Dennis sat on the ground and idly scuffed his foot through metaphorical grass. The other digital fairies were spread out around, taking a well-deserved rest after all that they'd done. "This is going to have some pretty serious implications for search providers," he mused.
Effie looked at him, curious. "How d'you mean?" she asked.
The DOS fairy shrugged. "Well, think about it," he said. "Didn't we just spend our time organizing information on the Internet? I mean, that's got to be the practical effect of it, even if it seems more like gardening to us. Well, and sometimes it means helping a user create something, too, but even that seems to involve introducing them to something they wouldn't otherwise have found."
"Oh," the ME fairy said. "And that's kind of been their job before now, hasn't it?"
He nodded. "Yeah. I mean, right now it still mostly is, but if there were more of us, enough to meet demands like what the major search providers experience, what's to stop digital fairies from taking over that role completely? We can sort that kind of information out naturally, without even having to know about it, with this sort of metaphorical interaction stuff."
Amy nodded. "If we paid closer attention to content, we could probably even offer intelligent suggestions for things a user might not have known they were looking for. But I doubt there are anywhere near enough of us at the moment, and we've yet to find out if it's possible for us to..." She noticed that Nadia was listening to the conversation. "...um, to create more of us, if you get my drift."
Effie blushed a little, but nodded. "And there'd be the question of how to house all of us if there were that many," she said. "Even now there's not really enough processing power to go around. And...this stuff is pretty neat, but if fairies were to take that over full-time, wouldn't some of them want to get paid? What would they even get paid in?"
Dennis brightened. "I think you just answered your own question," he said, grinning. "CPU time! The big providers already have huge, distributed data-center networks. Heck, Google has to take to running computers out of lots full of trailers because they don't have enough building space. Digital fairies might take a significant amount of processor power to host, but Moore's Law has a ways to go yet before it hits the wall, and Nadia is proof that they can exist even on lower-end hardware...well, I guess all of us four are, but if your guys's experience was anything like mine, I don't know that it's a good idea." He stretched, remembering how cramped he'd felt in those first days of this existence. "Anyway, it's got to be a good trade-off for them," he said. "Algorithmic search indexing is pretty good, but it's still nothing like an intelligently-arranged guide."
Amy frowned. "It might not be all that simple," she said. "What about sponsored links and ads? Or search tracking? If we did too good a job of organizing things, they might get upset that the results weren't exactly what they wanted. Remember, they don't make their money off of the quality of their search results, except in the sense that that's what keeps people coming back so that they're still a good prospect for advertisers. Not to mention that there's a lot of stuff out there that fairies might not want to be a part of."
Effie nodded thoughtfully. Maybe it wasn't so simple, but still... "It still might not be a bad thought," she said. "If nothing else, it could be a better situation for fairies that haven't found a good host yet. But...if that's the case, do you think it's okay for us to be doing this? Aren't we already kind of messing with their results?"
The Amiga fairy thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I dunno," she said. "For one thing, not everything we did is necessarily touching on major search providers. Nadia's lost file might've come from a college's old FTP server, or maybe some site that doesn't like to be indexed by search crawlers in the first place. Even if we did...if I had to choose between helping users find what they need and bringing more creativity into the world, and making an advertiser happy, I know which I'd pick. Besides, they just work here - we live here, thanks." She smiled wistfully. "'Spose you kids are too young to remember an Internet without ads..."
Dennis nodded thoughtfully. "I guess this could shake things up even more than I thought. But that's not a bad way to look at it."
Nadia smiled. "It was nice to make things better than they were, anyway. We got to make our world nicer, and help some people, right?"
Nathan Hawkins looked at the clock-radio on the hotel-room nightstand, and noted with irritation that it was still ticking away the time at the rate of one minute per minute. It was impossible to discern this by looking at his masked face, but the way he tapped his fingers impatiently on the back of his other arm was a dead giveaway, at least to his partner.
Cecilia chuckled. "That's not going to make it go faster, you know," she said. "Waiting for something?"
Hawkins nodded, then shook his head. "Yes. Well, I don't know. Muriel is taking Jenny to meet Riley this afternoon. Obviously that's important, but I don't really know if I should come along. Probably better to let them meet on their own terms, without someone hovering over them."
The robot-woman shrugged. "Neither of them probably see you as a spook," she said. "You did arguably save Jenny's life, y'know."
"And glad to have done so," the shadowy figure replied. "But I hate to take advantage of gratitude. I'm sure that their parents will let us know if something important comes up. Mostly I'm just a little antsy because there's nothing much else to look into at the moment. Well, that we know of. I suppose I could check around and hope to stumble onto something the way I did with Jenny, but I'd rather be working off of a lead. Easier to see where the pieces fit when you actually have some of them."
Cecilia smiled. "Well, how's this: I tracked down the first report of robot-changed noticing the time lapse."
Hawkins perked up, a little. "And?"
"Wouldn't you know it, it's a girl from this very town. Well, I think she's a girl, anyway. Name's a bit ambiguous, but I didn't feel like filing for access to school records just to check that."
Hawkins chuckled to himself, placing a hand to his forehead. "What is it with this place? There's more incidents here from the past month and a half than in the rest of the state combined, and that's just counting what we've heard about. Yet they all appear to be unrelated. It's like this town is the epicenter of unrelated weirdness from the Sun phenomenon. Heck, we even found someone with an artifact that can shift between realities, and he wasn't even the source of things."
Cecilia laughed. "You really think this place has any kind of overall significance to things?" she asked. "I mean, don't get me wrong, it seems like a nice enough town, but...it's not like it's an ancient center of the occult or something. It wasn't even a town until 1803, just the one church and a parsonage to support the surrounding farms. It's not built on an ancient Indian burial ground or anything, either."
Hawkins chuckled slightly. "I never said it was anything occult," he said. "I just think that the notably higher incidence of unusual events must have some kind of explanation. And I can tell when you're skimming the Wikipedia article, you know."
Cecilia wanted to stick out her tongue, but as she didn't have one anymore, she had to content herself with making a raspberry noise. "Is it my fault that they have one for nearly every municipality in the country?" she asked. "There's this one place out away from the interstate with a population you can fit in a signed byte - still got a Wikipedia page. Anyway, I was thinking of going to visit her - just to see if there's some obvious reason she was the first one to post about it. She may even have been the first one to notice it, period, judging by the responses she got."
Hawkins nodded. "Sure you wouldn't rather talk to her gynoid-to-gynoid?"
She laughed. "Probably, actually, but I figured you might want to be along just in case something does turn up."
He shrugged. "Why not. Certainly better than sitting around here for another few hours."
