Dear Vector prime: Ever encountered a data ghost?
Dear Ghost Gatherer,
Once, during my travels, I was summoned to the planet Gorlam Prime to assist the native Gorlamites with banishing a particularly malevolent data ghost who stalked the deepest levels of their planetary archives. In recent years, it had indeed evolved into a kind of “data poltergeist”: no longer content to simply lurk in the corners of their archives, it now rampaged across the network, and left a trail of corrupted files in its wake. Being quite unused to this kind of problem, I took the precaution of calling in a few Autobot specialists: Chromedome, Mainframe, and Ectronymous Diamatron.
It was quite a thrilling… “battle”, I suppose, although the conflict was entirely bloodless, as it raged across motherboards and servers. Mainframe was a formidable combatant once he’d plugged himself into the Gorlamite supercomputer—of our merry quartet, he was the only ‘bot able to meet the ghost on its own terms. Using his mnemosurgical tools, Chromedome was able to determine that this “ghost” was in fact a leftover of Gorlam Prime’s organic past: leftover brain scans from the great evolutionary leap from organic to machine, these corrupted copies had somehow fled into the deepest parts of the net, amalgamated with one another into a barely-sentient creature.
Fortunately, Ectronymous was able to improvise a digital “trap” that safely disconnected the ghost from the rest of the net and isolated it onto a single hard drive where it could do no harm.