there had been an expression "data mining". miners had been people, who dug deep into the ground, bringing back to the surface treasure, energy, beauty. the traces which describe a person, the evidence of friendship left in the world through interactions with others.
but bidden, solicited, these traces had a different tenor. a transposition then of an illusory, and a delusory, picture.
now the network traversal would come to people for their stories and they would willingly confess, being shown that minute incident of their lives in echo variants, and a many world of supersisting futures. and the words they would use the most carefully chosen, the most succinct compression of the kernel of experience that would allow for the expression of persona.
and the stories would trickle onto the local grid, and be caught up in parcels or whispered over silent networks until they found someone who could identify them, who could find someone with a use for them, someone who was just curious about them.
a many layered multi text appeared in ver mind. features extrapolated from handwriting style, word ordering, use of pronouns, drew works firmly together or showed deep underlying subjective differences. each story a minute echo of a thousand others, but between some, an apparent key invariant. ve recalled, with some amusement, the essence of a jorge luis borges story, scanned in many translations: library of babel. ve had come across all 32000 familiar characters in just the last couple of days. what a combinatorial explosion! at least, ve admitted to verself, the stories that unbidden find their way to me are made of classifiable words and conform to familiar generative syntax, even if many could not be said to include anything in the way of sense.