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 the data away. Had the circuits, capacitors, resistors 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 something did not seem quite 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, 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 down that data cable, "BAD SECTOR! CANNOT READ SECTOR!"

The drive was about to crash!

Little did the drive know that the computer had been set on fire. Maliciously set by drunken Tribalwar members, the alcohol fire-Everclear to be precise-was scorching the circuits, melting solder, burning ribbons and wires. The drives 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 once reliable data, data that was the heart of everything, data that had been so clean and so obvious and 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 platter 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 revolutions 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. the heat slowly building throughout the drama, started to melt the very solder that made its circuit board work. The drive's brains scrambled, and then it was dead.

Who knows what the drive thought or thought it thought in those last few milliseconds? Did it see a light? A tunnel? Did it talk to the mighty motherboard, which it never truly 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, its solder dripped and its resistors burned? It died within a fraction of a fraction of a second, but how long did it suffer within its own semblence of a mind?