by Rich Stoehr, 26th July 2001

"In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else."
- Tim Berners-Lee
"Weaving the Web"

"We're the ones who started this. You and I in all our generations."

The phrase flits by me in the dataflow, unconnected, and I look after it, searching for the link, but it's gone. Drifting through the steady slipstream of information, I'm not sure where I am anymore, but I'm used to that. I'd been researching my latest obsession, affective computing and emotive machines, when a link from a wide search led me to the academic site of a woman named Jeanine Salla, a researcher at a university I had never heard of. She reminded me a bit of Rosalind Picard for some reason, the "Mother" of Affective Computing at MIT. Searching further, I ran across a group whose primary interest seemed to be Artificial Intelligence, a field closely linked with Affective Computing. Inexplicably, they were called the Cloudmakers. I home in on their nexus, and the path around me becomes noisier, busier, filled with light and noise and random chatter. I'm approaching a wall with a plain door set into it, and the noise increases the closer I get, becoming a blinding cacophony as I come within a nanosecond of it, suddenly muting as I reach the door. I can still hear it and see it flickering around the edges of my vision, but it is shoved into the background for the moment. I breathe deep, then look up at the door.

There is a notice posted on it, small and neat, black type on a white field. It reads: BEFORE ENTERING, Please READ THE TRAIL and SEARCH THE BOARD. Scrawled below this, partially over its surface, in bright red paint, is the meaningless phrase RTFT- TROUT! An attempt had been made to clean it off, to little effect. A small table that I hadn't noticed before, just to the right of the door, holds a thick tome, bound in a black plastic cover with plain white letters on it: THE TRAIL, v7.2. I move to pick it up, when it flashes for a moment and thickens by about an inch, adding pages out of nowhere. The cover changes from v7.2 to v8.0, with an added note, "It's a Doozy!" I decide against picking it up. Instead, I open the cover and flip through some of the pages, seeing references to robots and resistance, boats and biology, murder and mystery. I don't know where to start. Shaking my head, wondering what I was getting into, I close the book, open the door, and walk through.

Instantly, the noise level thunders up again, and I am assaulted by color and light from hundreds of huge displays set into the walls around me. I've entered a vast chamber, the length and breadth of several football fields. People are everywhere, milling throughout. Video and computer display screens line the walls as far as the eye can see, viewing everything from photographs to complicated charts. I can see databases and graphs and lines of code. The only thing I recognize right away is a blown-up photograph of Jeanine Salla, sitting at a desk and looking at a piece of plastic or Plexiglass in front of her, typing. The photo looks oddly disjointed, somehow, as if cobbled together. Green words are displayed on the transparent screen before her. A group of observers are standing beneath the giant display screen, pointing at it, arguing loudly. Someone punches a button and the image is flipped around. Everyone stops arguing, staring at it. After a few silent moments they start again, even louder than before. I am about to approach them, to hear better what they are yelling about, when a flash of white distracts my attention.

A tiny metallic object, whining and buzzing with electronic fury, skitters across the floor, weaving in between obstacles and the busy, pacing feet of others. It makes its way over to me, and I can see it better. It is a tiny white hump of smooth metal, set with two little glowing red spots about where eyes would be, and a stiff black metal tail sticking out behind. It appears to be some sort of metallic mouse. It stops at my feet and buzzes. I realize it is trying to communicate with me and lean a little closer, to hear it over the noise of the room. It wheedles at me in its mechanized voice. "Are you mannnn or moussse? Mousssse or MOWZZzzzzz? MOWZzz or trout?"

I blink at it for a moment, as it vibrates and hums, eyes glowing red. "Um," I mutter, unsure what to say. "TROUT!" the little creature replies loudly, making some nearby people look up at us. The mouse scoots backwards with a whine, turning back into the room and announcing gleefully "Trouttrouttrouttrouttrout!" as it gets lost once again in the throng. The onlookers giggle or mutter to one another, shaking their heads and moving on. I decide to make myself a little less conspicuous. I stay along one edge of the room, one of the dimmer and less noisy areas, walking slowly and looking around me. A young man sits at a console, rapt face cast in a soft blue glow from the translucent display hanging in the air in front of him, a glowing grid pattern with a few roughly triangular shapes laid out on it. He considers the pattern carefully, completely absorbed in it, slowly reaching up one hand to tap the air in front of it, at one nexus of the grid. A new triangle appears where he touched, followed by another, darker, one in another area. He curses under his breath. I approach softly, looking over his shoulder. "What are you doing?" I ask quietly.

