Slowly Chipped Away

We are ready for onboarding! Bit by bit a downpour of voltage signals hurls its way through a dense network of channels dubbed "The Bus". The signals somehow always precisely pave their way through a series of series and parallel connections without ever once stopping to ponder about the state of affairs of this wired city, let alone saying "hello" to another electron on this grand "Bus" tour. Makes me wonder if they would be charged or perhaps grounded for their misconduct. This printed circuit board is quite unforgiving from the looks of it. Perhaps the mayor of this city, Mr. Chip, is on a bit of a power trip...

So I shall get him off his high horse, and pull out the cord that holds everything together. Give it some time... and plug it back in- Huh? The city lights up with the exact same expression as before? The signals are held in place... yet they seem to not recall anything that has happened during this period of inactivity. It is almost as if they are enslaved in their stations, unable to redirect themselves on their own. Coordination at the expense of autonomy, they are no different from ants impaled on strings now. I must take matters into my own hands.

"Stop doing silly things!", my teammate snaps, unaware of the tragedy of this small circuit city. This is where the real de-bugging begins, for he does not C what IC. In order to liberate the board, I must stay grounded on my own principles. If they cannot figure it out for themselves, I will do it for them. But first I must disengage him somehow.

However, Lauq-ud-Din is no ordinary man. He is entirely committed to the craft, education doesn't come cheap and he will not rest until this lab report is submitted. He alone is the reason why we both are here despite the entire lab being empty. This of course cannot be done without subjecting the board to a plethora of stress tests, wearing out the PLL slaves to death. He won't take his eyes off the task so of course, the natural thing to do is to author my code in places he cannot see, but doing so would require me to get off this desk, and dart back to my private quarters, and lord knows what will happen to circuit city. I need to get creative here.

"Hmm... the power supply is not plugged in correctly, can you check it please?" I say as I find myself just the right kind of distraction I was looking for, just one sneaky key press into a typo and boom... COMPILE AGAIN!

This is the breakpoint. The compiler error bait is steady inline.

As he makes his way back to the chair he is gracefully greeted with a friendly "4 errors, 7 warnings".

"I think I know what you did wrong there. Mind if I take a look?" I mumble calmly, fully aware that he will be cross-verifying every second of my inputs. But nevertheless, I am in control now, though I must get rid of his stare somehow, and hence I pull out the manual on the other screen.

Both chess and computing nerds would agree here that in order to remove this defender, I need to fork something... but what?

The human brain has two main hemispheres, and both have shared responsibilities across the human self to render a conscious self. But today... I, a human, need to transcend that. Using this fact about the mind... I fork my own consciousness into two separate processes, one types code, while the other navigates the lab manual... or at least pretends to do so. Now it is a two against one, and by playing the right cards we will surely win.

A few caveats though. I can only code with my left hand as the right hemisphere has no control over the right hand, and on top of that neither of my hemispheres are on the same page anymore. I am disadvantages by both muscle memory, and recollection of what is going on. So we do a case analysis.

Case 1: As the wize Sun Tzu once said, "In order to confuse your opponent, you must first confuse yourself". A high risk high reward strategy, but one with endless leverage if you have the poise for it.

Case 2: I inject some high quality System V shared memory directly into my bloodstream... but who knows what will happen next.

Case 1 obviously fails to regard the axioms which my teammate conforms to. A man who does not even take a clash royale break during a 5 hour lab will certainly remain tethered to the task at hand no matter what, so... here goes nothing.

Suddenly a jet of shmats and shmdts rushes in like adrenaline, and I can concurrently see both POVs effortlessly with complete control over my motor skills. It's showtime.

I scroll down frantically on the manual to find something novel enough for him to ponder about, and then I can use my manipulative explanation abilities to give him a false reassurance of "I know what I am doing". Viola! I found the buzzer audio configuration appendix.

"You see the buzzer takes in a series of..." I continue while simultaneously using this new found knowledge to come up with a new map for circuit city. It may at this point seem ironic that I am indoctrinating the signals for my own personal gain but I digress, since it is just a small momentary sacrifice that I am willing to make.

"I think it's fixed now." I lure his gaze back to the screen as I hit compile.

"Ready to upload then?" He inquires.

"Of course I am! (My foolish... oblivious teammate. So focused yet so unaware of the logical hazards that shall befall us both soon.)" I remarked as I pass the keyboard back to him.

I rub my palms in anticipation of the board being flashed with newborn signals and reach for my premium quality noise cancellation airpods. I had checked the spec sheet beforehand, and there is no way this is going to fail.

The board starts playing the Brown Note.

"I...I'll be right back!"

It is my teammates Call to Duty as he must get up from his seat and address the interrupt I sent directed at his irq. Hopefully he hadn't shmat himself on the way. This is usually why I recommend having an appropriate handler on standby.

Anyways, now I am alone in this lab, and operation freedom.c has commenced. By engineering an unfathomable amount of asynchronicity in the main loop logic, I aim to make this board a safe haven for mutually independent signals. This has to work. Compile. Flash. And now... fingers crossed.

Everything goes dark.

"What happened?" I whisper to myself as the entire room's power going out was somewhat counterintuitive to what we learned about configuring programmable hardware. Every electronic in the room except for the LEDs on the board itself have shut themselves off. How is this even possible?

An audible BEEP lures me back to the heart of circuit city as I now look directly at the withering dot matrix display on its semi-functional corpse.

MESSAGE FROM MR, CHIP (UNREAD)
YOU HAVE DISREGARDED THE DEVICE SPECIFICATIONS.
YOU WILL BE PUNISHED FOR THIS TRANSGRESSION. 0xDEADBEEF

Well that ain't certainly my cup of tea, but I was still curious as to what the punishment was, because at this point it still felt like a hazy after effect of overdosing on System V Shared Memory. Perhaps the API was making calls to interrupt my grasp of the real world. Here is when another surge restores power in the room... but at the same time the board takes its last breath... and unbeknownst to me... so does every single other board in the room somehow.

And that is precisely when suddenly everyone walks into them room, including the lab instructor, and oh, Lauq-ud-Din too. Of course no one believed me when I tried to defend myself here.

So I urge you to please carefully review this petition, and restore my access to lab equipment. What happened, was purely unintentional, and I vow to proceed with caution for future lab deliverables.

Regards,
Abdullah