Warm summer nights spent supine on a wet lawn staring up at the skies, thinking about nothing in particular, and thinking about everything in existence. The stars are fluorescent points on an ever-changing dark canvas. Every once in a while a streak of silver flashes across the skies and little girls tucked lovingly into cozy beds somewhere make wishes. The moon is a distant orb coyly revealing more of its scarred body in a relationship that lasts a month. Trees, by now reduced to dark silhouettes, wave lazily in the wind. A few errant leaves drift down lazily in a roundabout fashion and settle down on the dew stained grass. Those intensely personal moments snatched greedily while in graduate school are my fondest memories. Long nights staring at a blinking cursor offset by trips to the small lawn outside the lab. Sometimes I treated myself to a candy bar and if I was in an indulgent mood, a small box of glazed donuts. The vending machine on the way seemed to glow a little brighter as I approached. Twin eyes of red set in an aluminum frame. I could almost hear it say, "Feed me those lovely coins in your pocket. Yes, those circles of silver that clang annoyingly in your pocket while you walk down these lonely corridors. Feed me and I'll let you have these calorie bombs. There, that's a good boy."

Sunlight streams in on air laden with dust from the road. I'm half-awake and staring at the sun-lit patterns on the wall. Almost as if on cue everything around me seems to come to life. The paper boy is struggling with the gate, my mother is struggling with the pressure cooker, my dad is struggling with the volume control on the television set, my neighbors are arguing and I'm struggling with a pillow that's trying to smother my head.

Then my mind goes blank. I discover the meaning of nothing, an existence without consciousness.

Dawn breaks stealthily over downtown Tokyo. Silvery snakes dart through tunnels carrying a thousand people in each streamlined, climate-controlled belly. Green lights blink rapidly as computers come back to life after a long weekend of hibernation. A balding systems administrator sits at a terminal sipping a cup of scalding hot coffee, his first in an endless stream of caffeine jolts that day. With each sip his expression becomes more puzzled. He walks over to another terminal and brings up the systems log. His finger stabs out at one entry and he crushes his cup. A printer starts up nearby with the distinct signs of a Monday morning hangover. It spits out a few pages and then sits around with an aggrieved air. The administrator grabs the sheets and runs his finger down the columns and underlines a few entries. An unknown process was running on each of the machines, something he hadn't seen before. The machines running this process are all connected via a direct line to the Internet 3 secure data network. The Internet 3 is a radically new networking paradigm for high data throughput and has just been around for a couple of months. The regular Internet, commonly called the World Wide Web, was too congested for dependable data transfer and this had led to the conception of a secure, high speed data-only network - the Internet 3. The immense data transfer capability at hitherto incredible speeds had made network computing a reality. Computers sitting across continents working as massively parallel computers made their cryptic private jokes about the supercomputers that Seymour Cray was so proud of.

The process, captured in his system logs as 'ibm.exe,' would have passed unnoticed except for a sudden spike in the memory usage. It was almost as if the process had encountered an anomaly and required more memory temporarily, a few seconds. He was still coming up to speed on the software that was required for Internet 3 and didn't think it odd to find a new process that he'd overlooked earlier. He makes a note against the entry in the log and forwards it to his supervisor marked low priority. The coffee machine's gurgling indicates a fresh batch of coffee and he heads out to pour himself another steaming cup.

I'm awake again now. I must have dozed off again for a bit. That was a weird dream; it had almost been like drifting in a complete void.

My mom makes the best coffee in the world. Well, maybe that's an overstatement, but to say the least, she mixes a great instant coffee! Coffee in the morning with the windows open, my mom bustling about the room re-arranging things, my dad lounging near the door in his running shorts telling me to get some exercise - the ingredients of a perfect day.
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