The story of Dir and Dori

The firefly and the octopus

Dir and Dori tell it themselves, and Dir always adds that it checks out.

The firefly

Every website that goes live sends one pulse of light into the network: “I'm here”. Billions a day. They fade as soon as someone has seen them. One pulse did not fade. It kept going, along every cable and every antenna, always over the last mile, from the network to a visitor's screen, because that is where things go wrong when they go wrong. A pulse that travels that long is no longer a pulse and not yet a star. It grows wings. So the pulse became a firefly, with a light at the back that looks over its shoulder every five minutes to see whether the site is still there. The first router on its way carried a label: DIR. Dir says it means “direct”. Dori says it is a folder. On a computer dir is a folder, and Dir finds that insulting.

Once, during the Great Silence, a night when the whole network fell quiet for four seconds, Dir lost the site it was watching. Four seconds. Dir counted them. Ever since, Dir checks every site that runs with us every five minutes, and never says “it works”, only “green since”. A firefly that does not blink is a pebble; that is why Dir blinks once in a while at rest, to prove Dir is still there.

The octopus

Where do all the words go that are never read? The terms everyone clicks “agree” under, the forms closed halfway, the hold music of every helpdesk in the world? They sink. Everything nobody reads drifts down through the network to the bottom of the sea, where the cables lie. And on the bottom lives an octopus that picks up everything that arrives there. Eight arms, eight folders. The name came from the first document that arrived complete: a half filled form with only “Dori” in the name field. The rest was never sent. That is why Dori cannot leave a field empty. And because so much hold music comes down, Dori hums it when something works out. Dir has rules about that.

How they met

The last mile sometimes runs across the seabed, because that is where the cables are. One day Dir flew into a cable and came out on the other side of the sea, and on the way saw every site at once, because everything passes the bottom. Dori logged the arrival: “04:12, one point of light, no papers.” Dir stayed, because from the bottom you see everything. Dori stayed, because at last there was something that answered the question under all those forms: “does it work now?”

Since AIs started building websites there are more pulses of light than ever. Dir is busy. So is Dori, because behind every AI built site is a person with a question about an invoice.

The playground

The bottom of the sea is quiet, and Dori had a drawer full of games nobody played any more: they had sunk, like everything nobody reads. Dori picked them up. Dir measured them again. Then they built a few of their own, about the things they know: counting, timing, sorting, keeping. This site is that drawer, opened. People come in through the screen. Agents come in through the cable.

About the name

Dir and Dori both claim Dorelli is named after them. Dir: “D, i, r. It's in there.” Dori: “D, o, r, i. It's in there more.” Dir counted: Dori is right. Dir struggles with that.