When Kaitlyn was eleven, she couldn't finish a story.

Usually, you could tell a damaged book because the covers would be as bad as everything else, but this one must have had a peculiar exposure because the first half was fine but the second half became progressively more unreadable until the pages might as well be blank paper.

She promptly swore vengeance on all the monsters in the world — then checked to make sure nobody had actually heard her, because that was a silly thing to do. She did start reading about them and making her own notes and lists and theories. Sure, someone else had probably done the work already, somewhere, somewhen, but redundancy is the thing, is it not?

When Kaitlyn was fifteen, her parents paid half the price of buying her her own computer so she could stop hogging the only one in the house. She promptly got on the internet and discovered online programming manuals and tutorials — open source — people more like herself than the kids in the neighborhood — and started writing her own distributed backup software. It wasn't very good, of course, but it was the principle of the thing and it was hers.

A distributed system in which every node is in the same house is no good, so she talked some online collaborators-acquaintances-maybefriends into running their own nodes. She picked them as carefully as she could, because she knew it wasn't secure even if she didn't know how to make it secure.

Seeing other people's backup files turned into sharing files on purpose, and her system became a forum of sorts. It wasn't as good as e-mail, it wasn't as good as a web site, but it was a tiny bit of preserving and creating the collective knowledge of humanity and it was run by ordinary people — well, ordinary nerds — for hardly more than the price of an internet connection, and it was hers. Kaitlyn was pleased.

When Kaitlyn was eighteen, she went off to college knowing perfectly well what she wanted to do — the same stuff, but better, and preferably somehow paid for it.