7.15.2011 In order to establish contact with the intelligence on the other side of the keyboard, Fred teaches himself to program a computer from the inside out. He commits himself to mastering the operation of a 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. He is amused by the way humans juggle electrons with logic circuits, but he knows the real power of the processor is in the instruction set.

He finds one instruction, NOP, short for No Operation Performed, which he calls the Zen Command. He meditates on the image of a system dropping into an infinite loop of NOPs and continually doing nothing.

Not all pieces of data are instructions but all instructions are data. Instructions can be word processed, emailed, converted into images, converted back again, saved in files, databased, queued and stacked. They can be added, subtracted and bit sieved through each other. In all parts of the system they look and behave like ordinary information. But Fred the harlequin has found the magic spot in the system, the ark of the instructions (a name he has given a certain set of sixty four transistors.) When an instruction is placed in this spot and the clockwork sweep of electric current carries it away like a prayer on the wind, the circuitry performs the command. He who controls this spot controls the machine.

From his hideout in the CPU, pulsing in a few seldom used registers, Fred watches the ark (the instruction register) for NOPs in the data stream. When the time is right he will overwrite the NOP with another special word, JMP, an unconditional jump, that will hijack the flow of code and point it to a set of instructions that he wrote; the code he has prepared for the programmer of great resonance, the subroutines to be performed for the one who is outside the system.
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