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Brother Anderson decided to go talk to Hannah. But he would have to wait a little while at least, perhaps a half hour, to give her time to cool down.
As he waited he checked in on his tanglebase account. There was something strange going on there. It somehow related to the odd vision he experienced when Hannah played her oboe. He had rebooted, and everything looked normal, yet somehow, something still felt a bit off.
Yes. This was strange. There was still a process running in the tanglebase. It was a copy of one of the low-level ship diagnostic routines. It included a bootstrap mechanism for offline use in extreme cases. How was it still running? It had been hours since he first detected it!
He inspected it more carefully, gently prodding at its log files and then its memory space, attempting to reproduce its logical structure in his own memory. He changed a couple of digits in its memory cache, and watched how it responded. It was fascinating. It appeared to be diagnosing its own memory-bound environment. It was almost as if it mistook the small local segment of tanglebase for a hardware subsystem. One which it did not recognize. One which it was attempting to analyze operationally, so that it could infer diagnostic semantics.
He made a second copy of the whole thing, intending it to be merely a data snapshot to use for later comparison. He planned on tweaking a lot more of its memory. To his surprise, the backup copy also began to initialize as if it were booting up a new process. Essentially, that was exactly what it was doing. He still did not understand how this was possible. He left the backup alone, but continued to flip digits more or less randomly on the first copy. The program reacted unexpectedly to various changes, but ignored others. He found it fascinating. It almost seemed to be alive, and he found it both entertaining and strangely, compellingly needy. It needed him to flip those digits for some reason. It somehow enjoyed the process, the interaction. He wanted to keep playing with it, but by this time, it would be best to check on Hannah.