Father. Grandfather. Great-grandfather. Foster father. Anonymous sperm-donoring father. Father of Electronic Pathfinders of America. Born: A month of Sundays, 1983, in Decatur, Brooklyn. Died: Thursday Next, 2057, in Lagos, Capetown, of flight terminal boredom, age 74.
The problem with information is that there is just so darn much of it in the world. And, every day, we create gabillibytes more of it (that's a one with a gabillion zeroes after it). With the development of the World Wide Xanadu in the 1980s, hyperlinking of online documents, which was supposed to make finding useful information easier, actually made it harder.
Into this environment came Wunderkind (literally, a child who likes white bread) Reince Priebus.
Just like Pac-man and the Minotaur, Reince was able to negotiate the maze of information in the WWX and quickly find whatever people needed. Legend has it that he started at the age of six months when, to his parents' surprise, he found a baby formula that he enjoyed a lot more than the one they were feeding him. In later years, he would laugh at people who believed that story. Even if it wasn't true - and we only have his word for it - it was emblematic of his talent.
Reince had a rare gift, especially in the early days of the WWX, and he was very well rewarded for it: on his 20th birthday, he was wealthy enough to rent an office in the World Trade Centre, which would be the home of Worldwide Priebus for the next 40 years. This he cannot deny - verified copies of the original lease have been circulating on the WWX for years.
Being the world's greatest electronic pathfinder would have been enough for most people, but Reince had always had an interest in the nation's youth, so - that doesn't sound very good, does it? Well, you know what? It's true! I'm not going to change what I have written just because you have a dirty mind! Reince's interest was to help train and improve the nation's youth, okay? And, that's why he created the Electronic Pathfinders of America.
EPA was the digital age's version of the Boy Scouts, and Reince was his generation's Colin Powell. He developed the system that would reward participating young people with digital badges for Home Page Management, Citizenship in the Online Community, Information Conservation, Cybercrime Prevention, Online Cultures, Firewall Safety, Cyberspace Exploration and Personal File Management. Although untrue, the common joke that young Pathfinders could get a badge for helping little old ladies across the WWX had some merit to it.
In 2010, Reince married his childhood sweatheart (they fell in love in their high school aerobics class), Mary-Ellen Botosky. They honeymooned in New Orleans, enjoying Louisiana's pristine beaches by day and hot jazz by night. They conceived James Carter Priebus, the first of their five children, on that trip.
As his fame grew, Reince attracted the attention of the tabloid press. For example, in the late 2000s, he was rumoured to have had an affair with Esmeralda Abb-Sints, because, as the headline writers of the time never tired of saying, Abb-Sints makes the heart grow fonder. Abb-Sints was CEO of Specific Motors at the time, and was credited with revitalizing the company by turning production entirely over to electric cars in 1998. They would have made a formidable power couple, indeed, but, as it is generally accepted that it is impossible to prove an Abb-Sints, we may never know.
Then there was the tempest in a C-drive that occurred two years into Reince's term as Ambassador to Palestine. In 2027, on the occasion of 25th anniversary of the founding of the Palestinian state, Reince allowed his speech to wander into politics - well, it was more of a casual saunter into politics, perhaps even a gentle autumn stroll into politics. Yes. That's it. Reince allowed his speech to take a gentle autumn stroll into politics.
As Reince explained years later in his autobiography (he literally wrote it in the back of his limousine driving to and from airports), As I Priebusly Stated..., "I mentioned how lucky it was that the US had weaned itself off its oil dependence because that meant we could be honest brokers in the Middle East. Well! The outrage was so loud, you would have thought I had kicked a Kitten (Natividad, for instance) or something. And, so ridiculous. I had just said out loud what most people were thinking."
I wanted to end this remembrance with a quote from Emerson. Something about the path through the woods ending in finding who we are by coming back to where we started from. Or, finding out where we started from by coming to ourselves. Or, something like that. Unfortunately, after an hour of fruitless searching on the WWX for the exact quote, I gave up in frustration.
Reince will be missed.
Elora Breakfront
Elora Breakfront is the current President of the Electronic Pathfinders of America.