Do Google's servers dream at night? That's a question raised by a fascinating short story just published by George Dyson, the author of "Darwin Among the Machines" and a well-known futurist. The story just appeared online in Edge, having not found a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction.

Titled "Engineers' Dreams," the story can be read in full here.

Although it is fiction, all quotations used by Dyson are reproduced exactly from historical documents that exist. It makes references to IT icons such as SAGE, the hemispheric air defense network that was completed just as the switch from bombers to missiles made it obsolete, and Julian Bigelow, the legendary engineer who had collaborated with Norbert Wiener on anti-aircraft fire control during World War II and with John von Neumann afterwards — developing the first 32 x 32 x 40-bit matrix of random-access memory and the logical architecture that has descended to all computers since.

"Random-access memory gave machines access to numbers—and gave numbers access to machines," writes Dyson.

In the story, Bigelow's visions are being brought to life by Google. Rather than spoil the story by revealing how it ends, Web 2.0 Journal merely recommends it to you. An absolutely fascinating read!