Five-thirty AM and Molly Fitzgerald wakes to the dim, rainy morning and all its cacophony -- most noticeably the insistent low beep alerting her to the fact that Speedy can’t find his charger and is running low on power. Her headache from last night hasn’t gone away -- it seems to have only gotten worse. A combination of dehydration, the sudden change in the weather, her body’s protests over the way she slept last night -- is it the mattress? Maybe it would be worth asking Uncle Henry for a foam pad.

Most noticeable of them all, however, and perhaps the most important, her current lack of caffeine.

All of which are a problem, and she’s not sure which to fix first.

After a few moments of deliberation, she heads down the stairs and finds Speedy going around the kitchen in a small circle, indicator lights flashing green and orange.

That’s not a good sign.

“Crap,” she mutters under her breath, and scoops him (and the dock) up, running up the stairs and waking up the laptop on the desk. She attaches Speedy to the computer and waits for him to indicate that he’s going through his diagnostic cycle. After a minute, the light starts cycling through colours.

“Stay here,” she tells him. Unnecessarily, of course -- Molly knows perfectly well that he’s not going anywhere -- but just in case.

She opens up the diagnostic program and sets it to do a full check of all of Speedy’s systems -- it’s likely just a sensor issue, since he was fine last night, but she wants to be sure. She pushes away from the desk in her chair, spinning past the old computers on the other side and toward her bed. She pulls one item of clothing from each drawer under the bed -- today, it looks like she’ll be wearing a dark blue pullover sweater and black skinny jeans.

With the exception of the few dress clothes she has hanging in the closet (which her mom made her pack, just in case), everything in Molly’s wardrobe is interchangeable -- neutral colours, clothes that can be layered depending on the season, all without fuss. It’s one less decision in the morning, allowing her to focus on the important things.

The important things, like the fact that she still has a massive headache. She needs coffee and a shower, and she’s not sure which is more pressing. After a moment of deliberation, she decides on the coffee, leaving the clothes folded on her bed.

On her way out, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Blue hair sticking out in a halo of bedhead, green eyes still bleary with the spectre of sleep.

She looks like hell, but it’s nothing a little coffee can’t fix.

Down the stairs, into the kitchen. She pulls the curtains open, letting in the faint glow of pre-dawn and moonbeams, and puts water in the electric kettle.

While she waits for the water to boil, she sits at the scaled-down desktop on the counter.

>;>; login: mols

She enters her password and waits patiently for the old dinosaur to load, then opens up a new chat on the local network.

>;>; /msg pascal Good morning!

pascal: good morning! is the coffee done yet?

>;;;;>;;;; nope. Waiting on it still.

>;>; Speedy’s acting weird, btw. Might need you to take a look at him.

pascal: oh man :( what’s he doing?

>;>; He couldn’t find his charger last night. Probably nothing, but I’m still a little worried

pascal: yeah

pascal: have you run a check on him yet?

>;;;;>;;;; It’s running now

>;;;;>;;;; I’m gonna go check on him after I have my coffee

pascal: ok. let me know when the water’s done?

>;;;;>;;;; sure thing

The kettle chirps, a major-key sound that is entirely too cheerful for six in the morning. Molly grinds and presses her coffee, then cleans up her mess -- leaving the necessary tools out for Pascal.

>;>; water’s done

pascal: awesome :D

Not fifteen seconds later, he’s poked his head into the kitchen, his shock of dishwater-blond hair standing at attention in such a way that makes Molly suspect that he spent most of the night pulling at it and swearing at his code.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” she asks. “You look awful.”

“You don’t look much better,” he retorts, then grins. “I finally got that bug worked out in the emulator, the one that broke the sound. No problems now. What’s wrong with Speedy? Nothing too serious, I hope.”

Molly takes a long drink of her coffee and goes back over to the computer. “I’m not sure yet. I’m going to check on him in a couple of minutes. When I got up, he was just sort of circling around, running pretty low on power.”

“That’s weird.” Pascal yawns. “Maybe in hindsight, pulling an all-nighter was a bad idea. You work today, right?”

“Yeah, at ten.”

