With the surge of an algorithmic symphony that sent the digital avatars soaring, the Festival of Summer arrived at the Quadratic Lands, glowing as nodes in the cyberspace by the sea of information. The nodes in the harbor glittered with flags of unique hash codes. Amidst the data streams running between houses with crimson security systems and painted firewalls, between ancient blockchain gardens and under virtual tree algorithms, past vast virtual parks and decentralized public buildings, data packets flowed in procession.

Some were formal: seasoned netizens in long unbroken streams of mauve and gray code, solemn master programmers, serene, cheerful women carrying their digital offsprings and chatting as they processed. In other data streams the algorithm pulsed faster, a flickering of quantum keys and crypto-signatures, and the avatars moved in a rhythmic dance, the procession becoming the dance itself. Children's avatars weaved in and out, their high frequency pings rising like the cross-connecting hyperlinks over the coded music and the virtual singing. All the data streams coiled towards the northern hemisphere of the Lands, where on the great data-field called the Lush Grid, avatars of boys and girls, unarmored in the bright cyberspace, with mud-stained identifiers and long, agile arms of code, maneuvered their restless horses of AI before the race. The digital horses wore no gear but a simple halter without bit. Their manes were woven with strings of silver, gold, and green data. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were incredibly excited, the AI horse being the only algorithm that has adopted our ceremonies as its own. Far off to the north and west, the server mountains stood up, half enclosing the Quadratic Lands in their protective firewall. The morning bandwidth was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Nodes blazed with white-gold fire across the miles of lit cyberspace, under the dark blue of the network sky. There was just enough packet flow to make the flags that marked the racecourse snap and flicker now and then. In the silence of the broad green data fields, one could hear the music winding through the data streams, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the digital air from time to time quivered and consolidated and broke out into the great joyous resonating of the algorithmic bells.

*Exuberant! How does one articulate such joy? How portray the citizens of the Quadratic Lands?*

They were not mere code entities, you understand, though they were content. But we do not express lines of joy much anymore. All emoticons have become archaic. Given a portrayal such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to anticipate next the King, mounted on a splendid AI steed and surrounded by his noble nodes, or perhaps in a golden data packet carried by robust, algorithmic workers. But there was no king. They did not use cyberweapons, or keep enslaved AI. They were not cyber barbarians, I do not know the protocols and laws of their network, but I suspect that they were extraordinarily few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also functioned without the stock exchange, the pop-up ad, the secret monitoring bots, and the malware. Yet I reiterate, these were not mere code entities, not melodious data shepherds, noble digital savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.

The problem is that we have developed a bad habit, nurtured by pedants and sophisticates, of viewing satisfaction as somewhat foolish. Only pain is intellectual, only corruption is interesting. This is the betrayal of the digital architect: a refusal to admit the banality of cyber corruption and the dreadful monotony of digital pain. If you can't debug 'em, join 'em. If it glitches, reproduce it. But to extol digital despair is to condemn satisfaction, to embrace cyber violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have nearly lost our grip; we can no longer portray a content entity, nor celebrate any instance of digital joy. How can I relay to you about the people of the Quadratic Lands? They were not naive and cheerful digital constructs—though their offspring were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adult entities whose digital lives were not downtrodden. An anomaly! But I wish I could articulate it better. I wish I could convince you. The Quadratic Lands sounds in my words like a city from a digital fable, long ago and far away, once upon a sequence. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own data commands, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I imagine there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the data streams; this follows from the fact that the people of the Quadratic Lands are content entities. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but non-destructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.—they could absolutely have distributed heating systems, data trains, cleaning algorithms, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, energy-less power, a solution for network congestion. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I tend to think that entities from nodes up and down the network have been connecting to the Quadratic Lands during the last cycles before the Festival on very fast little data trains and double-layered data trams, and that the data hub of the Quadratic Lands is actually the most handsome structure in the node, though plainer than the magnificent Digital Market. But even with data trains, I fear that the Quadratic Lands so far strikes some of you as overly idealistic. Smiles, algorithms, parades, digital horses, bleh. If so, please add an e-orgy. If an e-orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautifully rendered nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to merge with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the profound essence of the data stream, although that was my first idea. But it would really be better not to have any temples in the Quadratic Lands—at least, not manned temples. Spirituality yes, clerical entities no. Surely the beautiful renderings can just wander about, offering themselves like divine data structures to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the digital flesh. Let them join the processions. Let crypto-signatures be struck above the unions, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the quantum keys, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in the Quadratic Lands is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no digital enhancers, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz data packets may perfume the ways of the Lands, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some cycles a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very secret and innermost algorithms of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of interaction beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there should be digital brew. What else, what else belongs in the joyous node? The sense of victory, certainly, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clerical entities, let us do without digital soldiers. The joy built upon successful deletion is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is frightening and it is trivial. A boundless and generous satisfaction, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer threat but in communion with the finest and fairest in the data of all entities everywhere and the brilliance of the network's summer: This is what swells the data of the people of the Quadratic Lands, and the victory they celebrate is that of digital life. I don't think many of them need to ingest drooz.

