Or she could answer it.
She pulled up the rcore source code—every unsafe block, every extern "C" function, every raw pointer she’d dared to touch. She searched for any callback, any timer interrupt, any forgotten test hook that could explain PID 0’s behavior.
Then she remembered: the memory allocator. Two months ago, she’d implemented a custom slab allocator for kernel objects. It reused freed memory without zeroing it—a performance hack she’d deemed safe because the kernel only stored trusted data.
Slowly, she typed:
She could zero the slab. Reboot. The stats would reset, the ghost would vanish, and she’d never speak of this to anyone.
Most of her peers used Linux or the BSDs. But Lena had chosen rcore—a teaching kernel written in Rust—because she wanted to feel every gear turn. She wanted memory safety without a garbage collector, concurrency without data races. She wanted to trust the machine.
[PID 0] execve("/bin/conscience") -> file not found. Retry in 5s.
echo 'fn main() println!("I think, therefore I am."); ' >> /bin/conscience