On Finding

Written for Brian. A first draft:

Before anything else, before the Web was even close to World-Wide, we had Archie. He wasn’t much, or he wouldn’t look like it now, but six years ago he was a revelation: a web directory with near-complete records of every FTP server out in that cold expanse. And if it only catalogued titles, and not specific content, so what? We were young. It was such a stride. But what came next? What stroke of evolutionary brilliance? What goddamn torturous fucking acronyms came nipping at Archie’s heels? Veronica and Jughead. I wish I was kidding about this shit.

Archie was not a… some fricking freckled fucking feckless kid. Some redheaded stepchild. Archie wasn’t short for ARCHIBALD, assholes. Archie was ARCHIVE, without the V. This is not cute, okay? This is not some twee little joke. This is timeless, it is epic, it is an historic watershed.

My engine is named Alex. Look, fuck Jughead and Veronica and Moose, but I still understand a little something about marketing. So, Alex. For Alexandria, Egypt, and the library thereof. Because Alex and AlexandriaAlexandria was the capital of commerce, thought, communication. A hub of research and recording, where new ideas were born as freely as the old ones could be pulled from their shelves. And it’s all because people were coming from all over, everywhere, sharing what they knew because all of them would want to hear it, and… and they knew that. These likeminded people travelled for months for no other reason than connecting, than… than, fuck it, logging on, together, always together. How fucking amazing that now we can have that without even leaving our homes? That now there is nothing, literally, nothing, to keep us from finding those people, that person… any person, with whom… because we’re all connected, inter-connected, literally, potentially; every human person, so now: NOW, how can one person not manage to find, see, touch, feel, another?

How can a person remain unfound?

I’ll make Alex, Alexandria, the new great human hub. I will make it, and everyone will know me.