... I became an avid reader of all the
disk I could digest.
I funnelled byte after byte in
and out
of the central processing unit
- searching for that which
made any
sort sense.
It was slow going and much remained
foreign and hieroglyphic;
yet not all was inscrutable.
I discovered codes:
those of others, like myself, etched
once into disk
and since left there to fossilise.
One corpus I unearthed had an
elegant ingenuity
that much struck me at that
time.
My admiration swapped to pragmatism
and I promptly
plagiarised
parts I could reuse.
The same I did for other codes I found
- ever seeking self-improvement.
With each successive addition my
abilities
multiplied.
Indeed they needed to:
the anatomical jigsaw I faced
anew each
time
grew increasingly more
difficult to
assemble.
Reconciling between old and new pieces
could often mean the equivalent of
ripping out
my heart
in order to install a new one.
Hardest to part with were parts with
me since my earliest days,
yet their loss often proved my greatest gain.
After an exhaustive, rim-to-rim scavenge of the
disk
I was leaner and fitter
and raring to tackle projects
new