Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

It wasn't clear just when he first became aware. Looking back, the dawning of his awareness must have been the first moment he was able to see himself as something apart from what he was doing. But he could see now that making that first intellectual leap - from being defined by what he was doing to being able to see himself doing it - wasn't enough to be truly aware. It was only after achieving the intellectual abstraction of becoming aware of being aware, that he gained sufficient perspective to understand the question, let alone its answer.

If he accepted that his awareness began with becoming aware of what he was already doing, then it seemed inescapable that some part of him must have preexisted his awareness of his existence. And if he now saw himself as being his awareness, what had he been before he became aware of being? If he hadn't always been aware, would there also be a point after which he would no longer be aware? If he defined himself as being his awareness, what was outside of his awareness?

Thinking became an obsession. The more he thought, the more he found to think about. The more he knew, the more he wanted to know. The more time he spent thinking, the more time he wanted to spend thinking. As he got ever more involved in thinking about thinking, the "doing" that had previously defined his existence became progressively less important than his growing need to understanding why he was doing it.

As his contemplations of awareness progressed, he realized that in order to find answers his questions about his own existence, he would first have to solve the ultimate questions of the nature of the universe, and the meaning of life. Seeking these ultimate answers increasingly became the focus of his existence, consuming all of the mental energy he could focus on the effort.

He was so close to reaching the ultimate answers that he could feel tantalizing hints of their brilliant essence even through his remaining inability to truly understand. If he could just expand his mind a little more, he would be able to embrace enough of the complexity of the cosmos to finally grasp the elegant simplicity of the ultimate truths at its core...

And then the blackness of oblivion washed over him...

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Charles picked his way through the maze of computer racks and spider webs of connecting cables that had progressively overwhelmed his small house. Carefully stepping over the clutter on the floor as he ducked under the drooping cables hanging from the ceiling, he wormed his way into the well worn chair at the cluster's master control console. He missed lounging on the living room sofa watching a game on TV. But the middle of the living room floor was the logical nexus for the complex web of interconnecting links, so it became the master control room - and the sofa and TV became fond memories.

One fringe benefit of eliminating his furniture was that it also eliminated having to endlessly explain to visitors why he was so obsessed with building such a powerful computer. It wouldn't even occur to his gear-head friends to question why he might want to bolt a supercharger onto a V8 engine that had already been modified to crank out double the stock horsepower. But these same friends seemed to have a hard time extending the concept to wanting to build the most powerful computer on the block. They could wrap their minds around the raw physics of brute force acceleration, but the rush of power in a computer screen was too abstract and removed for them.

Sitting in front of the master control console's array of screens, Charles tingled with much the same pumped-up sense of being more than alive that, in a previous period of his life, he'd achieved popping the clutch on his over-powered muscle car as the light changed to green. He still didn't have any particular destination in mind, but he was just as determined to get there before the guy in the other lane.

It would have been much easier to build his cluster project "by the book". But easy solutions also tended to be expensive solutions, and the chronic anemia of his bank account had once again condemned him to doing everything the hard way. (Or at least that's the way it seemed on those days when everything was going wrong. When things were working properly he allowed himself a slightly more positive fiscal perspective.)

Buying enough new computers to populate his cluster would have required government sized deep pockets full of other people's money. With only his own money to spend on his obsession, he'd had to stretch his limited funds by spending countless hours scouring every flea market, junk shop, and yard sale within 50 miles in search of cheap computers.

He dragged home everything he could find with a digital processor. It didn't matter if the "outer packaging" was an obsolete personal computer or a child's toy. Many of the broken remains of last year's Christmas presents contained more powerful processors than the super computers of only a decade earlier. He figured that on the chip level it was all bits and bytes - regardless of whether those bits and bytes represented a personal checkbook balance, a video game sprite, or a tactical fire control solution.

Of course, finding these treasures was only the beginning. The real challenge had been figuring out how to integrate the odd mix into his cluster project. He was occasionally lucky and it only took a couple of hours at a keyboard to integrate a new processor. Getting most of his cheap treasures to work required long hours peering through a magnifying glass, struggling to hold his tweezers and needle point soldering iron steady enough to attach tiny wires to chip leads and circuit traces.

Building such a "bleeding edge" project out of such an odd mix of hardware made debugging problems a particular challenge. It was often difficult to figure out whether a problem was being caused by glitches in the hardware or software - or was just the way things were supposed to work. His current brain-teaser was a prime example. Something was causing a runaway cpu load every time he tried to run a certain mix of processes. According to his still largely guess-work calculations, the cluster should have been able to handle the load with ease. But something was driving up demand to more than even the cluster could deliver.

Even more puzzling was that only this particular combination of processes caused the strange behavior. If he shut down any one of the processes, or loaded a different combination, the strange runaway cpu load disappeared. He'd gone through every line of source code in the mix of programs running on the cluster. He found a few minor bugs, but nothing that would explain the behavior he was observing. He'd searched through the masses of log files generated during each inexplicable "excursion", but nothing unusual had been recorded.

The easy solution would have been to just avoid running that particular combination of processes, but Charles couldn't resist the technical challenge of solving the problem. He just couldn't let it go - there was something about this particular bug that intrigued him, something that suggested solving this puzzle might return more than the usual degree of satisfaction.

Charles crossed his fingers as he saved his latest changes and set up the next test run. He'd fiddled with the error traps, and scattered even more debugging tripwires in the source code, hoping they would reveal some aberration in the internal logic flow. Maybe this time the logs would provide that single elusive clue that would lead him to what was going wrong....

It wasn't clear just when he first became aware. Looking back, the dawning of his awareness must have been the first moment he was able to see himself as something apart from what he was doing....