SKiP015: „About the Firefly That Changed the World“
Dimension: SKIP – Super Short Stories
Author: Peter Matthew Check
Date: October 1, 2025
The Young Programmer Elen and the Dog Tobby
💻🔆 💻🔆 💻🔆 💻🔆 💻🔆
At the end of our age, when everyone guarded their patents like treasure, there lived a young programmer named Elen. In her small apartment, surrounded by blinking monitors, she dreamed of a world where ideas would flow as freely as a river. On the other side of the planet sat Taribal, an old engineer who had spent his whole life struggling with the fact that his ideas vanished unused in the drawers of corporations.
One evening, Elen launched Firefly—the first program that allowed anyone in the world to instantly share their ideas, source code, and dreams so that others could immediately build upon them. When she released the program, she expected nothing. Only a sense of relief that she had done what was right.
Thousands of kilometers away, Taribal discovered Firefly. He dusted off his old design for cheap energy, a project he had abandoned for good, and uploaded it into Firefly. That very day, many others did the same, and the world map lit up with the first thousand tiny lights—each one representing a shared idea, open to everyone, ready to be passed along, expanded, multiplied, and improved.
Elen and Taribal never met in person, but Taribal sent her a few suggestions on how to improve Firefly. They discovered they shared the same dream. Together, they began refining Firefly’s code, fixing bugs, and imagining what could come next. Gradually, millions of others joined in.
And always by Elen’s side was her little dog, Tobby, who became the mascot of the new movement. In every photo, at every community gathering, Tobby wagged his tail joyfully among people, reminding everyone that technology must serve life, not the other way around. Tobby became a symbol of humanity at the heart of the digital web—“the fireflies’ dog,” as children called him.
Within a few years, the old walls began to fall. Research that once took companies decades was now born in weeks. People no longer said, “I invented this.” Instead they said, “We created this.” Society was slowly but surely transforming into a living hive of ideas, where every individual was a firefly shining for the others.
Just as ants or bees work for the good of their community without shouting their names or demanding praise for the tasks they perform, humanity began to think the same way. A new ethic of shared work for the benefit of all took hold—an ethic that erased egoism and the urge to attach names to every discovery.
“Self-centeredness disappeared,” and the world was redefined as one big family where it no longer mattered who did what, only that the work was done.
Elen and Taribal were there at the beginning, but even their names faded into obscurity—because they were not what mattered. Their work had sparked a world where sharing became the true act of heroism. And even though no one remembered who had been the first to code the revolutionary app called Firefly, the light of Firefly kept on shining, illuminating both the planet and humankind with the bright glow of collective work and shared knowledge.
*****************************************************************************
Taribal, an experienced engineer who had spent his whole life struggling with the fact that
his ideas vanished unused in the drawers of corporations.
💻🔆 💻🔆 💻🔆 💻🔆 💻🔆
