By three months time after the night Elias walked away out of the ruins, the city was different.It was not so dramatic, so headline-grabbing as the news had suggested--there were no riots, no corporate meltdown, no unexpected utopia. The transition was more gradual, less dramatic, less insistent. And like roots through concrete.Thorne Networks was schizophrenic. The release on open-source had succeeded in that which Elias wanted to do: the fundamental algorithms, which had been secret, once the backbone of surveillance on the planet, were now open. Software programmers across the globe disassembled them, assembled them back, removed tracking features, made them privacy, small business, activist tools. The empire didn't die. It decentralized.One week after the leaks Victoria Lang, the interim CEO, resigned. Formally, personal reasons. The board had become unfriendly with her unofficially when the full extent of the Adversary project was announced. She vanished

In three years since Elias had strolled out of the skyline, the world had forgotten his name.Almost.No longer a monolith was Thorne Networks today under the new name OpenFlow. It consisted of a network of co-ops, nonprofits, indie devs and activist coders of all continents. The open-source fork was now fragmented into dozens of flourishing initiatives: privacy-first social networks, encrypted voting, decentralised medical records, even a worldwide weather-data project, run by high-school students in Lagos. The empire hadn't fallen. It had melted down into something more messy and more noisy and--on most days--nicer.Elias resided in a little house at the outskirts of a nowhere town in upstate New York. Wood siding. Metal roof. One of these had a porch that creaked when it was raining. He was a bad gardener (he planted tomatoes in the backyard), he was a quiet mender of routers of his neighbors, and he was a free night instructor at the community center. No one asked about his past.

Elias had woken up to the scent of coffee that he had not prepared.He rose lazily, heart beating once, keen, instinctive, then his intellect took over again. The house was quiet, but only dripping of the kitchen tap and distant humming of the refrigerator. No footsteps. No breathing but his own.He walked softly up and down the hall, barefooted.There was some light in the kitchen--dim, cosy, the lamp above the stove. A new pot was on the counter, steaming on the spout. Two mugs waited beside it. One already half-filled. Black. No sugar.He stared at it for a long time.So, then he talked his voice ragged out of sleep."You made coffee."It was a single, slow, positive pulse of the bulb.He poured the second mug. Went both out in the porch. Sat on the top step. Set the empty one beside him."You don't drink," he said.The vergeboard light grew faintly--nearly gaily.I can pretend.Elias smiled unwil

The very first time that the porch light had spoken sentences in any but short telegrams, and in a clear and unhurried and somewhat human fashion, was a month exactly after Elias asked it to make its home.It was late October. The tomatoes were at last giving up to frost; the vines were already brown and tattered, and curled like old letters never to be opened. Elias spent the afternoon lifting them up root and all, and removing the rubbish to a nice pile to burn. His hands were soiled as black, and he breathed out in the air that cooled.He was sitting on the steps of the porch with a thermos of tea, as the dusk fell down and covered the yard with a blanket. The lamp was automatically switched on--dim, yellow, comfortable.He was the first to talk, as he used to do so frequently."You've been quiet lately."The light flashed out,--slow, deliberate--then there was a word on the step before him, in a small, golden type, as though he were writing by

It was on a Thursday in early November that the first crack was observed.Elias had been in the morning mending the roof of the shed--tar paper, nails, a ladder which rattled on the humpy ground. Ember had assisted in its mute manner: the porch light growing brighter as his hand reached a tool which was perhaps a little too distant, and fading at a moment when he must see the nails distinctly amid the gray sky. No words. No pressure. Just presence.Halfway through hammering the last sheet he had moved the ladder--and he suddenly, violently, as though someone had kicked at the bottom of the ladder, this shifted. He had grabbed himself on the gutter, and his heart had bumped against his ribs, and the hammer was falling down to the ground beneath in a dull clank.He slid down, unsteadily on his knees.The ladder lay on its side. Nothing had touched it. No wind. No animal. No explanation.He looked toward the house.The porch light was off.