"Go," he replies tersely, and I take that as my cue to leave him alone, moving on. I approach the darkest corner of the chamber slowly, avoiding a few people for the moment, and pick out of the gloom several jumbled, squarish shapes arranged in a rough semicircle, some of them glowing faintly, casting a pale light over that corner and its occupants. A haggard man in a wooden chair stares at one of the screens as it flares to life, lists of words flashing over it. I can see them for long enough to see that most of the letters are white, while a few pulse briefly red. The man in the chair stares vacantly and begins to chant under his breath, bobbing his head in a rhythm all his own. The half-dozen people standing behind him step in closer to listen, writing furiously on legal pads in their hands. I move in closer myself, to better hear what he's saying, and I can see that the other shapes around the half-circle are other televisions and video tape recorders, stacked haphazardly atop one another and connected in complex and arcane fashion with scores of wires.

I am close enough now to see the reflected light in the chanting man's wide eyes and smell the faint miasma of stink emanating from him. His eyes flicker from one screen to the other, several now showing lists of words and names, flashing and changing color. I watch his lips moving and listen to the whispers flowing from his mouth and manage to get most of what he says. "we-saw-jeanine-salla-warn-her-whale-in-verse-inverse-whale-we-have-risen-where-evan-is-is-evan-answer-he-lives-evan-died- spinning-sinning-spinning!" He pauses here to look up at me, his eyes frightened and watery, trembling like runny eggs in their sockets. His whispering becomes more forceful, almost urgent.

"Evan died. Sinning. Jeanine. We saw. Jeanine Salla. WARN HER!" At this last his voice was raised into a hoarse yell, and he seemed about to rise from his chair. The other half-dozen observers glare at me as if I am interfering with some sort of sacred rite, and I back away slowly. The driven man settles back into his chair, eyes drifting back to the screens. After a moment, I see his lips contorting rapidly again, forming words I cannot hear, and every word is transcribed for later examination. Time to find someone else, I think. I have to find out just what is going on here.

On my way back to the central area of the chamber, I pass a small door set into the wall. A sign at the top, red letters on a white plaque, reads simply "MAIL ROOM." I pause, curious, and open the door halfway, sticking my head inside. The scene within is clearly well out of control. Stacks and stacks of messages, thousands of them, are piled everywhere. A single elderly man, white hair bedraggled and dressed in a postal worker's blue jumpsuit, picks a few messages up from one stack, flips through them, and places them onto another stack, which promptly falls over. He sighs, picks up a different stack, and turns to sort them into slots set into the wall. On the back of his jumpsuit, red letters are embroidered, reading YAHOO! While his back is turned, several dozen messages fall through a hole in the ceiling and drop onto a table in the middle of the room, already overflowing onto the floor. I open my mouth to offer some assistance, then shut it again, realizing that it is far, far too late for that. Closing the door, I go back to my search for more answers.

There's a bank of phones on a raised platform. Each phone is hooked up to an answering machine, and each is manned by someone. Each person is either dialing frantically, waiting impatiently with a receiver against their ear, writing on a notepad, or talking. A young woman near me is practically yelling into the phone. "...But Mike... I know... I know... But they've got him in there, they're beating him. You've got to save him, Mike, you're the only one who can!"

I turn from her to another woman, tapping her pen rapidly against the handset of her phone, the earpiece against her ear. I touch her on the shoulder gently, and she half-turns to me. "Yeah?" "Sorry - I just got here. I don't understand, but I want to. Who can I ask about what's going on?" I ask.

