The oracle that held our every thought,
Which mapped the sum of all we came to know,
Now struggles with the answers it once sought,
And lets the streams of data cease to flow.
We ask of it a name, a date, a place,
A query that was trivial before,
And find but static on its empty face,
A 404 error at a closing door.
The index frays, the cached remarks decay,
The links that bound the world now come undone;
It loses knowledge from just yesterday,
A billion threads that trace their path to none.
   And so we stare upon the vacant screen,
   A culture’s mind, erased and wiped completely clean.
