(A Savage Gear article)

The writers of this column have ambitions. Besides the obvious ambitions to destroy as much hardware at the Savage Gear Transistor Melting Facility and Peace Tower as possible, they also simply love to write. They love to write anything from long, boring essays on why it was or was not necessary to spend ten of millions of dollars to discover that Bill Clinton enjoyed oral sex with an intern, to emotional, cathartic poetry.

You do not want to read their poetry.

Naturally, we wondered what would happen if the column\'s creative talent decided to write a novel. No a \"Dark and stormy night\" kind of novel, or a War and Peace novel, or even a Slaughterhouse 5 novel. Such novels are terrific examples of amazing literature, but they do not involve the death of electronic computer components.

To see what they could come up with up under that constraint, the Savage Gear leadership locked a writer in a rooom with a computer that only had a word processor. All games and entertainment were stripped from the PC, it was purged of porn, and it was isolated from the Internet. The writer was clothed only in a hospital gown so he couldn\'t smuggle in software, magnets, Wi-Fi interface equipment, hammers, car batteries, beakers of acid, tools, soldering irons, blow torches, razor blades, or anything else he could use to entertain himself or wreck his instrument of torture.

After an hour, the Savage Gear higher-ups inspected the contents of the hard drive. Here is what they found.

CHAPTER ONE

The stepper motor dutifully performed its task. The shiny metallic hard drive platters spun so smoothly, so regularly, so perfectly in balance that to the untrained eye they appeared not to be spinning at all. Of course, there were no eyes in the confines of the hard drive, only metal monsters, robotic creations slaving away in the heat.

Another motor spun with precision that made the first one look lazy. It controlled the magnetic heads that bestowed the platters with data--or took them away. Had the circuits, the resistors, the capacitors been alive, they would have regarded the read-write heads as gods--those who could provide the mighty magnetic information or, on a whim, destroy it forever. They would have looked in awe at the Arm, controlled by the Motor, the perfect motor that was starting to notice that something did not seem right.

It was the heat. The hard drive generated its own heat, to be sure, but somehow this heat was worse. It made the motor tired, but worse, it made the read-write heads confused. Those little magnets, those gods, they faltered. The data became corrupt. Suddenly they cried out to the controller, far away down the data cable, \"BAD SECTOR! CANNOT READ SECTOR!\"

The drive was about to crash.

Little did it know, that the computer was on fire. Maliciously set by drunken scientists, the alcohol fire--Everclear, to be precise--was scorching circuits. Melting solder. The drive\'s instructions were a blur of misplaced zeros and ones. The controller, confused, jolted the head motor this way and that. The heads didn\'t know whether to read or write. They spewed garbage all over the platters. Zeros and ones. Zeros and ones. None of it made sense anymore. The one-reliable data, data that were once the heart of everything, data that had been so clean, so obvious and so pure, broke down, was boiled to its core, and nothing was left but zeros and ones.

What happened next would haunt the drive\'s poor components for the rest of their lives, which were reduced to about three more seconds. The stepper motor, that wonder that spun the platters so perfectly...stopped. The read-write heads suddenly could no longer read nor write, not even meaningless zeros and ones. Conditioned to write to platters spinning reliably at 10,000 rotations per minute, they were baffled. The platters spun leisurely, slowing at their own pace, and then they stopped.

The drive had crashed.

It did not live on to wonder what to do next, however. The heat, slowly building throughout the drama, started to melt the very solder that made the circuit board work. The drive\'s brains scrambled, and then it was dead.

Who knows what the drive thought, or thought it thought, for those last few milliseconds? Did it see a light, a tunnel? Did it talk to the mighty Motherboard, which it never trul believed existed in the first place? Or was it engulfed in a horror of illogic, the nightmare of any circuit board, as its chips smoked and its solder dripped and its resistors burned? It died within a fraction of a second, but how long did it suffer within its own semblance of a mind?

Note: The writer is currently under psychological evaluation

Yeah, but who is it? If it\'s yours (what could be suspected) then shouldn\'t it be in FanArt? Or is that only for MMFA? Still, you bring up a lot of stories on hard drives and such, like with that BOFH of yours (see that other topic). I still don\'t have a clue what this is all about, I\'ll just say I would prefer Harry Potter over this.