Author: Majoki

Juan Dalderis was the creator of LinkJuice, the uber energy drink of the Internet, the black gold, the Texas Tea of web traffic. He could make or break any web platform or presence. He had the power of a techno god, but his mortal self fell seriously ill. A listeria-tainted cantaloupe left him an invalid, his immune system utterly compromised. His doctors instructed him to have minimal human contact while recuperating.

Confined to home, Juan wore nothing but pajamas for weeks. He holed up in the south wing of his enormous home. His cook left meals for him and the housecleaner cleaned when he posted his schedule for the day. Juan’s body was substantially weakened, but he remained regimented. He spent his time working and watching the world spin from the 62 netpanels covering three walls of his office.

One particularly slow day, a scene flitting in a lower panel of the room caught his eye. He switched every panel to it. An old movie. A very old movie. Juan reloaded the film from the beginning and watched it three times that day.

He grew curious. Over the next few days, he determined the 62 most strategic web presences in the world and, much like the old movie he’d seen, created his own global rear window. He tracked the real time pulse of the world on all seven continents. Whim quickly became obsession then paranoia.

And, of course, he witnessed the murder.

Our murder. Our slow strangulation by greed, corruption, polarization, disinformation, war, disease, exploitation, storm, drought, flood, fire, gluttony, starvation, waste, oppression, tyranny, injustice, poverty, profligacy, addiction, indifference, hysteria, denial.

Juan struggled to comprehend the Terracide being played out daily on his multitude of screens, his rear window. Until it all became clear when one of his netpanels displayed a child in Addis Ababa staring at herself in the reflection of a flooded street, raw sewage swirling around her image.

He began coding, began retooling LinkJuice’s algorithm. For a month, he worked like a banshee and became one, the ghost in his own machine. Then he haunted his own company when he froze out all his programmers, wiped LinkJuice from every server and launched Grace.

Then Juan slept. He woke thirty-three hours later to disbelief, dismay, guilt. Not his own, but to much of the world’s. For Juan had co-opted the power of LinkJuice in order to drive home the real and devastating effects of our day-to-day actions. His new algorithm, Grace, changed the nature of search results. It did not bring up content, it brought up consequences.

A search for porn brought up reports of victims of sex trafficking, their tales of terror and betrayal. Weather searches returned images and vids of fires, floods, heat domes, and climate refugees fleeing famine and drought. Real estate searches brought up homeless encampments. Medical searches displayed overcrowded emergency rooms of those without health care coverage. Restaurant searches showed stark scenes of starvation and malnutrition.

Grace displayed the unmistakable links between our actions and inactions and human misery.
The killer got a good look at itself. And humanity recoiled. Information itself did not always change behavior, but powerful emotion could.

Yet, Juan knew this was not enough to stop our collective Teracide. It was not enough to see the killer. People had to know how to stop it. So, after two weeks, he altered Grace’s algorithm. Search results which had been set to reflect our self-made horrors, now displayed how we could move forward. Simple steps through simple actions: slowing down, engaging more with neighbors and community members, building relationships, reducing waste, consuming less, exercising more, sharing kindness, believing in a better future.

These focused stories and examples began to shape the path for our deliverance. When billions made a small but positive effort every day, the tyranny of numbers could be transformative. Folks began to understanding that. Juan’s simple Grace had turned our windows into mirrors.

When finally healed, Juan left his house with renewed vigor that it was humanity’s turn to make those mirrors reflect our better selves.