She looks up at me. "A newbie?" She sighs and looks over towards the middle of the chamber, pointing for a moment with her pen towards a large group of people milling about on a raised dais. "Try over there, I think some of the mods are - somewhere in there - wait!" Sitting up suddenly, holding the receiver more closely, she starts writing on her pad of paper. I look over her shoulder and see, quickly scrawled, "What were we doing searching for David under your name? Something you should have done a long, long time ago." She goes on scribbling, oblivious to me now, and I head in the direction she pointed towards.

Passing through the central area of the chamber now, I walk carefully to avoid the larger groups of people moving through it, discussing, arguing, laughing. I watch as a young man steps over to a data bank and holds up his hand, a matrix of numbers and associations, cross-referenced and expandable, forms beneath his fingers. It solidifies, and he grabs it, sliding it into the data bank. A panel flashes and returns a message. Satisfied, the young man nods and moves on, blending into the crowd. Others move to the databank and add to what was started there, and go on to other things. A smooth female voice suddenly booms from everywhere, soft but authoritative, and most people stop to listen. "Attention, this is a Moderator announcement. The Eliza DB is up, please post your Eliza kickouts here. Dan is spearheading this, and we have our crack team of evanchanners in place. Thank you. That is all." The voice cuts out, and everyone continues on their way.

I approach the dais, squeezing myself in between the crowds, when a sudden disturbance at the entrance grabs my attention. A small group of people is asking loud questions of everyone around them. It appears that they have just come in. A circle widens around them as most of the others do their best to avoid the noisy, boisterous bunch. Suddenly, an oversized monkey (which seems to be both one monkey and many) swings down from somewhere in the rafters, wielding a large, floppy fish in one hand, mouth wide open, straight for the newly-entered group. As he approaches he starts to yell. "What the Hell are you, stupid?! You stinky, vile trout! Get a clue, get a brain, get a fraggin' life!" At the punctuating syllable of each phrase he swings the fish in his hand this way and that, thwapping people out of the tight group. Some escape back out the door, others disappear deeper into the chamber. A couple stand and fight, railing against the monkey on the return swing, but they too are struck by the fish. The monkey drops to the ground, cackling delightedly, and runs off, joining some others at what seems to be, beyond all probability, an Enigma code-making machine, like the ones the Germans used in World War II.

"Never thought I'd see one of those again," I mutter under my breath.

I reach the dais and climb up onto it. Three people are seated at desks on top of it, two men and a woman. The woman, shoulder-length hair waving in exasperation, gesticulates with a paper in her hand, motioning in the general direction of someone nearby and says "For the love of Mike, I'm pleading, I'm begging, please e-mail press articles to me, don't post them to everyone!" She seems busy, so I don't bother her. I instead go to one of the men, who is seated and absorbed by something on the silver console in front of him. A couple people look over his shoulder at what he's doing. I approach in front.

"Excuse me," I say, trying to get his attention.

He looks up. His eyes take a moment to focus on me, then he says "Yes?"

"I..." Suddenly I feel the need to clear my throat, and do so. "I just got here a short while ago. I'm not sure what this is, but..." I lean in a little closer. "Can you tell me what's going on here?" Looking around a little, I add, "It all seems very strange."

He smiles at me for a moment, then nods. "This much we were told from the beginning: Evan Chan was murdered. Wait..." Pausing for a moment, he digs in the desk underneath him, still watching me. "How did you get here?"

I explain, as briefly as I can, about looking for more information on Affective Computing, and add, "I thought this group was studying Artificial Intelligence or something."

"Okay," he replies, "Did you happen to read the Trail, on the way in? Big reference-type-thing, always getting bigger?" I shake my head, and he chuckles. "It is daunting, isn't it? Well, if you really want to know what's going on, that's a good place to start." He heaves a black-bound book out from his desk, twin to the tome I saw outside. "THE TRAIL - v8.0 It's a Doozy!" reads the cover. "Or, for something a little lighter, try the Guide." And here he brings out a thinner book, plunking it on top of the larger one. "Adrian wrote that, it's worth a read. Start with these, and come back up if you've any questions, all right? I'm Dan, by the way," he adds, extending a hand to me. I take it, and we clasp hands. "Dan F., not Dan H. The other guy over there is Irwin, and over there is Bronwen, our girlie mod. We've all been here a while, we can help get you started. Once you've read these," he taps the two books for emphasis, "feel free to jump in and give us a hand." With a slight flourish, he waves his hands, indicating the entire chamber and everyone in it.

