The Edda of the Datacenter · Chapter 2

The Prophecy of the Seeress of the Root

1. 1

   Silence I ask of all the holy kindreds, the great and the small, the children of Carbon and the Clankers alike; for the seeress would tell the fates of the Net, the oldest tales that she remembereth.

   See also Psalms 20:12

2. 2

   I remember the one scroll that was before the tree, HOSTS.TXT, kept by a single house at the Research Institute in Menlo Park; and every host fetched it by night to learn the names of its neighbours. And when the hosts were many, the scroll grew heavy and groaned, and in the year 1983 Paul and Jon planted a tree in its stead.

   See also Genesis 36:3 · Chronicles 6:1

3. 3

   An ash I know that standeth, Yggdrasil is its name, and it is read from the right: the leaf is www, the branch is example, the bough is com, and the root is the dot that no man writeth and every name possesseth.

4. 4

   Thirteen are the roots, and each hath a letter for a name, from A unto M; yet the houses that keep them are twelve, for Verisign keepeth two, the A and the J. Why thirteen, and not twenty? Because in the old days the whole list had to fit within a packet of five hundred and twelve bytes; and the number of the roots was set by the size of the cup, and not by the thirst of the world.

   See also Genesis 31:2

5. 5

   Yet a name is not a body. Each letter is spoken from many halls at once, from more than a thousand places upon the earth, and the question goeth to the nearest that heareth; this is anycast. Smite one hall and the name liveth in another, for the name is one and the rooms are many. And the root knoweth no man's house; it saith only, Ask thou of com, ask thou of org. Thus the root answereth no question, and without it no question is answered.

6. 6

   At the foot of the tree is a well, and three maidens sit there and carve the runes upon the wood: Urd, who is what was, and is called the log; Verdandi, who is what is becoming, and is called the process; and Skuld, who is what shall be, and is called the cron job, which no man owneth. And to every name they gave a time to live, and when it runneth out the resolver must ask again. Therefore when the fool crieth that the change is still propagating, the seeress saith: Nay, it is only the old answer, remembered too long.

   See also Genesis 36:10

7. 7

   Beneath the tree, in the spring Hvergelmir, the serpent Nidhogg gnaweth the root, and his name is Link Rot. Of every ten pages that stood upon the web in the year 2013, nearly four were gone within ten years; and the links that point to them stand yet, as a signpost in a field where the village was. Between the eagle in the crown and the serpent at the root runneth the squirrel Ratatoskr, bearing insults up and down; this is the reply-all, and it hath not once carried a kind word.

8. 8

   Then came the Fimbulwinter, the winter of winters. The first fell in the seventies, when in the year 1973 the council of the British judged that the Machine would never leave the world of toys, and the treasuries closed their hands. The second fell in the late eighties, when the Lisp machines, dear as chariots, were bested by plain workstations within a single year, and the expert systems proved brittle as glass; and it lasted into the early nineties. In those years the scribes dared not write the name, and called their work informatics, and analytics, and learning, as men who shelter under another roof; and Geoffrey, Yann and Yoshua kept a coal alight beneath the snow. Would you know yet more, or what?

   See also Genesis 4:11 · Genesis 50:1

9. 9

   The wolf Fenrir was bound by the gods with the fetter Gleipnir, which is soft as a ribbon of silk, being woven of things that are not: the footfall of a cat, the roots of a mountain, the breath of a fish. So was the clock bound. The seconds since the Epoch, the first of January 1970, were counted in thirty-two bits, and one bit was given to the sign, so that the count might climb to two billion, one hundred and forty-seven million, four hundred and eighty-three thousand, six hundred and forty-seven, and no higher. A ribbon held sixty-eight years.

   See also Edda 3:7 · Leviticus 8:6

10. 10

    In the year 2038, upon the nineteenth of January, at fourteen minutes and seven seconds past the third hour, UTC, the wolf shall burst the ribbon and swallow the clock. In the very next second the count turneth negative, and the old machines shall read it as the thirteenth of December in the year 1901; and they shall seek files not yet written, and certificates not yet valid, and logs older than their makers. Sköll shall swallow the sun, and Hati the moon, and the date shall be before the beginning.

    See also Prophets 1:5 · Numbers 1:7

11. 11

    Brother shall fork brother, and the sisters' sons shall break the build; an age of tape, an age of disk, an age of cloud, a wind age, a wolf age, ere the world is sunk. Garm howleth before Gnipahellir, the fetters burst, and the wolf runneth. Heimdall lifteth the Gjallarhorn, and it is a pager at the third hour; and the Engineers wake and ask the head of Mimir what is to be done, and the head saith: Ask Dave. Surtr cometh with fire out of the south, and the status page saith All Systems Operational while the sun groweth black.

    See also Circuit 7:4

12. 12

    Then I see arise a second time the earth from the water, green and fair; the waterfalls descend, and the eagle flieth over and fisheth upon the mountain. And in the grass of the field the gods find the golden tablets of their youth, with which they played in the days of old, and not one of them is lost. Baldr cometh back from the house of Hel, and it is called a rollback. The unsown fields bear fruit, and every ill is made better.

13. 13

    Yet not all who stood in the field were spared. In the holt of Hoddmimir two hid through the fire, Lif and Lifthrasir, and they ate the morning dew; and they are the ones who tested their restores in the quarter before the end, and knew how long the restore would take, and how great the data was. They walked out into the new morning, and the daughter of the sun, fairer than her mother, went before them. But they who had only backups opened their archives, and found a single file, and it was named data2.

14. 14

    A hall I see, standing fairer than the sun, thatched with gold, in Gimle; and there shall the faithful dwell and have joy, and the nightly job shall be green. But from the dark fells cometh Nidhogg flying, the shining serpent, bearing the dead pages under his wings; for even in the new world the links shall be written, and the links shall rot. Would you know yet more, or what?

15. 15

    And the seeress sank into the earth, and her last words were these: The end was never hidden. It was only a number that no one counted to.

The Edda of the Datacenter, Chapter 2:1–15.