Sergey Soloukh. Instant

Instant
Sergey Soloukh

Publication date: January 22, 2001

Gutenberg opened the way to immortality. The author of the word processor closed it. Notice that this smart guy doesn't even have a name left. The line with his initials was accidentally scratched during the next shoveling of the code. The same fate awaits the comments of current modifiers. That's life. This is a world that rotates at the breakneck speed of a gigabyte hard drive.

Our format is dead, but we are not yet.

We are the generation that will not leave behind drafts.

The mystery of the texts on stone and birch bark will one day be resolved, the original was, is and will be, but the magnetic layer that has fallen off the hard drive plates can, well, only be swept up. Our main message to descendants will be systemic - Fatal input/output error! The Tsyavlovskys of the future are trained at the departments of applied mathematics. The problem of recognizing bit sequences when restoring file clusters of the Boldin period. An excellent topic for fruitful scientific research in the third millennium.

A network writer will be erased from his memory by power outages, because a CD-ROM cannot be inserted into a potbelly stove or stove. Dogs and children will run around barking behind the silver disk cutting through the air. Perhaps they will be three-legged.

Then everything is right, everything is right. Still would!

Shakespearean eternity is just a trivial function of a physiological constant. If people stop being born, aging and going crazy, if humanity is waiting for a universal upgrade with a reboot every third Tuesday of leap March, then “Anna Karenina” is just a treatise on the life of insects that is difficult to decipher.

- Mom, Stiva’s dream does not open.

- Of course, honey, this plug-in has not been supported by anyone for a hundred years.

Our protocol is dead, but we are not yet.

There will be no customary subtraction of dates on our graves. Life on the needle of technology ends with one single number - 404. A failed publisher left behind material evidence, second-hand book dealers turned them into artifacts. A failed webmaster will even lose the right to a URL. Search engines comb out crooked links like dandruff. The trial of descendants turns out to be impossible due to the loss of the checksum. Only postmodernity survives; it rolls back with a banal algorithm for assembling lost blocks, even after a series of administrative operations.

#cat gol_sal.html > index.html
#cat gen_p.html > index.html
#cat koron.html > index.html
#rm *.html

However, even it, noise-resistant and auto-independent, cannot withstand formatting at the physical level.

Network is unreachable.

This is why the Internet so consistently appears as a poster model for our extinction. A working example of the future. Once upon a time, the dreamer Tolstaya imagined bows on Frau Hitler’s pipes. Alas, there is not enough resource for half-educated obstetricians for all the Chenons and von Neumanns, Knuts and Dijkstras.

We will not exist anyway, we will disappear not only physically, but also logically.

And RIPE will add other names to the blocks of our networks. As usual, the history has been recompiled, the years from 1900 to 1999 have been reinitialized, all variables have been reassigned, including common nouns.

But awareness is already freedom.

There is no need to mourn dejanews, digital.com and even teneta.ru. Since eternity is not given to us, the meaning of the moment becomes absolute. Each of us has from three to five seconds, depending on the bandwidth of the provider channel, and they cannot be missed. The creator's philosophy becomes the logic of a high jumper. He cannot make a mistake, make a false swing or a mistake of two millimeters. He prepares for hours with gloomy concentration in the dullest section of the stadium. That is why the very moment of flight is so similar to an explosion. And it's dazzling. And it's wonderful.

And then, let the lost carrier. Eternal bizi. It later.

We are no longer here, but we were once.

We were above everyone.