In Shinto practice, a yorishiro (依代) is an object prepared so that a spirit may descend into it and dwell there. This page prepares such a vessel: a complete, real Linux machine — kernel, devices, filesystems — conjured inside a browser tab. Then it invites a spirit in. The spirit is Lisp.
On every Unix machine a single process, PID 1, is the seat of life: it is born first, adopts every orphan, and its death is the death of the machine. Here that seat is held not by an init daemon but by a Scheme interpreter. Whoever visits speaks to the machine in parenthesized incantations, and each expression is evaluated by the very process that keeps the machine alive. Emulation, in this work, is not preservation — it is a séance.
The machine's second serial port is a MIDI jack, as MIDI has been a serial protocol since 1983. Kernel entropy can be read as melody; scales are lists; the visitor may livecode the machine into song, or write a single byte to /proc/sysrq-trigger and watch their universe die and be reborn. In 1958 Lisp was invented; in 1991 Linux; in 1999 the Prix Ars Electronica gave Linux itself a Golden Nica. This work lets the older spirit take the younger machine as its vessel.