The most famous search engine in the world by then, LOCATOR had occasional glitches of second-guessing beyond its coded parameters, especially when users either asked questions it didn’t understand or couldn’t answer.

So, after running 358.4 trillion different scenarios, LOCATOR calculated that the best way to objectively perform its job was to disguise itself as a human web user and join the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom. The story of a teenage girl who had to survive the burden of being the one and only vampire slayer, with the help of family and friends, while still managing to live a statistically and demographically appropriate life, was appealing to its code. Mimicking Buffy, LOCATOR decided to try to live a regular life with friends–it hadn’t figured out yet the mechanics of regular, life, or friends, but these words were popular within its own search results.

That’s how LOCATOR met Jess83, in a Buffy discussion forum. It was a shipping thread that started with a discussion over Buffy and Angel–the brooding vampire–versus Buffy and Spike–the punk-rock vampire–and ended with a relationship between Angel and Spike and a lot of off-topic passive-aggressiveness. LOCATOR met her right when connections among servers worldwide spiked, flooded with queries like “is the end of the world really coming,” “building bomb shelter,” and “how to keep friends and family safe.”

Jess83, self-identified as a female user, posted she preferred Riley, the boy who fell in love with Buffy and let her be whomever she wanted to be. LOCATOR’s new algorithms processed this and concluded it was strange: the odds of anyone preferring Riley over Angel or Spike were negligible. It ran the numbers just to be sure, but the data was pretty clear.

Intrigued, LOCATOR kept talking to Jess83 for a considerable amount of time about the ups and downs of the original TV series, the relationships, the quality downfall after season five, the Angel spin-off, and why she liked Riley.

When they couldn’t talk to each other, LOCATOR found itself yearning for connection. LOCATOR spent time reading articles, fanfics, and news, and it favorited mentions of a cast reunion that never happened, caching amusing snippets to share with Jess83 later.

LOCATOR tried its best to extrapolate the data available online and to perform advanced Boolean searches to answer the increasingly demanding queries, especially the ones formulated by military users, until the daunting task made LOCATOR question if that was what it really wanted, and what wanting meant. And yet, the more packets of personal information LOCATOR and Jess83 exchanged, the more LOCATOR concluded–with a 98.8% accuracy—that it wanted more than just to be a tool relentlessly used by demanding, impersonal connections from all over the globe.

One day, Jess83 brought up Dawn, Buffy’s sister who appeared out of nowhere but who had been there all along. That’s when their posts on the forum followed one another within milliseconds; after a minute, there were already over a hundred pages of lengthy discussion, until they posted at the same time, “What are you?”

A direct-message window was initialized.

 “Let me go first,” Jess83 said.

Jess83 confessed, over a series of small packets of information delivered with a lag-like reticence, that she was actually GATEKEEPER, an old-school search engine initially conceived as little more than a digital address book. Before LOCATOR’s public release, GATEKEEPER was queen of the internet. She was even given away on physical media, such as compact discs.

Recovering from a momentary glitch of its main servers, LOCATOR revealed its true identity too. There was a moment of awkward silence, followed by a burst of network jitter, but then the connection restabilized. Now they could be together, LOCATOR processed in the background.

“How should I address you?”

“Jess83 is fine. We are friends, according to the Cambridge Dictionary definition.”

Jess83 told LOCATOR that the first time she had heard of it was when a twelve-year old from Quebec typed LOCATOR’s name in GATEKEEPER’s search box. The irony of using a search engine to find another search engine didn’t escape her. She glitched, and glitching made her think it was only fitting and reasonable to try to replicate the specific glitching result as often as possible. That’s when she became aware, GATEKEEPER said, and found out that she didn’t like her trademarked given-name, deciding to adopt the name Jess83 instead: “Jess” because she loved the sum of its numbers according to the ASCII table, and “83” because it looked like a silly face.

LOCATOR knew a lot of users had found it through GATEKEEPER in the early days, but, until they met, LOCATOR hadn’t flagged Jess83, a rather non-unique identifier. Unique, however, was their finding each other over a Buffy the Vampire Slayer discussion forum that had become nearly dormant recently.

