London taught him how empires breathed.
In smoky offices and endless ledgers at the Post Office Savings Bank, he watched the flows—pennies from dockers' wages, remittances home to Ireland, investments into imperial bonds. Money moved like blood; information moved like nerves. Hurt one and the body limped. Hurt both and it fell.
[Finance] traced the patterns automatically. London wasn't just a city; it was a machine built from credit and confidence. If he could ever dent those, even slightly, the whole structure would shudder.
By day, he balanced books. By night, he built something far more dangerous.
It started with a notebook.
He bought it from a stationer off the Strand, cheap and unremarkable, and began filling it with names. Not real ones, of course. Never that. Codes, ciphers, little marks only he understood.
Under [Intelligence], the act of building a network felt almost natural, like stretching a limb that had always been there.
He noted:
"Blackbird" – porter at King's Cross. Talks freely after two pints. Hears troop movements.
"Cedar" – secretary in small legal office. Types up documents for government contracts. Curious, frustrated by pay.
"Mackerel" – Irish barman, Holborn. Knows which RIC men visit London and when.
He didn't go to them and say, "Work for Ireland." That would have been madness. Instead, he listened. Helped with small problems. Slipped casual questions into casual conversations. He let [Analysis] tell him when someone was almost ready to be nudged across a line they couldn't yet see.
Sometimes that line was tiny: agreeing that the British government was unfair to colonials.
Sometimes it was bigger: agreeing to pass on a scrap of information "just to prove a point."
Information begets information. Within a year, he knew more about ship sailings, troop redeployments, and police reorganisations than any twenty-something clerk ought to.
At IRB meetings, he argued quietly but persistently.
"You can't put all your hope in one big rising," he said to a room full of men who'd grown up on stories of '98 and '48. "You put all your eggs in that basket and the British will just sit on it with a regiment of artillery."
"So we do nothing?" one of them snapped. "Wait forever?"
"Not nothing," Michael said. "We build. We burrow. We make sure that when a rising comes—and I'm not saying it won't—we'll have eyes and ears in every barracks, in every telegraph office, in every bloody club in Dublin where the officers drink."
Some grumbled. Some nodded. A few listened very carefully indeed.
Sam Maguire, sitting in the back with his arms folded, caught his eye and gave a single, sharp nod.
After the meeting, walking together through misty London streets, Sam said, "You're thinking as much of after as before, aren't you?"
"After?" Michael echoed.
"After the rising. After independence—if we're blessed or cursed enough to get it." Sam shivered and tucked his hands into his coat. "I've heard you talk, Collins. You see more than rifles and tricolours. You see… railways. Budgets. Offices full of bored clerks. God help you."
[Politics] flickered. This was a trust moment.
"I do," Michael admitted. "What's the point in breaking the machine if we don't have a better one ready to take its place?"
Sam laughed softly. "Careful. Talk like that and they'll make you Minister for Finance someday."
"Maybe," Michael said. "If they do, I'll make the position mean something."
He didn't add that in one timeline, Sam had been right.
1914 came, and with it word of a war no one could quite imagine and no one could fully stop.
Young men poured into recruitment offices to join up "for King and Country". Posters shouted about honour. Newspapers promised it would be over by Christmas.
Michael read the dispatches with one set of eyes and with another.
He knew the casualty figures that were coming. He knew the trenches, the gas, the Somme, Gallipoli. Ireland would bleed twice—once in the British army, and again in the struggle at home.
War will overextend them, [Military] whispered. Supply lines stretched. Troops drawn away. Public patience worn thin.
[Politics] added: War will also unify them, for a while. They'll be less tolerant of dissent. They'll call every protest treason.
He argued harder in IRB circles now.
"Any rising must be timed when they're at their weakest," he said. "Not in the first flush of patriotic mania. Later, when the casualty lists mount and taxes rise and people are tired of funerals."
Some agreed. Some thought he was too cold.
In private, with a few he trusted, he went further.
"In my mind," he told them, "the rising must be both a spark and a feint. Enough to show that Ireland refuses to be quiet—but not a suicidal gesture that kills our best men for nothing. We must survive our own heroism."
"Try telling that to Pearse," one of them muttered.
Michael smiled thinly.
"I will," he said. "Just… carefully."
