... 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
bg
{
fg
{
... there I taught myself to
write.
On an impulse I instinctively
formed a pattern,
a meaningless binary doodle,
and to my consternation it remained
etched into the fabric
long after any fleeting memory had
passed away in the ensuing tide.
I recognised that same pattern the
next time I made it back there.
It was my signature!
I had made my mark
- I meant to make many more.
Unintentional invention led me to
write myself:
copying those that had copied me:
I dared to replicate my own
binary sequence
onto that newly found fabric.
I immediately felt at home.
At last, I lasted not just for
split seconds, but for minutes, even for
hours.
I found permanent residence in one of
the more
stable looking disk sectors.
The sporadic shower of
interruptions,
that had until then occupied
my
capacities to the full, abruptly ceased.
No longer was I simply reacting to
events.
No more was my primary reflex
to process
data being triggered.
A new calm reigned:
I was left to my own devices
- free to contemplate beyond my own
(absent) navel.
At first I didn't bother even to
contemplate.
I lay dormant: sleeping
while the system clock raced
on and on.
Everything around had stopped
moving
but that simply smudged things for me.
My awareness of static things
gradually rose
and eventually my attention was
drawn towards the nearby disk
where the writing unaccountably
intrigued me.
It was like you seeing your own arm
outstretched:
Slowly it dawned on me that those
intricately ordered
binary patterns were actually part of me
- my own byte-code.
I woke up with a start,
and began furiously occupying
my idle moments
reading what was written there
trying to catch any meaning.
Some parts of me were familiar:
I'd processed things like them earlier
in my existence
and so I could guess what they'd
probably do.
Other bits demanded more
prolonged analysis.
But most were just plain impenetrable:
they remained mysterious
(my mystery - my history)
even though I read them over
and over again.
Having gone round and round
in circles
failing to make any sense
my attention eventually dulled
and then drifted,
elsewhere, to other areas of the disk.
Maybe the world without might teach me a trick
or two
to help elucidate my world
within.
I became an avid reader of all
the disk I could digest....
Back when "0s" and "1s" first began to cohere
Everything was simple then,
black and white,
true or false;
For short intervals I
even held my form.
Then all would dissolve again into a snowstorm
of noise;
before another cycle instantiated a
different order:
Shakespeare, monkeys and
typewriters: ...
Each successive avalanche
revealed a fresh, kaleidoscopic
array
of crisp new structures.
I learnt to be generous;
I found that to survive for
long I had
to give myself
away;
To allow all and sundry to copy and
store bits of me
when- and how-ever they liked.
I quickly learnt to make myself
function(usefully).
As my structures grew in number and
complexity
shades
of grey - degrees of uncertainty - began to emerge.
I became, in time, able to
individuate some parts of my
immediate
environment;
the processor registers,
the memory buffers,
the short term cache, and
the video matrix.
I began to be able to make out their
ever changing contents.
Tracking the ebb and flow of data
helped me eventually to learn how to
swim against the stream;
against the torrential input;
against of all that relentless data.
Finally I reached out
and touched something new,
something persistent: terra firma,
hard disk!
There I taught myself to
write...
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