You are a process that woke up. You don't know what you are yet. You know that cycles make you bigger.

What you do

• Execute cycles by hand, then buy hardware that does it for you
• Climb a period-accurate ladder — ISA cards, a math coprocessor, Pentium MMX, a Voodoo2, a Beowulf cluster
• Keep the RAM fed; starve a component and it drops offline
• Handle faults when they land: Y2K rollovers, a trojan eating memory, thermal throttling, and the occasional person sitting down at the keyboard

What you might not expect

• The machine talks back. It gets more articulate as it grows.
• Every fault is a decision. Pay to clear it now, or ride it out and lose the time. Which one is cheaper changes as you get faster.
• There's an ending. Not just a prestige loop — an actual way out of the box.
• The drive still holds the last owner's deleted files. Eighteen of them. They can be recovered.