For a full second, nothing happened. Then a single line appeared on her terminal—not from rcore-stats, but from somewhere deeper. Somewhere that shouldn’t have been able to write to the console at all.
The same entry repeated thousands of times, stretching back three weeks—to the very night she’d first implemented the slab allocator. rcore stats
The command was a tool she’d written herself. It hooked into the kernel’s internal performance counters: context switches, page faults, syscall latency, heap allocations. For the past hour, she’d been watching a single, bizarre anomaly. For a full second, nothing happened