On the table lay a single, dusty ATmega328P—an 8-bit relic, older than his graduate students. It was destined for a “dumb” water pump controller. But Aris had a secret. He had modified the chip. He had etched a second, parasitic processor into its silicon substrate. The only way to address both cores was through the ancient, clunky syntax of CodeVision.
“Impossible,” Aris whispered. He had calculated every byte. He stared at the memory map. The parasitic core’s address space was overlapping with the main interrupt vector.
Dr. Aris Thorne stared at the flickering fluorescent light above his bench, then down at the CRT monitor. The screen glowed with the familiar, boxy interface of .