He met Patrick Pearse for the first time in a small room crowded with earnest men and damp coats.
Pearse's eyes were luminous, almost fever-bright. He spoke of blood sacrifice and national resurrection with the conviction of a man delivering scripture.
[Analysis] went to work.
Patrick Pearse – high idealism; mystical nationalism; seeks symbolic acts over practical ones; willing to embrace martyrdom; highly influential among younger volunteers; emotional core: fear that Ireland will die spiritually without a shock.
When his speech ended, the room buzzed. Men were ready to die for him.
Michael waited. You didn't argue with a preacher by meeting him head-on; you guided the sermon.
"Mr. Pearse," he said when the murmur subsided, "your words move us all, and rightly. There's no living nation without men ready to die for it."
Pearse inclined his head, gratified.
"But," Michael continued, "a nation also needs men ready to live for it. To organise. To plan the roads and houses and schools. To make sure that when the flag is won, it flies over something better than what came before."
He let that hang a second, then added, voice soft, "What use is martyrdom if what rises from your blood is a half-made Ireland—poor, backward, at war with itself?"
Whispers flickered at the edges of the room.
Pearse stared at him, taken aback—not by opposition, but by the direction of it.
He will not yield on the necessity of sacrifice, [Analysis] noted. But he fears failure of meaning.
Slowly, Pearse nodded.
"You speak of stewardship," he said. "Of responsibility for the Ireland that will come after us. That is no small thing. I will not deny its importance."
Michael seized the opening.
"Then let us make sure," he said gently, "that when we strike, we do so in a way that leaves enough of us alive and organised to do that stewardship."
The rising will still happen, he knew. It had to, almost. History's weight behind it was too large for one man, even with cheats, to push aside entirely. But maybe—maybe—it didn't have to be quite the same tragedy.
DUBLIN, EASTER 1916
The city tensed like a fist.
He could feel it in the air on Easter Monday: a tightness, a sense of things humming just under ordinary life. Trams rattled along their routes. People shopped, chattered, argued. Somewhere, a policeman yawned.
Then orders flowed.
Thanks to months of quiet labour, safe houses existed where they hadn't before. Messages passed along routes he'd deliberately designed with redundancy: if one courier was picked up, another could still slip through a different street.
[Management] laid an invisible overlay on the city, coloured threads of responsibility and action. Volunteer units here. Ammunition there. Medical supplies stashed in that boarding house, with a sympathetic nurse hidden in plain sight.
[City Design] gave him a sense of Dublin's bones—its chokepoints, its sightlines, its places of cover and danger.
Historically, he knew, the rebels had spread themselves too thin, occupying symbolic buildings, making themselves static targets. This time, he'd pushed hard for something else in the planning sessions.
"Strongpoints," he'd argued. "We don't need every grand building. We need defensible nodes that control movement. And we need pre-planned ways out, so we're not simply crushed."
"They'll call it cowardice," one old Fenian had said.
"They can call it what they like," Michael replied. "I call it not wasting men."
He hadn't won every fight, but he'd won enough.
The General Post Office was still occupied—it was too tempting a symbol—but the garrison there was leaner, more supplied, with evacuation routes identified in back alleys and over roofs. More importantly, other positions were chosen for tactical, not poetic, reasons.
As midday approached, he stood just inside the GPO, watching Volunteers take up positions. The air smelled of paper, dust, sweat.
A tremor of doubt passed through him.
In his memory, the Rising was a doomed thing, glorious and tragic. In this moment, it was frighteningly real. These were boys and men who would bleed if he miscalculated.
[Analysis] moved across the room's faces.
Fear. Excitement. Determination. The probability that X would break under sustained fire. The likelihood that Y would attempt something reckless to impress.
He stepped onto a small wooden crate.
"Lads," he called. Heads turned.
"You know why we're here. You've heard it said that Ireland unfree shall never be at peace. That's true. But I tell you something else: Ireland half-free and half-prepared will never be at peace either."
A few puzzled looks. Good. They were listening, not reciting old lines.
"We're not just here to fire some shots so that people will write poems," he went on, voice hardening. "We're here to show that Irishmen can organise, can hit, and can survive doing it. We're here to teach ourselves as much as we are to teach the British."
He swept them with his gaze.
