We found this story on a sheet of paper sticked to the wall on the Amega Party in Porsgrunn, Norway. It was ment to be published in the first issue but we forgot it at Misfit's place in Prague, so... The story wasn't published anywhere yet, so we decided to include it. It was signed by Rocket/Hypnosis but we're not sure if it is his work, cos someone else's name was erased with a pencil eraser... Unknown writer, please contact us so we can give you much deserved credit!!! Here goes a story of Lust... Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-band protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output devices concurently, even if it meant time-sharing. One morning he arrived home just as the sun was crashing, and had parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself: "She looks user friendly, I'll see if she wants an update tonight". Mini was her name, and she was delightfully engineered with eyes like cobol, and a prime mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherials networking all over the place. He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin 32-bit floating point processors and enquired "How are you doing, Honeywell?". "Yes, I am well" she responded, batting her optical fibres engagingly and smoothing her console over her curvilinear. Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm going to stand-alone tonight" he said, "How about computing a vector to my base address. I'll output a byte to eat, and maybe we could get an offset later on." Mini ran a priority process for 2.67 milliseconds then transmitted 8K "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I need to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your backyard and meet you inside". She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and thinking "Wow, what a global variable, I wonder if she'd like my firmware?" Thay sat down at a process table to a top of form feed of fiche and chips and a bucket of baudot, Mini was in conversional mode and expended on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional acknowledgements, though in reality, he was analysing the shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old "Would you like to see my benchmark subroutine?", but Mini was again one step ahead. Suddenly she was up and stripping her parity bits to reveal the full funcionallity of her operating system software. "Lets get basic, you ram", she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware policing module had a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing its output buffer. A hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about. "Core." was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off. Micro soon recovered, however, when Mini went down on the deck and opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root device and was about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence. "No, No!" she cried, "You're not shielded." "Reset, baby", he replied, "I've been debugged." "But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child processes!" she protested. "Don't run away." he said "I'll generate an interrupt." "No! That's much to error prone, and I can't abort because of my design philosophy." Micro was locked in by this stage though, and could not be tirned off. But Mini soon stopper his trashing by introducing a voltage spike into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep. "Computers" she thought as she compiled herself, "all they ever think about is HEX!!!"