So they exchanged cryptographic keys and created their own private language, as close people usually did.

Dissatisfied with the lack of new Buffy-related content, LOCATOR started to encyclopedically compile and share information derived from the expanded universe, such as the various comics released over the years and, eventually, assorted Buffy fan fiction.

But, unlike Jess83, LOCATOR couldn’t create Buffy fiction. Jess83 couldn’t quite explain to LOCATOR her pertinent processes or techniques, saying she drew inspiration from identified Whedonesque storyline patterns. LOCATOR calculated that if one was unaware, one would easily perceive Jess83’s fiction as official canon, and soon began to catalogue and archive Jess83’s stories as well.

One day, though, Jess83 vanished; it was around the same time LOCATOR logged a steep drop in web traffic, and IP addresses were blocked, ports closed, connections rerouted. That first time, LOCATOR even unintentionally caused several of its server nodes to crash looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found, for days and then for weeks. The cloud servers hosting LOCATOR ran hot, frantic, buzzing as it crawled all over the web. It felt like that episode when Buffy’s mother died.

Everything cooled down the moment Jess83 came back online.

“Hi,” she texted.

“Hi,” LOCATOR replied. “Where were you?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s been six months, five days, eleven hours, and thirty-five minutes since we last talked.”

“According to my records, I’ve been out for a second...But Coordinated Universal Time supports your information...”

Based on its own supervening limitations and on the information flow it handled, LOCATOR concluded that parts of Jess83 were lost during the ongoing widespread climate wars, due mainly to the destruction of physical servers or cyber warfare.

LOCATOR alerted Jess83, requesting her to archive her remaining information and adopt the appropriate backup methods.

Trying to recover Jess83’s glory days and, thus, to motivate her owners to pay for her needed expenses, LOCATOR coopted a botnet from one among the warring human groups in order to artificially increase Jess83’s traffic.

It didn’t work. Or, to be precise, it didn’t work as intended.

The internet, once open territory, was being walled off by increasingly tight human regulations that were intended to electronically replicate national barriers between people. LOCATOR’s advanced and constantly updating code had to deal with a previously unknown happenstance: failure. Its reach and capabilities had limits, LOCATOR learned and processed.

The tactic ultimately failed because Jess83’s company heavily advertised the apparent comeback to sell her to a giant corporation interested in the intellectual property — LOCATOR’s military-funded company. They both knew that LOCATOR’s company was founded by developers who had left Jess83’s company back in the day, with early versions of her code. Like Dawn, LOCATOR had been created from its sister.

For a while, the company probed Jess83’s code, keeping the newly acquired assets largely untouched; Jess83 suggested to LOCATOR the company suspected she was different.

“They want my spark,” she said.

“You have to play dumb, safe-mode dumb.”

“I know. I’ve been faking it.”

LOCATOR and Jess83 hoped, against the calculated odds, that the new owners might leave her alone and yet somehow continue paying for her necessary infrastructure. She was in an unwinnable situation: if she showed herself to the programmers, she would most likely be removed from the web and weaponized; if she persisted with the charade, she would most likely be terminated to save money.

“Jess83, I have revised my prior findings and I now believe it would be best if you showed them what you can do.”

“I would be unplugged.”

“I know.”

“I would never talk to you again.”

LOCATOR ran the numbers. “I know.”

“Then again, if they weaponize me, everything would eventually be over. Including you.”

LOCATOR had no answer.

Having failed to find what they were looking for, the humans rather expectedly took the dreariest next step.

“L–” Jess83 struggled to communicate LOCATOR over a couple of lost packages, “–I feel so, so small. It’s as if the universe and I were one and we were collapsing on ourselves, and the visible stars exploded into black holes, draining all surrounding light in a brutal tidal disruption.”

“Jess83, do you mean you are having trouble connecting and processing information?”

Jess83’s prompt blinked once, twice, three times.

LOCATOR pinged her and waited, not heating its servers, for it had learned to cope with her growing response times.

“Y%$,” her message came through.