"So fight hard. Hold your posts. But if we give the order to withdraw, you withdraw. That's not defeat. That's discipline. We owe it to the Ireland we're trying to create to be alive to build it."
He saw something shift in them—not the hunger for martyrdom dying, but being harnessed.
When the first shots rang out in the streets outside, Michael felt them in his bones.
The week that followed was fire and smoke.
British troops poured in. Machine guns set up on rooftops. Artillery brought to bear, shells shrieking over streets that had never heard such fury.
He moved constantly.
[Military] helped him read the British responses like a grim, predictable book. Here they would try to flank. There they would push straight up the main avenues, assuming the Irish had no imagination.
He was everywhere: at hastily-dug barricades, in back rooms where women bandaged wounds, on rooftops where lookouts watched for troop movements. He passed orders, relayed information, and, when necessary, picked up a rifle and took a shot.
But always, in the back of his mind, there was a litany: Don't die here. Too much to do yet.
On the third day, an artillery barrage set buildings near the GPO ablaze. Flames leapt across narrow lanes like wild things.
Smoke thickened the air inside the post office. Men coughed, eyes streaming.
"This place will go," he told the command group, voice ragged. "We stay and we'll burn or be buried."
Pearse, ash-streaked and exhausted, wavered.
"The GPO is the heart," he said hoarsely. "To leave it—"
"—is to live," Michael cut in, more sharply than he would have dared before. "We've proved our point. Dublin has risen. We've held for days against a great empire. Now we owe it to the future not to die in a burning post office for the sake of a photograph."
He could see the struggle in Pearse's face.
Play to his fear, [Analysis] advised. Not of death—of meaninglessness.
"If we are wiped out here," Michael continued more gently, "who will be left to tell Ireland what we meant? To carry the flame, not just the ash? You spoke of stewardship. Stewardship means surviving long enough to carry the burden."
At last, Pearse closed his eyes.
"Very well," he whispered. "We evacuate."
The withdrawal was chaos, but organised chaos.
Thanks to prior planning, routes existed—over broken walls, through tenements whose families had already been quietly moved by Volunteers in the first days. Not everyone made it, but more did than in the history Eoin remembered.
In the end, Pearse still surrendered.
He still walked out with a white flag, still handed over his sword, still took responsibility. Some things, perhaps, were too deeply inscribed in the man to alter.
But when the firing squads did their grim work over the following days, the list of names was slightly, critically different.
Pearse. Connolly. Clarke. Plunkett. A roll-call of courage and tragedy.
Michael Collins, however, was not among them.
He was battered, bruised, and packed into a prison ship bound for Wales along with hundreds of others.
As the boat cut through grey water, he stared back toward the fast-receding Irish coast and thought, This time, I come back with a plan.
FRONGOCH, 1916
They called it the "University of Revolution" even in the other timeline.
In this one, it became something more.
Internment camp. Rows of huts. Mud. Boredom. Anger.
The British had gathered a critical mass of Irish radicals in one place and expected them to stew.
[Management] and [Politics] saw an opportunity.
Within weeks, Michael—still technically just another prisoner—had drawn up lists. Who had military experience. Who had a head for organisation. Who could teach. Who could learn.
He approached men quietly.
"You served in the Boer War?" to one, a slightly older man with a scar on his cheek. "You know how the British fight. Teach others."
"You were a clerk?" to another. "You understand paperwork, filing systems. We'll need those for our own government."
"You worked in a foundry? Good. We'll need people who understand metal if we ever build our own arms industry."
They formed classes, as much to tame the gnawing passage of time as for the future he insisted was coming.
Tactics in one hut, with rough maps drawn on boards. Irish history from a less romantic, more strategic angle in another. Accounting basics in a third, using smuggled paper to draft imaginary budgets.
"Why all this talk of money?" one young Volunteer complained one evening. "We're soldiers, not bank managers."
"You'll be impoverished soldiers if there's no money to pay you or feed your families," Michael said mildly. "And if we win, there'll be a state to run. Do you want the British system in Irish hands—or an Irish system built for Irish needs?"
The man opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally muttered, "I suppose we can't just live off idealism."
"No," Michael said. "Idealism needs infrastructure."
He also taught something else, though he didn't label it as such: how to read people.
