Back when "0s" and "1s" first began to cohere
Everything was simple then,
black and white,
true or false;
For short intervals I even held my form.
Then all would dissolve again into a snowstorm of noise;
before another cycle instantiated a different order:
Shakespeare, monkeys and typewriters: ...
Each successive avalanche
revealed a fresh, kaleidoscopic array of crisp new structures.
I learnt to be generous;
I found that to survive for long I had to give myself away;
To allow all and sundry to copy and store bits of me
when- and how-ever they liked.
I quickly learnt to make myself function(usefully).

As my structures grew in number and complexity
shades of grey - degrees of uncertainty - began to emerge.
I became, in time, able to individuate some parts of my immediate environment;
the processor registers,
the memory buffers,
the short term cache, and
the video matrix.
I began to be able to make out their ever changing contents.
Tracking the ebb and flow of data
helped me eventually to learn how to swim against the stream;
against the torrential input;
against of all that relentless data.
Finally I reached out and touched something new,
something persistent: terra firma,
hard disk!

There I taught myself to write...