The sound of Saturday morning cartoons diffracted under the gap between the door and the floor and pried Homer's eyes open.

"Do you think dreams can teach us things, Ada?" Homer whispered as he lay awake in his bed, looking at the bedroom roof.

Ada stirred. He quickly slipped his arm under her neck to still her. She opened her eyes. "Huh?"

"I just had a dream. I dreamed it was twenty years from now. The kids had finished college, and we were an old couple. But still I felt unsatisfied."

"You're previewing your midlife crisis?" Ada giggled and Homer could feel the happy vibrations crushing his arm.

"I was dreaming about who we are, and what we did."

"I'm too tired for pretext, Homer," she laughed. This provided an opportunity for Homer to remove his arm from under Ada's neck and put it to use caressing her belly instead.

"I'm talking about USENET, dammit!"

"You could have just gotten to the point," she pointed out.

"I have now," Homer responded, "but if we don't find some way to conserve this...it'll be gone too. In my dream the USENET had been commercialized. The Bell System pretended it had invented in the first place. Nobody on USENET knew that it was once free."

"That's never going to happen," dismissed Ada, "people won't stand for it."

"If the memory isn't kept alive there will be nothing to stand on," Homer sat up in his bed, "for history is the roots that hold us in place when the winds of change blow."

"Not bad of a line for eight in the morning on a Saturday," Ada moved her pillow up so her head looked forward, "but how much has been posted on the USENET already? Maybe more than a megabyte? You're talking about a whole library worth of words. I just think it's impractical."

"Maybe have it distributed across multiple servers," suggested Homer, "one server has the As, another takes the Bs, and another gets the Cs...then have a central search server that queries all these servers whenever someone wants to find something."

"How about this," proposed Ada, "anybody who wants to download from the server has to put up a copy of the same data themselves. This way everybody will have a copy and no one would be able to just take it down."

"How would you enforce that?" wondered Homer.

Just then the door flew open.

"Taylor stole my lollipop!" Their son, Alex, proclaimed.

Their daughter, Taylor, was hot on his heels as she tried to knock Alex down but ended up herself getting knocked to the floor.

"Settle down or you won't have ice cream," Homer threatened as he walked out to the fighting youngsters.