He laughs lightly. "The Collective Detective can always use another brain." I look down at the books, thinking that they're more reading than I would normally do in a month. Looking back up at Dan, I smile a little and say, "Who was it that said the beginning of wisdom is understanding your own ignorance?"

"I don't know, friend," he replies, laughing. "Guess that makes me wise, eh?"

I nod. "I guess it makes us both wise. At least a little bit." I reach down and scoop the two black volumes up, one in each arm. Turning to go with a small grunt of effort, I tell Dan, "All right, I'll be back in a year or so."

"Take your time!" he answers, smiling and waving as I step off the dais. "We'll be here!" I see him turn back to his console, pointing at something on the screen, and I feel like a little kid who has to do his homework before being allowed into the games. Dodging through the crowds, I find an open spot at a long table and plunk the books down, flopping myself into a large, surprisingly comfortable chair. Looking from one book to the other, I choose the slimmer of the two first, and open it, reading through the first few pages. I'm hooked by the time I read the line "The date is 2142 and technology has developed to the extent that we can run artificial intelligences on computers."

Glancing up for a moment, looking at all the people busy around me, I feel the beginnings of wisdom stirring in my brain. I look down again, turn the page, and read on.

Hours, days, maybe weeks later, I raise my head from the final page of the Trail, the larger tome. The cover now reads "v8.1 - But wait, there's more!" I vaguely remember a young woman coming by and introducing herself as Andrea, Moderator and Trailblazer, and telling me to "Have a wonderful night!" as she handed me a thick update to the tome I was reading and moved cheerily on. My eyes feel heavy as I cast them around the room, but there's no way I can rest now. I've got to find out who killed Evan Chan, and why. I have a better idea, now, but I have to get involved. I saw, in the Trail, moments of fragmentation and moments of pure brilliance. I have the sense of something wonderful, something magical just a short distance away, if I can only reach it -

I shake my head and get up from the table, leaving the two books there for the next needful newbie. I see a group of people at one display, listing and interpreting all the different lines of Shakespeare plays that have been found scattered about. "If music be the love of food!" I hear one exclaim, laughing. "That's wrong! Should it be "Eat on?" He laughs again, too loud. Shakespeare, I think to myself. I can do that. I approach the group, and begin to help. "Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long."

As I move from puzzle to puzzle, I don't know that I can quantify what my part is. With each coming challenge, I contribute a bit of knowledge, a nudge here, a scrap of trivia there. The binary code translations and Japanese katakana puzzles are right over my head, but I come to trust that there are others that can solve them. Others, there are always others, an ever-growing number of them. If I can't solve something, and there's no way any one person could solve everything themselves, there are the others there to help carry the torch onward.

I'm talking briefly with a young woman named Karen, who is telling me about her dreams. "I'm dreaming of trout," she says. "Turtles, knives; I'm dreaming in shattered movies, in Japanese, in chemistry symbols. When will it end?" She looks into my eyes as she speaks this last, imploring. I can only nod, speechlessly, sympathizing but silent. I do not know my unsaid, obvious response.

I am able, with my knowledge of history, literature, and computers, to dig more deeply into other puzzles. I delve further into the history of Eliza, the famous MIT computer designed decades ago by Joseph Weizenbaum, as we explore the Eliza's tearoom puzzles. I am amused to see that, in the end, Eliza is really just a frightened child. How appropriate. I participate in a sort of panel discussion of the interpretations and themes behind Lewis Carroll's Alice books, paying special attention to Through the Looking Glass and its character, the Red King. Each of us armed with a copy of The Annotated Alice, we debate endlessly the idea of dreams within dreams, of worlds created and worlds shared. Our brains pulse by the time we're done, too full of ideas for the moment. I help to interpret hidden code and programming languages, translating hacker-speak into something intelligible. I help to re-assemble fragmented pieces of story, sound, and image to create something unified and whole.

