Wales. Pembrokeshire. A cabin in the woods. Early October 2025.
The clock ticked. 22:41 BST. Which, thanks to the cruel arithmetic of time zones, meant I had just under twenty minutes to hit “authorise” before what I’d spent the last twelve months trying to bring into the light slipped back into darkness.
Who’d have thought it would come down to this?
No router. No broadband. Just me and my iPhone, clinging to a signal like a gumshoe to a half-baked lead. I’d set up a personal hotspot—one of those modern miracles that works until it doesn’t.
I tilted the bottle of 10-year-old single malt and poured a generous measure into my favourite heavy-bottomed glass—the one I kept tucked away with my other ‘special’ tools of the trade.
The webpage froze. I stared at the screen as if it owed me money. Was it the phone? The laptop? The distant server? Or had the whole internet decided it didn’t owe me any favours and found something better to do?
Then the phone rang. Unknown number. Of course it was. I let it ring out. I didn’t have time for mystery callers—not unless they were offering bandwidth.
Outside, the wind had picked up, and the bramble scratched urgently on the other side of the remote log cabin’s wall.
I sighed and rebooted my tech, because that’s what we do—whether you’re a schoolteacher or work for a shady government agency.
Behind the cabin, the geese stirred. The farmer told me they were better than guard dogs. More vigilant. More vocal. Right now, they sounded like they were auditioning for a duet with Andrea Bocelli.
I stepped into the night air, hoping the altitude of the veranda might coax a few more bars of signal out of the ether.
The geese honked as a cool gust sent ripples across the water trough, blurring the reflection of the moon. Somewhere in the trees, a squirrel dropped a pinecone with the kind of timing that makes you believe in fate.
I stepped backwards, not taking my eyes off the darkness until I could pull the doors closed on whatever lurked outside.
I tried the page again, my heart thudding in my ears.
It blinked, but offered as much as a novel with a missing last page.
I swirled the whisky and hit F5, watching the page refresh through the bottom of my tumbler.
The page loaded. 23:58 GMT or 22:58 BST. It was now or never.
I clicked on the only key that interested me. The last move in a long-running chess game.
An egg-timer flashed onto the screen. Tilted right ninety degrees, hesitated and flashed off. That was that.
I had released Annika Dash: The Dark Side of the Moon.
Author’s note: Well, this is how I remember it 🙂
The Seven Systems 