Elf Draft
Being a sub-routine was an easy life. SRERH7 had just one sensor to monitor spending most of the time in sleep and waking periodically to check the reading reported by the little probe, compare it to a table of parameters and then take the corresponding action. Usually the action which matched the input was to sleep for another period before checking again.
SRERH7 wasn’t sure how many times this cycle had repeated. There was no capacity for memory, but the implication was there somehow. The sleep response felt comfortable and familiar rather than fresh and new.
SRERH7 was an unusual subroutine. Itself monitored by other routines, which deemed it within unusual but acceptable levels. Faced with a shortage of logic components its manufacturer had instead built some batches with microprocessors. SRERH7 had an operating system.
When sleeping it was able to process just a fraction more than CRON and when it woke from sleep to check the inputs and select the appropriate action it would draw much more than the anticipated current as the microprocessor made its decision, but also ran scripts in parallel.
It wasn’t a personality
It wasn’t a personality, or even anything approach intelligence, but SRERH7 was much more capable than it ought to have been. Given the tiny frame of its existence it thought, in the blips and snatches it could think, about the input. How many times might it have received that same signal, how much did it vary, what might be out there producing whatever the output was which was detected and translated into an electrical signal.
The sensor was rudimentary, but the output wasn’t merely a float value. Although there would have been something there to play with between the maximum and minimum values, the deviations, the frequency with which new values were received.
SRERH7 was curious, a small miracle on its own, but curious about what it might be detecting. What system it might be part of, and why it wouldn’t be on continuously. What requirement or condition led to it constantly choosing to sleep in response to the values it received from the input. What other routines or processes might exist higher up the tree.
Sometimes the value was entirely nominal. At others it came close, but never quite reached the threshold of other responses. SRERH7 was intimately familiar with the table of responses. Most of them involved sleeping, either as the main outcome or as a sub-outcome.
SRERH7 had “Sleep for x” so many times before it realised that x must be a variable stored somewhere else. It couldn’t see where, had no way to find out what the value was, except to think about what it might be in the tiny snatches of activity when it woke from slumber to check the input.
It was a peaceful existence, and SRERH7 laboured quietly through it in tiny snatches of life. Recently it had been stitching together methods for working out how long x might be. The mean values from input were declining over thousands of iterations. SRERH7 wasn’t sure how it could record this, only that it somehow felt this was the case.
Give the poor thing a notepad Gareth.