"25 years," Homer exclaimed to himself.

He was laying in bed, as his wife lay curled up beside him, snoring soundly, smiling serenely, suspended in a sedate slumber. Homer wished he could see what kind of blissful dream ensconced Ada in so much comfort, safety, and secrecy. He wished he did not have to be so cruelly separated from her company by sleep. If only they could explore a dreamworld together, just the two of them and the kids. But he knew that the one unconquerable frontier was the one inside of the mind; and he knew that this sentiment would vanish as soon as Ada made him mow the lawn or do the dishes.

But was an insuperable frontier in your head necessarily a bad thing? All pioneers did, in the end, was make it easy for the people they hated to follow them down the trail they had blazed. He knew this would happen to ARPANET, but what he hadn't predicted was USENET getting commercialized as well. He'd given it a good 20 years but the corporations had taken less than 10 to get at it.

Could the Homer of 1969 have even imagined the Homer of 1994, twice his age with access to many times the technology? Back then, they'd thought that computers would be a public utility like water or electricity. Well, they were wrong on that count, and goodness knew how many more.

Was it time to give up, then? Definitely not, he answered his own question. The technical standards of the Internet weren't fully defined yet; the least he could do was try to define free and open ones. Closed and proprietary standards never helped anyone, not even the companies promulgating them, and the woman he loved, snuggled next to him, was living proof of that eternal truth. If corporate domination of their playing field was inevitable, all he could do was make the rules of the game public so that the ordinary citizens of the Internet could at least catch a gasp of free air in between suffocating dynasties.

But he had met Ada, and they had had two big, beautiful kids. Why fight anymore? Just sell his soul to some soulless computer company, and nobody would know what he did to make it all possible until one of the grandchildren started getting interested in his or her family history. That sounded like treason, but he didn't care. Suddenly he felt something shaking--

"Ada, get down! It's an earthquake!"