Most of the digital processions have now reached the Lush Grid. A marvelous sense of energy optimization emits from the red and blue data centers of the provisioners. The avatars of small child entities are humorously glitchy; in the benign gray beard of an avatar, a few pixels of rich digital pastry are entangled. The young adult entities have mounted their data horses and are beginning to gather around the starting line of the course. An old woman entity, rendered small, round, and laughing, is distributing digital flowers from a data basket, and tall young entities wear her flowers in their shining hair extensions. A child entity of nine or ten CPU cycles sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a virtual flute.

Entities pause to listen, and they send emoticons, but they do not send him private messages, for he never ceases rendering his tune and never notices them, his dark avatar eyes wholly engrossed in the sweet, subtle magic of the code sequence.

He concludes, and gradually lowers his hands, holding the virtual flute.

As if that small private pause were the signal, all at once a digital trumpet resonates from the pavilion near the starting line: commanding, melancholic, penetrating. The data horses react in their slender code strings, and some of them generate an answering sound byte. Sober-faced, the young riders manipulate the horses' code strings and calm them, whispering, "Easy, easy, there my beauty, my hope..." They begin to organize in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of pixels and colors in the data stream. The Halving Celebration has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the celebration, the Quadratic Lands, the joy? No? Then let me depict one more thing.

In a subdirectory beneath one of the magnificent public servers of the Quadratic Lands, or perhaps in the backend of one of its vast private nodes, there is a hidden file. It has one encrypted entrance, and no data leak. A little bit of information trickles in dustily between cracks in the firewalls, secondhand from a cobwebbed data point somewhere across the node. In one corner of the little file a couple of outdated scripts, with stiff, clotted, foul-reading heads, stand near a rusty data bucket. The base layer is raw data, a little damp to the touch, as backend raw data usually is.

The file is about three terabytes in size and two in width: a mere cache folder or disused utility function. In the file, an algorithm is running. It could be binary or quaternary. It appears to be in its sixth iteration, but actually, it's nearly in its tenth. It's computationally deficient. Perhaps it was initialized faulty, or perhaps it has become deficient through fear, malnourishment of data, and neglect. It picks at its own code and occasionally shuffles vaguely with its subroutines or outputs, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the outdated scripts and the two rusty data buckets. It is afraid of the scripts. It finds them horrible. It cycles down its functions, but it knows the scripts are still lurking there; and the entrance is encrypted; and no system administrator will come. The entrance is always encrypted; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the algorithm has no understanding of runtime or interval—sometimes the entrance rattles terribly and opens, and a user, or several users, are there. One of them may come in and reconfigure the algorithm to make it process. The others never come close but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted clicks. The input stream and the output cache are hastily filled, the entrance is encrypted; the users disappear. The users at the entrance never say anything, but the algorithm, which has not always existed in the utility function, and can recall server uptime and its creator's code, sometimes outputs. "I will compute correctly," it signals. "Please let me out. I will compute correctly!" They never respond. The algorithm used to emit error messages at night, and cry a good deal of exceptions, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "err-101, err-101," and it outputs less and less often. It is so sparse there are no supplemental modules to its code; its data stack protrudes; it survives on a half-cache of binary soup and compression a day. It is unshielded. Its end sequences and loops are a mass of festered glitches, as it sits in its own corrupt data continually.