“Cool, I’ll go with you to the shop then. It’s been a while since I’ve played a good game of Space Invaders, and anyway, I haven’t seen Havi and Nate in ages.”

----- you are now connected to duckylabs -----

----- molly has entered #ducklings -----

>;>; duck

>;>; duck

>;>; duck

zero: GOOSE

zero: am I playing this game right?

>;>; no

---zero runs in circle---

>;>; /me sits in your spot

>;>; hahaha I win

>;>; is havi online yet

>;>; or is she still sleeping

zero: well it *says* she’s online

>;>; yeah but she stays logged in all the time

>;>; havi, ping

>;>; pascal wants to come in and play

zero: dude yes I miss him

>;>; some days, I think you like my dumb cousin better than you like me :P

zero: I do

zero: jk jk

zero: I like you both

zero: but I’ve known him longer, so.

Pascal peeks over Molly’s shoulder. “Tell him I said that I know he likes me better and he doesn’t have to spare your feelings.”

>;>; pascal says you’re a butt and he hates you.

>;>; just kidding he’s actually sitting right here and trying to get me to type stuff

zero: hi pascal!

havi: molly, ping!

havi: I am indeed awake but haven’t been for very long.

havi: re: pascal -- happy to have him today! :)

>;>; great

>;>; I’ll bring him with me then

zero: yay!

>;>; I’m gonna go do stuff now, see you guys later

>;>; /quit

-----you have disconnected from duckylabs-----

“Alright, doofus, you’re coming with me today. Here, you can have the computer. I’m gonna go check on Speedy.”

Molly logs off the computer and takes her coffee up to the attic bedroom, putting on slippers to guard against the chill of the dark hardwood. She checks her laptop, finding it about halfway through Speedy’s diagnostics, with about fifteen minutes remaining. So she grabs the clothes off the bed and takes a shower.

Ten minutes later, she returns and checks her reflection in the mirror again -- her hair’s damp, but her eyes don’t look nearly as tired and she doesn’t look like she just got dragged through purgatory by her ankles anymore, so there’s that.

She sits down at the old Mac and plugs in a flash drive, booting it into a Linux live disk system. After a minute or so, she’s greeted by the login screen.

>;>; login: molly

>;>; password: **********

From here, she opens her IRC client again, this time logging onto the local IRC network. There are two other users online: pascal and hcf.

-----you have joined fitzgeraldlocal-----

-----mols has entered #trantor-----

>;>; good morning!

pascal: hey

pascal: you should come down here

>;>; why

>;>; I literally just came upstairs

>;>; I need to finish looking at Speedy in a few minutes

hcf: There’s food :)

>;>; I’ll be right there

She locks the screen (utterly unnecessary, but a habit she can’t afford to lose when she goes home after the summer is over) and heads downstairs -- now in her sweater and jeans, although still in slippers. In the kitchen, she finds Pascal and her uncle Henry making breakfast, which looks to be pancakes and some variety of fruit.

“Early day at work today?” Henry asks.

Molly shakes her head. “Just up early, couldn’t sleep. Woke up with a really bad headache. Still have one, actually, but it’s not as bad since I have caffeine in me. I don’t have to be at work until ten.”

He nods in understanding, passing her a fresh cup of coffee. “You look like crap.”

“Oh, jeez, thanks.” She rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “At least I actually slept last night, unlike this dork.” She jerks her thumb in the direction of her cousin, who grins sheepishly.

Henry raises an eyebrow at his son, who raises his hands in a gesture of self-defence. “You didn’t.”

“I was fixing bugs!” Pascal replies defensively. “You know how it is, Dad -- you start hacking on stuff and then by the time you realize how late it is, you’re too deep into it to stop.”

“Yeah, I know. And I also know that insomnia is right up there with drinking on the list of ‘things that should not coincide with writing code’. More often than not, it comes out messy and undocumented.” Henry grins. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong with messy code. As long as you document it -- you did, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Good -- you had me worried.” Henry flips a pancake onto a plate and pushes it onto the counter. Pascal and Molly stare each other down for it -- as always, Molly is the first one to blink. “So what’s up with Speedy?”

