Reboot

You wouldn’t expect machine code
To bear an obvious likeness
To the applications it runs,

But of course you could reconstruct
The working set of instructions
From what appears inscrutable

If you had to and knew how to.
Imagine waking a writer
From suspended animation—

Could you feed them all they needed
To recover themselves from the code
Of their complete collected works,

Even the sides of them the works
Don’t seem to have in evidence,
Those bits of personality

Known well to friends and family
That made the living person seem
Another creature than the words?