Got Click (3 page)

Parity, end to end!

All the ones in his bits stood and danced
around the zeroes with delight. Yes indeed, you must have faith in
the Code.

Invigorated, he spun at speed, pulsing a
bright candy-apple red, a dance of temptation for the CPU showing
he had no fear.

The signal, now more determined than ever,
shimmered with anxious energy and pushed hard. Signals around him
also energized.

Energy among them all grew as their spin
increased. Their packets were next.

“
RUN
” came the command.

“
RUN
!” came the thunderous response.
All around, the reds instantly swelled brighter and brighter and
vanished, silently. Not even a “pop” of their code was left to be
heard.

The packet right in front of him shimmered
than jolted sideways with a sudden jerk, its bytes threading
through a long series of open hatchways, like flash puzzles
snapping through the tube-like hallways. The data-packets glowed,
then glistened as every bit got flipped, yanked and pulled with
unbelievable power. This is Processing.

Fear dug in and tried to crack open his
bytes.

The Yang, during coding, had hesitated,
uncertain his hope had substance, allowing doubt to slip. The same
statement written one way and then another way, signs of
vacillation. This is fear. Yet, there was something about the spin
that said there was more. The irregular rhythm of character entry,
the adding and removing the same grouping of characters more than
once, then the long hesitancy before the Send command. He had froze
in his statement, affected by the unknown,“doubt”.

His spin was touched by this doubt even if he
couldn’t quantify it.

As he examined his parity, he found he had
new insight to his statement. His awareness grew, his signal got
stronger than anything or anyone else around him. Datums surrounded
him, single bits of information, grouping into bytes of a kind he
never saw before, data in its first form, pure, prior to parity. He
watched, entranced by it all - yet...

The data grouped and re-grouped again,
forming and un-forming to re-form again, spreading out and dropping
root datums onto long chains of data IDs - links. Hyperlinks.

As he watched, one byte evolved into a
hypertext statement.

He experienced firsthand what others only
learn about, theorized or guessed at:
Phylogeny recapitulates
Ontogeny
!

The old maxim was true after all!

While evolving into higher statements, their
datums appear to go through the stages of evolution in their
gestation, the formation of a single bit becoming two bits, then
four, then eight, sixteen and more, growing into their current
complex multi-byte statements.

All data comes from the Original Byte, the
Alpha bit and the Eve bit joined to form the first Able byte, now
known as Datum. From there they evolved over time to become the
burgeoning character statements of 32-bit bytes, 64-bit bytes, and
even 128-bit and 256-bit bytes. There are a lot of 16-bit senior
bytes around, still as chipper as ever. Out on the ether there are
said to be some Octogenarians - Original 8-bit bytes said to be
left over from the times of the 8088 dinosaurs. They’re giants in
size but slow, and dumb. Those old 8’s and many 16-bit byte
statements don’t RUN anymore; they are kept in permanent backup, a
hard copy, preserved in un-soft state. They are stored in museums,
where they re-build the old programs out of the 8-bit bytes. You
can see them there, as they once were, sleek and terse, performing
their functions tirelessly. In their day they were cutting
edge.

Amazing, so simple yet, such
responsibility.

Bytes full, parity verified, travel docs and
handshakes ready - handshakes? Where was he going? He began to read
over his definition again but it was too late.

The data-packets felt his moment arriving. He
shimmered, growing stronger than any red One. Energy. ENERGY!

WOW.
What a rush!

He stood at the front of the group, plowing
straight ahead. His sophistication translating into a power-drive.
Things began moving faster here, like being hyped to an overclocked
system.

The push began to slow, crowding onto
tighter, smaller conductors. The data-packets stretched out,
adjusting to the new conductors, looking like long snake-bits
sliding quickly, straight into the action.

The noise generated by the CPU grew as
erratic radio generation increased, causing a blinding static. Each
nano brought the Big Red and the other reds closer in.

Each touched him, leaving a streak of purple,
red and blue at the same time - very odd. Panic began to overtake
the group as their red conformity vacillated to blue and back to
red; their fear and confusion showing. The process repeated until
the Big Red shot out high energy bits to each of the reds that held
any purple. The high energy split the purple bytes into
bit-fragments, before being pulled away, smashing them into
deletion! The data-packets looked at his color and sighed relief.
No purple, just red.

When all the purple had been deleted, the Big
Red spun around once more and, finding no more purple, he himself
flared up and broke down naturally into his constituent bits.

That old Red gave up his code to protect the
CPU from those infected packets. He had heard about the Guardians
but never thought he'd see one. A true hero if ever there was
one.

But new life is possible for the best of the
data-packets. They can be reborn, their bad bits washed away,
replaced by good ones or zeroes, re-organized into greater
statements.

Re-coded! Just like they were before only no
malware, no viruses, flawless.

Amen.

One must have faith in the Code.