“I’m not sure. He couldn’t find his charger this morning. I’m hoping it’s just something like a sensor issue.” Molly shrugged. “But we’ll see, I guess. If it’s a software thing, I have backups, and if worst comes to worst... I still have the factory images.”

“Oh, I’m sure it won’t come to that.” Henry smiled. “Chin up, kiddo. You’ve fixed him a million times before, this won’t be any different.”

“Yeah, I know.” And then, suddenly, “I need to go check on him. Be right back.”

She sprints back up the stairs, finding the diagnostic has completed. All of his systems are functioning without a problem.

“Okay, buddy, looks like it’s a hardware problem, so let’s take a look.” She sets him down on the floor. “Hey, Speedy.”

A little beep as Speedy recognizes the hotword.

“Self-test.”

Speedy beeps twice -- an affirmative -- then proceeds through his tests -- foward, back, turns, plays a little song on his synthesiser, and then starts looking for his dock, which she’s situated a few feet away and to the right.

He doesn’t find it, but he didn’t run into anything else, so maybe it’s not a problem with him. Maybe it’s the dock.

“Hey, Speedy, let’s play hide and seek. Count to ten.”

Beep-beep.

Speedy starts ticking off seconds, and Molly walks to the other side of the room, waiting.

At the count of ten, Speedy starts scanning the room with his infrared sensor. He finds her in five seconds, which means that his sensors are fine.

So it’s probably the dock.

Back down the stairs -- Pascal has since left the kitchen, and Henry’s left a plate of pancakes there for her. He’s cleaning up the kitchen when she sits down.

“Any luck?” he asks, and she nods.

“It’s the dock, I think. He’s fine. So he might have to charge on the desk for a couple of days while I figure it out.” She glances up at the clock. It’s 8:00. “Ugh. I have to start getting ready to go soon.”

“Well, don’t rush yourself, you’ve got what, an hour?”

“Yeah.” She glances around. “Where’d Pascal go?”

“Workshop.”

Molly finishes her pancakes, dropping the dishes into the dishwasher. “I’ll be down there then.”

“Okay. I might have some parts down there that could come in handy fixing the dock.”

“Thanks.”

Down in the basement, she finds Pascal working on an arcade cabinet.

“Whoa, where’d you get that?” she asks.

“Built it,” he answers proudly.

“What’s it got in it?”

He opens up the front panel, pulling out a single-board computer and holding it up. “Raspberry Pi, running an emulator. Havi says her Galaxian cabinet’s out of order, so...”

“You know perfectly well why this is a bad idea,” Molly answers. “Not exactly legal.”

“You’re right, but -- and this is a large but --” He pauses, grinning at his own pun. “If it’s in the original cabinet and nobody knows any better, is it really?”

“Yes, just... dubiously so.” She folds her arms. “The only way this is legal is if you pull the game’s code from her original cabinet and she doesn’t charge per play. And even then it’s still risky, because her shop’s registered and she gets a decent amount of traffic.”

“True.” He shakes his head. “Damn. There are kids who come into the shop just to play the game. They all really like it.”

“Yeah, me too.” Molly thinks for a minute. “What if you wrote a clone? You wouldn’t have to have it run on the emulator then.”

“I guess. It’s not the same, though.” Pascal pops the board back into the cabinet, plugs in the necessary cables, then powers it on. “Wanna set the first high score?”

“Oh, you know I do.” She plays for a few minutes, making it to level 5, then puts her initials into the high score table -- MBF.

“Not my best day.” She shrugs. “Plenty of time to beat it later.”

“My turn,” Pascal announces. He makes it to level 10 -- she suspects that her cousin spends as much time playing these games as he does hacking on them.

“PCF” goes above her score.

“Let’s play something else,” Pascal says.

“What other games have you got?”

“A bunch of old Namco games. Pac-Man, Galaxian, Galaga, Dig Dug... Space Invaders, of course, because how could I not. A few others.”

“Oh man, Space Invaders.” Molly grins. “We used to waste so much time playing that game, remember?"

