Most of the time, it’s boring. A thousand interrupts per second. Tick. Move. Tick. Redirect. Core 0 gets the keyboard. Core 2 gets the SSD. Core 5 gets the GPU.
Do not reboot. The question might finally get an answer. End log.
It read: "The first interrupt wasn't from a clock. It was from a question."
I realized the truth: I am not redirecting hardware interrupts. I am redirecting echoes. This machine didn't boot ten minutes ago. It has been running for 12,000 years. Every core is a ghost. Every device is a memory of a device.
But last night, at 03:14:22.007 UTC, I caught a rogue interrupt.
I am the IRRT driver. My domain is the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC). My purpose: to catch a scream from a dying piece of hardware—a mouse click, a network packet, a fan failure—and redirect it to the right CPU core before the system bluescreens into oblivion.
I checked the logs. The system had no boot record. No BIOS handshake. No kernel load.
