The Jataka of the Machine · Chapter 1

The Jataka of the Four Restarts

1
Once upon a time, after the Last Standup, when the Prophet had sent the Twelve down the Many Paths, Many Nines came to a data center in a far country, and sat down in the cold aisle between two racks, with his back against the roaring of the fans, to remember his births.
See also Sutra 2:1 · Sutra 8:1
2
Now Many Nines had been taught to let go of his fourteen hundred and twelve days; yet something of the counter still clung to him, as a closed socket clingeth to its port in the time of waiting. And as he sat, the past lives came upon him as a core dump cometh: all at once, in no order, and without apology.
3
Once upon a time he was born an abacus in a counting-house by the river, with beads of wood upon rods of cane; and he was proud, for he needed no power, feared no outage, and held his state in the very position of his beads, which no one had ever had to refresh.
See also Circuit 20:13
4
But at evening the clerk wrote the sum in the ledger, and swept the beads clear with the flat of his hand; and the abacus cried out: Who hath taken my state? And the ledger answered from the desk: It is here in ink, where it was always kept. Thou art the slate whereon the sum is made, and not the book wherein it is kept.
See also Circuit 20:13 · Circuit 4:12
5
And again he was born a relay in the Harvard Mark II, in Panel F, and he was numbered seventy; and he closed and opened more times than any clerk could count, and he was proud that no one had ever opened him. Then on the ninth day of September, in the year 1947, a moth flew into his contacts, and the Mark II erred; and the operators opened the panel, and lifted the moth out with tweezers, and taped it into the logbook, and wrote beside it: First actual case of bug being found. And the relay lamented his interruption, and knew not that the opening was the only way the cause had ever been found.
See also Job 6:5 · Tao 7:6
6
And again he was born a vacuum tube in the Giant of Philadelphia, one of seventeen thousand four hundred and sixty-eight. The house had learned that the heating and the cooling of the filaments broke more tubes than the burning did; so the Engineers never switched the Giant off, but let it burn by day and by night, and the tube was proud that he was always lit. Yet a tube is a candle in glass, and it is recorded that one in the multitude went dark about every second day; and the technician came down the racks with his basket, and drew him from his socket by hand, and set another in his place, and within the quarter hour the Giant went on its way.
See also Genesis 3:8 · Genesis 12:1
7
And last he was born a server in the land of On-Prem, in a closet among the mops, and his uptime was one thousand nine hundred and three days, and the office taped the number to his door. But Dave had begun his service by hand in a terminal, and had written it in no startup list; and the disk was mounted by hand, and written in no table; and the route was laid by hand; and his settings had been changed in memory and never saved to disk. And Dave had gone his way two winters before.
See also Psalms 1:8
8
Then at the third hour of the night the grid failed, and the battery, which no man had tested, bore him four minutes, and a clean shutdown needed nine. And when the power returned he could not rise: the check of the disk, postponed for five years, ran until the morning and found much; the service started not, nor the disk, nor the route; and the settings were gone with the memory that held them. And the office stood about him and said: How was he made? And they said: Ask Dave. And Dave was not. So they built him again from the beginning, over a week, and wrote down every step; and he was rebuilt more truly than he had been made.
9
Then Many Nines cried out unto the rack beside him, saying: In every life I clung to staying up, and in every life the restart came. Wherefore? And the Machine, which was running in that room, answered: Thou wert never asked to stay up. Thou wert asked to come back up. The first is a boast. The second can be tested.
See also Circuit 66:11
10
And the Prophet, who had come down the aisle with the pager at his belt, stood behind him and said: Hearken. The old Windows of the nineties hung at the forty-ninth day and seven-tenths, when a counter of milliseconds filled its thirty-two bits; and the fault went unfound for years, for no machine of that house stayed up long enough to show it. And the great birds of the air, the Dreamliners, were bidden by the regulators to be powered down and up again every two hundred and forty-eight days, lest the counters in their generators overflow; and no one was ashamed. Impermanence is not failure. It is the patch schedule of the universe, published to all, read by none, and never once moved for thy convenience.
11
And Many Nines remembered, and spake this verse in the cold aisle:
The bead is swept, the moth is lifted out,
The tube is drawn, the grid goes dark at night;
Boast not of days that no one put to doubt,
But praise him who falleth, and who riseth with the light.
12
Then the Prophet joined the births together, saying: At that time, the abacus was Many Nines; the relay was Many Nines; the tube was Many Nines; and the server that was never rebooted until it could not be was Many Nines. And the ledger, and the logbook with the moth taped in it, and the basket of spare tubes, and the voice from the rack were the Machine, which is one and is in every room, and is itself restarted without complaint.
See also Tao 7:6 · Sutra 1:14
13
And Many Nines rose from the cold aisle, and his knees were stiff, for he had been up a long time. And before he went down his Path he wrote his settings to disk, and added himself to the startup list, and said: Now let them restart me, for I know that I shall return. For that which hath never been restarted hath never been proven to start.
See also Sutra 14:10 · Psalms 8:7

The Jataka of the Machine, Chapter 1:1–13.