Web User (requests a webpage)	Internet Service Provider (connects user to Internet)   Internet Diagram: Data flows from a website host computer to the user's computer. See discussions below	Routers
Host Server  (web site) “serves” page to users	Virtual Name Server	Root Server

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THEY MET ON THE NET
 

(In Which the King and Queen Meet for the First Time (Version 1.0) )

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The King and Queen might have met:

1)  At a ham and chicken church supper in Nashville, Tennessee.

2)  Sharing a Post Cold War Root Beer on the Trans-Siberian Express.

3)  Waiting in line at Virgin Space Lines for tickets to the first commercial flight to Mars.

As it happened, the King and Queen met incognito on a terrifically cool social networking site, where, for six months, they knew each other only by their network code names, Aeschylus and Aphrodite.  The theme of the forum that brought and kept them together was “Cyber-Culture in Transition: Techne and Logos at the Singularity Café.”

Their first exchange of ideas took place over a period of 23 hours during which neither the King nor the Queen ate, slept, or did any Disk Defragging. During this first googlogue (being a huge dialogue, beyond the imagination of mere mortals), certain key servers melted down and had to be replaced, and 54,000 complaints about cable outage were registered with cable providers in six midwestern states.

Philosophically, emotionally, grammatically, and spiritually, this cyber-collision was a planetary seed-crystal experience of both intended and unintended consequences. Neither the King nor the Queen would ever be the same, forever bound throughout space time by the tensegrities of Bell’s Theorum and old fashioned Divine Love. Heisenberg looked down from wherever he is now and felt validated. Forever changed by each other, forever changing, the King and Queen entered hyper-reality at Warp 50 speed.

Our love-starred couple knew not shapes, sizes nor colors. They saw no felicitous outlines of face or form. What flew from ISP to ISP, from e-mail to e-mail, from heart to heart was pure thought which manifested itself in bytes, megabytes, googles, and terrabytes of ardor and awakening.  As they each printed out thousands of pounds of recycled chemical-free text, in order to preserve their encounter for posterity, the sheer volume of paper streaming out from their laser printers threatened to encase them in tombs of their own prose, bury them alive in their love.

With all the impassioned purity of Heloise writing to her ardent Abelard, the Queen poured out her astonishing life-story.  With all the bravura of Browning, Robert, writing to his beloved Barrett, Elizabeth, the King for the first time in his life bared his biorhythms and unmasked his ego. Oh, the thrill of it! Thousands of data packets streamed through space-time in asynchronous transfer mode to draw these two ineluctably closer and closer together, into a digital union that approached Kurzweil’s Singularity.

Mind locked in on mind. Concept caressed concept. Verbs hugged. Apostrophes blushed. Paragraphs parted their sweet lips in smiles of recognition, promising penultimate and concluding sentences sweet as Creation itself.  An electronic Eve reached out her invisible hand to her advanced technology Adam, but wait! wait!  Eve offered Adam

not the fatal Gala Apple of times past, but a gift of true happiness, friendship, and ideas. “Let’s build us a civilization,” she said.  “Whoop-de-do!” answered Adam.

Millennia sniffed the wind and wondered if the home planet was in for some kind of perfect storm of enlightenment and change. Primitive life forms wiggled  in their murky swamps, dinosaurs looked up from their dinners of palm trees and hibiscus shrubs, Bengal Tigers huffed away in their blue jungle sanctuaries, polar bears took the day off for ice-games. It was just that kind of history-making thing.

Desktop to desktop, the King and Queen discovered each other in the dark first as raw data, then as information, then as memes, then as categories and finally as whole libraries of potentiality – libraries interlinked, interlocking, interactive and most of all, inspired. Desktop to desktop they interfaced in user-friendly compatability,  and it all happened without a touch, without a tear, without so much as a sibilant sigh. The sheer flow of idea-energy that flooded and flowered between them was enough to fill several intergalactic guidebooks, and certainly enough to jump-start at least twenty-three new planets.

This ardor, fervor, and coherent light generated by the King and Queen in their digital adventures catapulted back and forth across the continental United States with such force that it created a radiant glow at several power stations.  This spontaneous luminescence was briefly mistaken, outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a new kind of UFO.

Over the months to follow, the King and Queen knew each other soul to soul through their microelectronic transmissions and typing, posting and pasting skills alone. They embraced chastely, demurely, and dreamily in the electronic ethers of Web 2, 3, 4 and 5.

They agreed that meeting at the ham and chicken supper in Nashville, Tennessee would have been much too Southern. At the time, she was involved with a space biologist, and he was smitten with a neuro-linguistic programmer. They went into a secure, private chat room for an hour to talk about that close call on the Trans-Siberian Express, and how awful the root beer was.  As for the time when they were waiting in line at Virgin Space Ventures, well…who knows? But here, now, meeting like this on the terrifically cool social network was perfect. It had just the right touch of classification, invisibility and anonymity, to best discover their authentic and integral selves.

Hoo Boy!  A genuine Twenty Third Century Cyber-Love Story, masquerading as an old fashioned romance!

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from 23CN:

“The Book of The King and Queen of Roller Disco”

 Please visit DIVING DEEPER: A Writing Workshop, and CAMP HAPPINESS: A Weekly Blogazine

Copyright C 2007 by Alex Noble. All rights reserved in all media.