Pascal takes the first turn, and she watches him play for a few minutes. He always gets really intense while he plays, which is hilarious. It reminds her of when they were kids, playing old console games in the living room when her dad would bring her up on weekends. She’d been really good at platformers -- Sonic the Hedgehog was her favourite -- but when it comes to shoot-’em-ups, she’s never been able to match Pascal’s skill and focus.

“I’ll help you with the clone,” Molly offers after a minute. “I bet we could hack it out in a couple of days. Progressively aggressive enemy ships, a simple soundtrack... Kinda like Space Invaders, y’know? I’ve seen you write more difficult games in a couple of hours.”

“It’s not about that. It’s about preserving the history of gaming. You know that better than anybody, Molly. It’s only ‘cause of Havi’s cabinet that half of those kids have even heard of the game.” Pascal doesn’t even look up from the screen. “What if we put in the board, lock it up and just tell Havi that I fixed it? She’d have plausible deniability should it ever be found out -- I don’t work there, and you’ll be gone by September.”

“No.” A flat answer, delivered without affect or emotion -- because the whole of her being wants to say yes. Pascal’s right, and she knows it. “You know the rules.”

Pascal lets out a string of curses as his last fighter dies violently in a pixellated explosion. For a long moment, he stares at the high score screen.

“If the tech is even in a legal grey area, it doesn’t leave the house. Keep the stock firmware, just in case. And don’t put any of it on the Internet,” he intones, then shakes his head in disgust. “Yeah, I know the rules.”

Molly nods grimly. The conditions stand in both of their houses -- adopted last year after the Librarian of Congress didn’t grant any DMCA exemptions and the scope of “fair use” narrowed. Just like that, Molly’s phone had to be flashed back to stock firmware, her portfolio of projects for college admission had to be scrapped and started over almost from scratch. All of her projects had to be pulled from Github.

Not that it stops her. But she misses the old community -- the people she used to chat with for hours, who she had inside jokes with, are all scattered now. She has a new screen name that she uses to keep a few of her projects running, and while she’s sure some of her old friends stuck around, she just doesn’t know. Sometimes she sees something familiar -- a phrase someone used to use a lot, or the way someone explains an idea -- and it leaves her fighting the urge to reach out and reconnect.

Hey, were you part of this community? What was your username, before everything went to crap?

But of course, she’s never asked anyone that. She can’t -- it would defeat the purpose of changing one’s username in the first place. And so she’s left wondering whether the forks of her friends’ projects that she sees floating around are their creators under new identities, or just what they seem on the surface -- strangers adopting abandoned code and making improvements.

So far, so good -- but having to start over with no reputation, losing track of most of her peers, and trying to replace her portfolio leaves Molly with a dull ache in her chest.

She really misses exemptions. And the broader definition of fair use.

“Can you... I don’t know, actually fix the board?” she asks.

Pascal shrugs, pushing his glasses up his face. “In theory, sure -- but in practice? Probably not. I don’t have a lot of hands-on experience with old arcade games, just the stuff I’ve read. The emulator would be the safest way to go.”

“And the chances of installing this without Havi finding out what we’re really doing are...?”

“Slim to none,” he admits.

“Damn.” She thinks about this for a second. “What if we let her in on it? It’s her cabinet. We’ll just say that we ripped the game off her board, plug in the emulator with just the one game loaded on it, and boom -- that’s fair use.”

“No, it used to be fair use. Nobody knows whether it is still -- and I don’t think Havi is going to be happy with us if she’s the court case that decides it.” Pascal sighs. “And if my dad finds out...”

“So we won’t tell him. What Henry doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“And you think I have the bad ideas? If he finds out we’re even thinking about this, he’ll ground me for life, and I bet your parents won’t be happy about it either.”

“Oh, no. My parents will freak out. Hell, I might not ever be able to touch a single-board computer again.”

“This is a bad idea,” Pascal says in a small voice.

That hangs in the air for a moment, and then Pascal grins at Molly, who grins back.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asks conspiratorially.

“Save the collective history of video games, one game at a time?”

She laughs. “Glad we’re on the same page.”