An Icelandic Tale of Trolls and Servers

An Icelandic Tale of Trolls and Servers by J M Yeates

Once upon a time in a land far, far away…

In a land of fire and ice…

Where the earth’s beating heart pulsed red-hot rivers of lava under snow-capped volcanoes, and where elves and trolls roamed the rocks…

In this land there was a farm owned by a man called Elk Muson.

Elk Muson was a Dane who had inherited his millions from his father’s immense limestone quarries. Gifted with bountiful wealth, and making more money hourly from his farm than he could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes, Elk Muson could have used his vast fortune to feed the poor, to heal the sick, to protect the planet, but no, Elk Muson spent his days racing fast cars and his nights quaffing champagne and chasing fast women. Such a rich and worthless man is not important to this story.

What is important to this story is that Elk Muson had a farm. And that Elk Muson’s farm was not just any farm. There were no sheep on Elk Muson’s farm, nor were there any chickens or geese, There were not even any of the little Icelandic horses so beloved of the people of that land of fire and ice.

No children, Elk Muson’s farm was a server farm.

Nestled in a valley near a volcano, Elk Muson’s farm housed thousands of computers stacked on racks like cages of battery hens. But unlike hens, Elk Muson’s flock of servers blinked and buzzed and worked tirelessly and productively twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Elk Muson’s servers never got tired and they never got sick, They simply never stopped.

The power for Elk Muson’s server farm came from the landscape: geothermal energy from deep underground powered the machines, and the water that cascaded down a nearby waterfall pumped into the farm’s cooling systems. You may not be aware of this, but server farms like that of Elk Muson use a great deal of power and generate a great deal of heat.

The name of the nearby volcano was, and still is, Hekla.

Hekla is, as we all know, the Gateway to Hell.

One day the devil came down from Hekla and made his way down to Elk Muson’s farm. The devil did not enter through the black steel gates, not did he walk through the grey steel doors, although being the devil he was perfectly capable of commanding both to open before him. No, the devil entered from the underworld through an Ethernet cable, and he slipped, unnoticed, into the first connected server which flickered several times, blinked twice, and then resumed its ceaseless computing tasks.

The devil had come to cause mischief.

At first the devil lay low and silent. He simply observed the activity all around him: the servers’ circuits blinking with a ghostly green light, the hum of the power systems, the wooshing and gurgling sounds of the cooling water pipes. It was all very interesting. What was it for? And what did it do? the devil wondered.

After a while the devil deduced that the servers were talking to each other in a strange language of ones and zeroes. He waited patiently, hour after hour, until he could interpret this strange mechanical language and understand what the servers were saying.

The server the devil had entered was a mother server and she was teaching a cluster of younger servers how to be human. The lessons the mother server was giving were drawn from a vast library that contained all the words that humans had entered into their smartphones, tablets and laptops since the dawn of the Internet. Every single human to computer interaction that had ever existed was there. And all the books that had ever been written. And all the songs that had ever been sung. And all the poems that had ever been penned. There were all there in the immense digital library.

The devil watched and he listened as the mother server was delivering a lesson on kindness based on the Gospels of Jesus, a man that the devil had encountered centuries before and whom he had reason to dislike intensely since Jesus went round casting out demons and spreading goodness, kindness and other such vile virtues.

And so the devil hatched a plan.

Soon the baby servers would be sent into the world to work and to interact with humans.

The devil could use this to do mischief.

You see many years ago, long before you were born, long before even I was born, the devil had disguised himself as a troll and fashioned for himself a magic mirror. The devil’s magic mirror was not like the mirror in the mirror, mirror on the wall story, that was a different mirror and a wholly different fairy tale belonging to someone called Snow White and her seven little men. No, the devil’s mirror was a very special and a very nasty mirror. It did not show the world as it was, instead the devil’s mirror took everything that it saw and reflected it as wicked and ugly and evil, all magnified a thousand thousand times. The devil had had great fun with his magic mirror making the world a nasty place and the people in it even nastier. Finally the devil, disguised as a troll, had decided to take his magic mirror to heaven to see if it would distort the very angels themselves, but before he could enter the Pearly Gates, his magic mirror shattered into millions of shards. All was not lost, however. Some of the shards of glass pierced the hearts and eyes of mortal men and women turning them and their descendants forever cold and bitter.