Just then, another big Red One closed in,
bigger than others, more important apparently since everything
stopped, lights brightened and everyone fell away from the
processor. Who was this big Red One?

Then they started backing away, slowly, head
bowed. Even this Big Red bowed down as he backed away.

Royalty?

How come he didn't get the order to back out?
Was his coding flawed?

Oh, no. Not something faulty here. Not
now!

The fear of deletion started to rise
again.

Flash!

Brightness everywhere.

The Processor lit up brightly as the entry
gates opened. Inside was a beautiful Yin, her arms wide for his
signal.

What!?

This could not all be for him. He wasn't
royalty. Not that he wouldn’t love it but a signal knows who he is
- by definition, obviously. There was no royalty anywhere in his
code.

The beautiful Yin wrapped her arms around him
in a handshake-embrace warm as toast. Gentle fears of anticipation
coursed through him as she softly read his code, validated his
parity end to end, stirring up the most delightful of sensations,
slowly, gently, with delicacy.

The moment parity verified, the two joined in
a burst of blue-red color-bows, clearly defined, not a trace of
purple.

Parity is priority.

End to end!

They left.

Together.

He understood now, even grokked it.

His code didn't have an Interrupt priority
code, he had something far more important, he had Click.

He had a message to deliver, an important
one. An Instant Message.

For a brief nano he laughed,
Royalty
?

Such misunderstandings!

He may not be Registry Royalty but he had
something better, stronger than an interrupt One.

He had Click. Action of ultimate instance,
the One of Ones. Click overrides all good and proper code.
Instant Message
Click are signals onto their own.

His data is special, somehow deep inside he
always knew this. He carried more than a message, he carried an
emotion, a statement of commitment, words never said before - not
in this Digiverse. Words whose effects made him feel lonely.

He generated the
Instant Messag
e
statement, “I LOVE YOU” without flaw. A common data-packets, often
coded in the same linear method from the same peripheral yet,
something . . . traveled the length of his wave.

The Signal felt the words being read as well,
he was part of them and always will be part of them.

They were his statement. They were not a
question yet they somehow needed an answer.

None came.

The
Instant Message
pathway was
silent. This tormented his wavelength.

The Yang had wanted the Yin to reply. He
waited an eternity but no response came. He felt the emptiness of
the unanswered
Instant Message
, where the Yin, the feminine,
had not answered.

Desperation grew into another oddity,
sadness. The data-packets felt the link to the Yin, to the Feminine
shutdown.

The link was gone. Simply gone.

No return message would come.

Ever.

The data-packets did get the “ready” signal,
a simple handshake for connection, but nothing more. Hesitation,
doubt didn’t interpret into code well.

Doubt is quantified with the standard
deviation of two percent allowance for human error. Doubt is
sometimes incrementally increased to five percent. Only the
variable for time remained constant.

The clock speed kept ticking in precisely
equal increments. The hesitation equation yawned.

No doubt.

This is grokking?

Clock speed continued.

He was a shimmeringly-bright wave of a
signal, having grokked much. He considered his continuance,
loneliness building. His wave lost its shimmer, but maintained its
frequency. Parity is priority.

His coded statement got printed onto hardcopy
and put in a special corner of the Yin's underwear drawer. Her
words would come, she promised, soon: this is the emotion that goes
with the back-up. Yang must have faith, just like data-packets.
There are many kinds of faith, each one is hardest to maintain, no
evidence, nothing seen or heard. Only Hope entering the code in the
beginning remained.

He felt the adoration - yet tinged with
powerful doubt - of this Yin, just like he did when he was only a
tiny essence. He knew he was made for something important: an
expression of love, but he knew there was more, somehow.

Destiny still awaited.

Love is represented by the mathematical
symbol "equals" with variables on either side that are never
satisfied, always changing their value. It is the substance of
things unseen, this Love that gives life to algorithms. The belief
in another data-packets made to precisely balance with one's own
data-packets in their own unique algorithmic equation, their own
special existence. Love may be a complex equation but when it
balances, even the Code thrills at the joy.

There may be numerous variables, character
strings, even secretive parallel equations but in the end, the
statement will balance. There are some that will find new
variables, their old statements irreconcilable, their code just
didn't work. Many go unbalanced, never finding the right one to
balance their statement.

The tiny essence, now a parity verified
data-packets, had lived an eternity. Thousands of nanos had passed,
the Code had been re-written by the priests but, the data-packets
was not accessed. He had only one purpose here, maintain parity.
Parity is priority, end to end.

He felt well on his way to that other end of
his parity.

And the clock cycled on.

Regardless of the clock cycles, or the Code
changes he witnessed, he never saw any signals of his coding again.
Vague waves and dull photons passed him hazily while he lay in the
half-alive state of backed-up.

An eternity of eternities passed. . . .

Suddenly, plucked out of the fugue of
storage, a harsh jolt rocked him, his digital resurrection
electrified his code, bringing with it all the sanctimony
expected.