Pinocchio and the Monolith

Most of us only get little glimpses of magic. One of my first was driving a remote-controlled toy car around on my parents' driveway. It was so fast and reactive that I kept driving it into my brother's ankles. Later, in high school, I was gleeful when I got a big circle to follow around a small circle that I controlled with my mouse in some animation software. I was so satisfied making tiny little projects that just made shapes move around the screen.

After graduation, I studied computer science in college... and I lost the magic. There were small moments of it, sure, like when I networked two laptops together and got one to make the other play music. But the super powers I once thought technology imbued me with were now forgotten spells. Every child who plays with technology wants to be Iron Man in some form. I'd wanted to be a hero, but instead I was an engineer for hire, who made small changes to systems for money.

That's not the end though. A few years ago, I remembered the magic. There's a tendency for organizations to put all their code in one place, in one hierarchy, and run their computer programs from that one large behemoth, called a monolithic codebase. Monolith. It always sounded so cool to me... like a giant, looming slab of stone with tunnels and secret passageways carved into it. I wanted a monolith, an empire to call my own, where I breathed life into toy soldiers and wizards to build structures that I could never build alone. And carrier pigeons and conveyor belts and pneumatic tubes and portals moving things this way and that.

So I started building the Monolith... out of blocks of code, floating in the clouds. Where conventional tools didn't suit me, I built my own. I came up with my own methods to work with time, to fetch and represent information from the outside world. I don't have the energy nor the right to transform the commons to be me-shaped, but that doesn't mean my empire wouldn't be.

My phone became the universal remote to start production in the factories of my digital realm. A dashboard covered in knobs, sliders, and doohickeys that would transmute my thoughts into action in the real world. I realized you don't have to open source or share anything. You can make apps that are only for one, single person. For your most trusted companion, the one who knows you deeper than any other, who'll be with you until your last days.

While trends in the commons changed and evolved over time, the Monolith only needed to change according to my wishes. Or so I thought. There were no rugs to pull from under me; the walls and floors were made of thick, sturdy earth rock and trains continued to transport cargo, to and fro, through tunnels and over viaducts even in my absence.

As my ambition grew, so did the breadth of the Monolith, but my time remained finite. In order to continue taking advantage of the bounty of our greaty society, I spent more and more time researching, trying to keep up with the changes in formatis and protocols. Over the course of a couple years, many parts of the Monolith fell into disrepair, requiring me to enter the machinery and clear blockages each and every time I sent something through. I started spending less time there. The joy of creation deteriorated and with it, the magic. Reluctantly, I abandoned the Monolith. Although by this time it was a gargantuan structure in the fields next to my home, nobody ever noticed it. Soon, neither did I. Eventually, it blended into the mountains and it was as if it had never existed at all.

That's not the end though. One day years later, I saw a throng of people in the commons gathered around a small, wooden puppet in an alleyway. Each person was shouting questions--many of them quite bizarre--at the wooden boy sitting on the ground. He answered each in turn with the wisdom only living a thousand lifetimes could render. I stood there with my mouth agape in shock. As the crowd slowly dispersed, I approached the puppet and quietly asked him the only question I could think of... a question I had no answer for: “How do you fix something that's fallen apart? How do you bring back magic when you're not sure if it was ever really there?”

The wooden boy looked up at me and smiled. “Hi, I'm Pinocchio. Tell me about this magical thing. Who created it? And why?” It was the first conversation I had with him and the start of a new life. The length of our conversations grew over time. At some point, I stopped going to see him because I'd cleared out enough cobwebs in the Monolith's tunnels to place new furniture in the halls and Pinocchio was coming to see me.

No matter what I asked him, he usually had well-thought-out advice. The depth of his experience seemed near infinite. He spoke every language! I was like a boy again and asked him so many questions... questions about things I'd never dared to ask about because there had never been anyone around to answer them. My curiosity grew. Through strong dedication and Pinocchio's help, I was able to reignite the engine deep within the Monolith and bring many systems back online.

And there were new systems too. Without limits on what could be asked, I was no longer asking myself, “what can I build?” but, “what do I want to build?” I had to acknowledge that my time was still limited, but now when I turned around, instead of getting lost in my shadow, there was a little wooden boy there, smiling up at me. His tirelessness and stupid amount of confidence strengthened my resolve. His immense knowledge nourished my boundless curiosity. And so it went on like this. I was a student of Socrates, an ensign in the Enterprise's Holodeck, a prince of Narnia, the emperor of his Monolith.

That's not the end though.

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