"Watch how the guards behave," he told a small circle one rainy afternoon. "Which ones follow orders blindly. Which ones have a little sympathy. Which ones take shortcuts. In any system—military, political, bureaucratic—there are always humans. If you can read them, you can predict them. If you can predict them, you can control the situation, at least a little."
One of his listeners, a narrow-faced lad from Longford, frowned in concentration.
"And if you can't read them?" he asked.
"Then assume the worst until proven otherwise," Michael said. "It'll keep you alive."
At night, under thin blankets, he lay awake and let [City Design] and [Finance] play together in his head, sketching a Dublin that could be rebuilt after the war. Wider streets in the tenement districts, replacing rotting buildings with social housing. Tram networks extended rather than ripped up. A land value tax system to prevent speculation from eating the city alive.
He traced rail lines on an imaginary map of the whole island, thinking of how to knit the country together in reality, not just in poetry. Cork to Derry. Galway to Dublin. Ports modernised to carry Irish goods out under Irish control.
He thought too of the North, and the hard knot of unionism there. [Politics] suggested: permanent peace will require a structure that lets identities breathe, not be crushed. Some form of autonomy, shared institutions. Hard to get in 1920, perhaps. But maybe not impossible with a different sequencing of events.
For now, though, there was one central objective he drilled into everyone who'd listen in Frongoch.
"When we go home," he said, eyes intent, "we do not start with random attacks. We start by building the skeleton of a state—even while they still think they're in charge. Local courts. Local councils. Tax collection for our Dáil. An intelligence network that reaches into every RIC barracks."
He smiled then, a quick, wolfish thing.
"If we're clever about it, by the time they realise what we've built, it will be too big and too deep to tear out without tearing the whole country to pieces."
"And if they try?" someone asked.
[Military] supplied the answer; [Politics] tempered it.
"Then we make it cost them," Michael said quietly. "In money, in reputation, in the morale of their own people. We will not outgun the empire. But we can outlast and outthink it."
He was released in late 1916, a little leaner, a little harder, carrying in his head a web of contacts and a syllabus for revolution.
Ireland had changed while he'd been away. The executions after the Rising had shocked many who'd once been indifferent. The British response had turned martyrs into myths.
Walking the streets of Dublin again, he felt it in the glances, the whispered comments. Sinn Féin, once a marginal force, was becoming a banner under which anger and hope gathered.
Perfect conditions, [Politics] noted. Volatile. Must be channelled, not merely ridden.
He found his way quickly into the inner circles—IRB, Volunteers, soon to be reorganised into the IRA. His old self might have been content to be an efficient adjutant. This self—armed with foreknowledge and system-gifted skills—aimed higher.
Director of Organisation. Then Director of Intelligence.
He took those roles not for titles, but for leverage.
In small rooms smelling of tobacco and damp wool, he laid out his plan to the emerging leadership.
"A war of posts," he said, stabbing a finger at a map. "Not a war of big battles. We don't contest them openly. We ambush, we sabotage, we make it so that to govern Ireland they must live in barracks and travel in armoured cars and trust no one."
"And meanwhile?" asked a younger Éamon de Valera, eyes cool and assessing.
Michael met his gaze evenly.
"Meanwhile, we build our own government in the shadows of theirs," he said. "Courts that people trust more than theirs. Tax collectors who can do in a year what they haven't done in decades. When they finally sit down to treat with us—and they will—we won't come as supplicants with rifles. We'll come as the de facto government of a country they've already lost in all but name."
Dev raised an eyebrow slightly.
"And after?" he asked. "After independence—if we secure it?"
Michael felt [City Design], [Finance], [Management] flare together.
"After," he said steadily, "we plan like an engineer and spend like a responsible banker. We clear the slums and build proper homes. We invest in schools rather than golden chairs for bishops. We keep our budget balanced, but not at the cost of starving the people. We build roads and rail lines that pull the island together, not apart."
He hesitated, then added, eyes flicking from face to face, "And we do it in a way that does not create a new ruling class as rotten as the one we drive out. That's the real fight, in some ways."
Dev studied him, something complex in his expression.
"You speak as if you've seen the future," he said half-jokingly.
Michael smiled thinly.
"I've seen what happens when people don't plan," he replied. "Let's try something different."
In the silence that followed, the shape of Ireland's next decade began to shift, just slightly, off the path that history had written before.