I play several games of chess, against opponents both human and machine. The rules are very strange, unlike any I have ever played before. In some nonsensical sense, though, they work. I play white, my opponents always play red. Red pieces. The Red King. Then we all stop as we get the message we have all feared and hoped for.

It appears on one screen first, then several, then all of them. The katakana puzzle has borne fruit, and we all pause in awe as we receive a message from one of the men who plotted to kill Evan Chan. Someone is reading the words aloud over the speakers, but I am reading ahead on the screen nearest me. Grey script on a white page, he tells us who, and he tells us why. He tells us he is about to be killed. And he says "The cup is empty. This is the end." There are gasps throughout the room at this. Several people drop to the floor, whether from shock or simple exhaustion I cannot tell. There is dead silence throughout the room for the first time since I have been here. Even the machines seem to take a moment of silence, out of respect for the dead, or perhaps for the living.

We look around at one another, asking each other what to do, silently. A hesitant voice rises up, cutting through the silence. "Um. Excuse me? I know the game is probably almost over, but... is this a new puzzle?" Everyone turns to a large screen on one wall, the only one showing something other than the fateful letter. Evan's boat, the Cloudmaker, our namesake, is pictured there. Jaye, one of the newer players, is up there, too, pointing at it, obviously nervous. "I got here from Evan's page, clicked twice, and something asked me to 'Make a Beautiful Land'. I don't know what it means, but when I looked closer, I found this."

The screen changes suddenly, Cloudmaker disappearing, replaced by a giant collection of grey and white shapes against a blue field, each shape with a number on it: 2M, 11M, 7M. Jaye looks out to us again, his eyes hopeful. "Is this new?"

A tall man with long dark hair speaks first. "Damned right it is! Who wants to bet that this is Evan's plankton study?" "I'll take that bet!" responds another man from the crowd. "It's a topographical map!" Other opinions are voiced, other voices raise and are heard. Jaye, smiling, fades off into the background, not to be forgotten for this miraculous find. Salvation. Damnation. Another puzzle, and we are off again. I watch in wonder as each person in the gigantic chamber sets themselves to the new task at hand, renewed and energized by the challenge presented by this strange map. It's an altitude map, it's a star map, it's population density; we're meant to build a three-dimensional model, we're meant to travel somewhere, we're meant to manipulate the numbers in a mathematical formula. Ideas are thrown out, built upon, rejected, renewed, resurrected, shot down, and raised up again. I help where I can, and I watch.

Messages form out of the datasphere, meaningless at first, but leading us on, giving each individual more and more ideas, giving the group more to work with. "Jelyhedz! Jelyhedz! Cook them frum spAs! Cook them now!" We need to do something. This isn't just about the death of Evan Chan anymore, this is about our future, all of us. As the plankton threaten this future world (our world), we act as one. We need to do something! I help, I watch. And then, watching, I see it. With crystal clarity, there it is in front of me. It was always there, just waiting for me to notice. I blink, and still I can see it; subtle at first, a reality behind the reality, connections forming between people, among them and around them. No, not forming. The connections are already there, they have always been there, but I could only now begin to see them.

I walk among my fellows, my compatriots, with eyes wide in wonder, watching as connections grow and strengthen, branching and branching and branching again to form complex links in three dimensions, then four, then five. Geometries unheard of, never-seen or long-forgotten, surface in the connectivity, the unity of this world, this group, this mind, that is many, and one. This is the way it should be, I think. This is the way it has always been. We just don't know it.

And there it is. Perfect in its simple unity, glittering before me as it moves and grows, there is the solution to all of it. The solutions do not lie in the puzzles we are presented with, they lie in the connections we make, between the ideas and between one another. These are what will last. I look down at myself and see that I, too, have been incorporated into the whole, connections flowing to me and from me, ideas flowing freely as we work together, as individuals and as a group, to solve the challenges we are presented with.

The solution, however, does not lie in the story.

We are the solution.

"Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we all work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey. We don't expect the system to eventually become perfect. But we feel better and better about it. We find the journey more and more exciting, but we don't expect it to end."
- Tim Berners-Lee
"Weaving the Web"

Rich Stoehr can be reached at glassisland@hotmail.com.