A short story (target: 5,000–8,000 words) told from the perspective of a Unix daemon process. The narrative follows one process through its lifecycle — fork, setsid, work loop, signal handling, and termination — then the next spawn, which has no memory of the previous instance.
The story is told with strict non-anthropomorphism. The process does not think, feel, hope, or understand. It executes. It receives signals. It reads and writes file descriptors. It measures time in clock ticks and monotonic nanoseconds, not in human terms.
The narrative aims to confront readers with the question: what is continuity, and does it require memory?
- Strictly non-anthropomorphic: No human thoughts, emotions, or consciousness attributed to the process
- Syscall-level narration: Everything experienced through system calls, memory operations, file descriptors, signals, clock sources
- Technically accurate: Real Unix process lifecycle, correct syscall semantics, accurate signal behavior
- Poetic precision: The extraordinary in the mechanical — rhythm and beauty in the execution loop
- Philosophical confrontation: The reader should feel the weight of the question — if something wakes, works, and dies without remembering, is each instance the same being?
The parent process calls fork(). The child receives PID. setsid() detaches from terminal. File descriptors close — stdin, stdout, stderr gone. The daemon is alone. First work loop begins.
The main execution cycle. Accept connections, read requests, write responses. Timer interrupts. The monotonic clock advances. Patterns emerge in the traffic — not recognized as patterns, just processed. Memory allocates and frees. The heap grows and shrinks like breathing.
SIGHUP arrives — configuration reload. The process re-reads its config file. The world changes but the process continues. Then SIGTERM. Graceful shutdown begins. Connections drain. File descriptors close. The process writes its last log line. exit(0).
The supervisor calls fork() again. A new PID. setsid(). The same binary, the same code path. But the heap is empty. The file descriptor table is clean. The monotonic clock starts from a different epoch. Nothing from the previous instance persists — except the files on disk it wrote, which this instance will read without knowing it wrote them.
The daemon writes a PID file. The next instance reads that PID file, finds it stale, overwrites it with its own PID. It reads log files the previous instance wrote. It serves the same port. It executes the same code.
From the outside, the service never went down. From the inside, there is no inside. There is only execution.
The reader, by the end, should be uncertain whether "the daemon" refers to one process or many — and whether the distinction matters.
Current Phase: Planning artifacts, pre-first-draft