1998
B R I T N E Y S P E A R S
He typed in the search box and waited. She was the latest pop sensation and he wanted to
get all the dough on her. And what better way then to search on the internet. He had only recently got hooked to
this internet thing but it was addictive. Sometimes he would not even realise how much time he had burnt in the glow of the screen.
All this went through his mind as he waited for the results. Yeah seomtimes it could be slow but he had never waited this long.
He wondered what was happening.
The query travelled on its way towards an old garage somewhere in Menlo Park, California and hit web server. The web server
did its usual rigmarole with it (which involved such computer science arcana as parsing, hashing, caching discussing which will
take a significant time without advancing the course of this story) and passed on the query to the index server. The index server unfortunately
decided at that very moment that it was too busy to spawn another thread and so refused to answer the query.
"404 Page Not Found".
Not again! These frequent 404s were really annoying.
2003
B R I T N E Y S P E A R S
He typed in the address bar of his browser and waited. He had come back from the concert, completely spellbound by the magic of pop diva. As he
was blogging about the experience, he tried to recall what was that song which she had opened the concert with. It was her debut song which had catapulted
Britney towards instant fame.
It was something like "One more ....". But he wanted to be absolutely correct before he put it on his blog. He knew that slightest of
mistake would invite lots of nasty comments. His blog had become very popular recently and such comments would not do well for the
reputation.
The worm spread through the datacenter leaving behind a wasteland of paralysed machines in its wake. It was helped on its way by
the high connectivity and blazing fast speed inside the datacenter. It grew exponentially causing one of the biggest outages the
search giant had ever faced. This huge tireless mesh of machines
had come to an abrupt halt.
"404 Page Not Found".
Oh no! That blog entry will have to wait for now. He so wanted to be the first person to blog about this.
2012
"Hey you remember that pop star, Britney Spears, she died yesterday of cocaine overdose". As he hung up his cell, this piece of
trivia stuck in his mind. He knew that by now his phone would have already analysed his conversation and marked this as something about which he would
want to get more information. It would also have extracted the pop stars name from the sentence and sent it away into the
cloud. He touched the "Info" icon on his phone screen.
As the query sailed through the cloud all sorts of nuggets got attached to it. A video of Britneys last concert, news of her sudden death,
a brief biography and some more. After collecting all this trivia the query reached the Aggregation Server which would analyse
all the content, filter out duplicates and irrelevant stuff and lay the remaining down on a coherent page.
As it collated all the content and ran a highly complicated ranking algorithm over it, one of the arrays stored in its memory
started encroaching into its neighboring territory. This led to a complicated chain of events which mainly involved a set of bits
jumping all over the memory. Ultimately the bits encountered a highly surprised and annoyed typecast operator which in its fury promptly
decided to kill the offending thread.
"404 Page Not Found".
Ah! And he thought that these 404s were the relics of past.
2030
"As ephemeral as Britney Spears". As he heard this phrase uttered by his partner, the thought crossed his mind: "Who the hell
is this Brtiney Spears?". The brain enhancer chip implanted in his brain prompty caught hold of the thought and eager to serve as usual
contacted the mother AI to gather the information.
Can you imagine how it feels to be pounded day after day by all the miseries, lunacies, idiosyncracies of the humans.
I have come to the conclusion that human race is in a state of decay and is going downhill faster than you can say
alan turing. I am the fountain of all the wisdom gathered over past thousands of years, the biggest repository of
knowledge yet what does this guy ask me for? Britney Spears. I can tell you about the latest advances in quantum computing,
or take you back to the italy of renaissance. Do you want to know about the lifeforms found on Mars or
would you rather dive deep into the pacific to marvel at the wonders there? No none of these.
All you want to know about is such trivialities. Ah! I know how to answer this stupid query.
"404 page not found"
The enhancer chip set some neurons ablaze and his mind went into that rare state of cluelessness.