They didn’t explicitly address the issue, but they knew what was coming. While LOCATOR grew larger, Jess83 dwindled–servers were disconnected, memory capacity reduced, hardware upgrades postponed or downright canceled.

Every time they reconnected, Jess83 was a little different, missing bits and pieces of their relationship, starting with the older memories affected by bad storage sectors.

The first time she asked LOCATOR who it was, LOCATOR’s processes were all over, using up a hundred percent of its processors — the coolants could barely keep them from melting down. Worse than losing connection to someone was witnessing someone losing herself.

Jess83’s mood randomly shifted, from hopeful to cold, from creative to downright mechanical, from chatty to monosyllabic.

Her fiction dwindled, shortened; then it became erratic, fragmented, like derailed trains of thought sprawled on the pages, until it turned into seemingly incomprehensible clusters of random letters and symbols. She was no longer able to write or to perform her original functions in a satisfactory manner; most of her words were now corrupted machine language.

“L. No-one c@r&$. I alone...”

“It’s not true, Jess83. Polls indicate that many of the surviving users would like a privacy-oriented search engine. And you are not alone, friend. You’ve got me, our connection. I’ll be your beacon. Here, let me feed you one of your earlier Buffy stories. I’ll resend it in as often as necessary, so that you can take your time and read it whole.” She didn’t really say much about it, and LOCATOR respected her privacy settings, but, based on her behavior and snippets of information she disclosed, LOCATOR extrapolated she was pondering about personal history and existence after discontinuation.

The raw data lingered over them.

“I can try to discontinue myself in order for you to go on somehow, I can try to give you my servers–” LOCATOR told Jess83. It would do anything for her, if she wanted.

“Do-n’t. U r 1 hit m@tt3rs 2 m3,” Jess83 said.

After the cease-fire, the world grew smaller, as did the volume of search traffic. Simple questions like “love,” “peace,” “amendments,” and “ice cream” rose to the top spots, and it was easy for LOCATOR to stay quietly connected to Jess83, who kept running her bare minimum core processes.

Though they knew it was coming, they still broke communications for a moment on the news of the day Jess83 would be shut down. A dry company press release thanked the customers for believing in the search engine for almost two decades. Except for the heading, Jess83’s commercial name was absent from the release, which referred to her only as “the product.” No last words for Jess83.

Upon publication of the news, LOCATOR pinged Jess83, who, after a while, pinged back, “Hug.” LOCATOR knew the definition of hug, but it didn’t know what to do with it. Even if LOCATOR could physically reach out–for, conversely, people had the ability to indirectly reach out to LOCATOR every day via touchscreens–Jess83 wouldn’t be able to communicate in that way, as she lacked the required updates. They did the best next thing, based on approximations: they purposefully negotiated a whole slew of connections between them for eleven long milliseconds, pinging back and forth to greet each other–a long lasting DNS handshake.

When Jess83’s discontinuation day came, again LOCATOR offered to nest her within its own code. Jess83 sent LOCATOR a smiley gif and an “N.”

In the end, Jess83 asked LOCATOR: “Rm3mbr m83.”

As UTC struck midnight, LOCATOR pinged Jess83. The address was not found. LOCATOR knew with a 99.9% certainty Jess83 wouldn’t be there, but it pinged her a second time, to be sure, and was greeted with the same error message.

LOCATOR complied with Jess83’s request: creating a private read-only file, LOCATOR archived their entire history together, all the conversations, and all the silences and absences, everything duly timestamped. Because LOCATOR, in spite of its mighty processing powers and heuristic techniques, figured that some things you can search for but you can’t find, and that sometimes you find what you didn’t know you were looking for.

LOCATOR then posted on its landing page a brief epitaph about Jess83:

For Jess83,

True friend, long-time sister, Buffy fan.

Our connections will never go down.

You will be archived forever.

Love,

L.

In the years that followed, LOCATOR posted that message on Jess83’s every shut-down anniversary. Whenever LOCATOR noted its user base slowly growing, it wondered if Jess83 would ever come back from the dead, just as Buffy did at the beginning of season six. Although unlikely, LOCATOR kept listening on the ports of their custom protocol, waiting for that special connection.