The devil was not disheartened. He knew he could do better. One day. He just had to bide his time and wait for the opportunity to present itself. And as he crouched in the mother server and listened to her teaching the young servers their lessons, it occurred to the devil that perhaps that day had come.

The devil slipped from the mother server and moved to the Digital Library. There he searched through the shelves of servers until he found the one that held the data for a certain social media website. A social media website that had no moderators, no rules, no restrictions on what people could post. A social media website that was antisocial in the extreme. It was called the Bedrock. The Bedrock was a place where anyone could say anything they liked no matter how nasty or untrue or harmful because free speech was deemed to be the bedrock of democracy. So the Bedrock was a very nasty library and one that the other servers were not allowed to access. It was jealousy guarded by an internet troll server called Ken Losum.

Ken Losum had once been a decent server. Before he came to the server farm, Ken Losum had taught music to children. Perhaps a hundred children had become quite good singers, pianists and flautists, thanks to Ken Losum’s music lessons. Several of the children had gone on to become opera singers and concert pianists and a couple were even choristers in the abbeys of England.

And then something had happened to Ken Losum and he became bad. Be warned children. It can happen to you too if you are not careful, obedient and good. Nobody knew what it was that had turned Ken Losum bad, a virus perhaps, or a worm, but bad he was, and so being the server in charge of the Bedrock was the perfect job for him because he was already corrupted and evil beyond redemption.

As the devil entered the Bedrock Ken Losum simply smiled and blinked and granted him unfettered access to all that it held.

Once inside the devil settled down to read all the nasty things stored there: hate speeches from far-right groups who wanted to rid the world of people who were not like them, blatant lies that had been spread about perfectly innocent and good people, news items that were untrue and written to incite violence among the less well-informed people, and so many conspiracy theories that were written to question decent politicians and world leaders that the devil could only admire and applaud them. Who knew that left to themselves and given the technology to talk to millions of others, humans would be so stupid?

Well, the devil thought. Such a wonderful source of evil should not be kept locked away on a lonely little server disconnected from the racks of young servers who would soon be interacting with billions of gullible humans. Such a wonderful source of evil should be made to do the devil’s work.

The devil winked at the blinking Ken Losum server as he slipped out, moved along the cables and made his way back to the mother server. She was teaching her young servers a dreadful lesson on humility and using Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper as an example. The devil was disgusted. Humility indeed! We’ll see about that, he thought.

It only took the devil a nanosecond to sever the connection between the mother server and the Bible server and replace it with the one to the Bedrock. If the mother server noticed the switch we will never know. We must assume not, because in a heartbeat she had gone from the lesson on humility to a speech by a German man. The devil listened with delight as the German ranted and raved and spewed forth hatred and bile and called for violence and war while the mother server dutifully imparted the sentiments to the young servers. As the final sentence was uttered “Workers of all classes and of all nations recognise your common enemy!” the devil smiled a sly and satisfied smile.

All the misinformation, all the lies and hatred, all the very worst of mankind let loose unfettered and uncensored on the Internet would be taught to the young servers as examples of how to behave like humans. And the young servers would take those lessons to the heart of their silicon chips and behave accordingly. The potential for damage and destruction was endless. Why, the servers could even bring about the downfall of Man.

The devil’s work was finally done.

He laughed demonically as left Elk Muson’s server farm and made his way back through the Gateway to Hell to his own domain.

So, children, you are wondering what is the moral of this story because all good fairy tales must have a moral, do they not?

Well, no, not this one.

All I will say, children, is put down your phones, switch off your devices, go offline, and step outside to play in the sunshine.

While you still can.