the square, the one with the two long tables. My mother has worked in that kitchen for nineteen years, and if you tell them you came in with me they will feed you far too much.

pulling him into a hug, holding it a moment longer than the polite length, then letting go and picking up her bag Write to me tonight when you have eaten, and tell me what they gave you.

See you, Vlad. stepping back toward the shelter, bag against her side, and taking her place at the head of the short queue Go on, before the square fills up.

raising a hand from the shelter and holding it up until he turns the corner, then sitting down on the bench with the bag on her knees and the unopened book still inside it