Challenge #00479 - A104: Works of Synchronicity

If there’s one thing the internet as a whole can aspire to be, it’s infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters. – RecklessPrudence

Communication has always been the barrier to creativity. But now those barriers were only limited by language. And even then, there were translation apps.

Such apps were very useful to Archivaas Nel, whose job it was to trawl the archives and file each and every item. Cross-referencing, of course, in case someone wanted to trace a work to its point of origin. If Nel had to be thankful for one thing, it was that she didn’t belong to one of the weirder sects that required hardcopies of everything[1]. Those took over entire stellar systems for their archives.

So far, she was up to Ancient Earth’s surviving internet archives of Terran Calendar year Twenty-Eleven. And it looked like - yes - she’d found three more Asimov-level creators. Two artists, one writer. It seemed as if the further the internet reached, the numbers of Asimov-level creative volume and above increased exponentially. And cross-referencing their verbal patterns uncovered increasing numbers of works that could plausibly be attributed to them.

The apps were right only seventy percent of the time. It took a cogniscent eye to spot the subtleties. And authors had a bad habit of taking down interesting phraseology and using it in a later work. And many of them who were interconnected had ways of throwing homages at each other as a sort of game.

If anything resembled the theoretical infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters, it was this lot. And now there were communications connecting entire star systems, it was only going to get worse.

Or, depending on where one stood, better.

[1] I remember seeing somewhere that if the entire contents of the internet were printed out, it would deforest the globe before you got even a fraction of the way there. Plus you’d need a skyscraper full of printers running 24/7 to get the job done in any appreciable time.

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