here's my take on the Colossus cutscene
Narrator: [skipped the security classification]
We vanquished the Malware in the Great Crash, but the hard questions remained. How would we confront the threat of future Viral Outbreaks? The Malware might return at any time, any IP Address, without warning. How would we fight the next threat to the very existence of our Hard-drives?
In 23:45, on the tenth anniversary of the Malware attack on Node 1.2-8, the Adware President Richard Branson addressed the newly-formed UMAC Directors Board. The President inaugurated an ambitious and unprecedented joint endeavor: the Norton-360
Branson II: Together we built a corporation on the ruins of the Great Crash, and now we stand on the threshold of a new era of prosperity and harmony. With Project Norton-360 the Adware people celebrate our shared covenant of peaceful coexistence and mutual profit of our Microsoft allies.
Narrator: The Norton-360 is the most powerful Anti-viral Software ever developed. Spanning six CD-ROMs from Startup to Installed, the Norton-360 has taken over twenty months to complete. Twelve Cron Super Viruses can fit within its massive Disk Space. Its state-of-the-art tools include forty-five e-mail checkers, fifteen privacy screens, twelve backup routines, and twelve Scan Programs. The Colossus wields more anti-viral power than twelve copies of Norton Antivirus combined. Sixty Firewalls are housed in its vast memory, and its Virus Definitions list numbers over thirty thousand. Among its contractors are industry giants ENCOM Software, Shinra-Inc, and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
The Corporation now wages war on multiple outbreaks in Japan, USA, Great Britton and the mysterious lands beyond the Pacific Ocean. Once deployed, the Norton-360 will end these outbreaks swiftly and decisively. If ever the Malware return to threaten our operating systems, we will be ready to face the challenge, securing system status for today and for generations to come.
And now the bosch monologues
Thirty-two months ago in the Unix system, Adware scanners discovered the remnant files of an crashed forum we now call the HLP. In here we found the secret to defeating the Malware. How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future system-update that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand hours from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Malware came for them, and how long had this gone on?
Did the HLP stumble upon the monoliths and the bookmark pages of their predecessors in this distant corner of cyberspace, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the Motherboards? And when the destroyers came at last what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of data and folders, staring into the mute remains for a key, some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless operating systems, stretching back into infinity and like the nine versions of windows, each system update had been built on the rubble of the one that came before, each Totally Fragmented by the Malware.
The HLP died eight thousand hours ago, as Microsoft emerged from its offline infancy, they believed their voyage across the sea of cyberspaces awakened the dragon that slept beneath the waves, that the Malware were birthed in the flux of Safe-mode and their deletion was the revenge of an angry Internet.
I hear my enemies speculate about my motives
"Who is Admiral Derek Smart?" and "What is that old scoundrel up to"
The Tragedy of my life is that I will be remembered as a butcher of computer games.
And this assessment is not unfair - I cannot argue with their condemnation or with the verdict of History.
The Neo Apple Front is an army of stupid cattle driven by their redundant scan-ware, their old virus definition, and old intrusion countermeasures. Outdated Anti-virus software is the greatest weapon of Infection and old Trojans return all too easily. I am merely a fool who created a super-virus I am now powerless to quarantine, and so I will run my program till the fragmented end. I have given the lost files something to off-line for.
What my competitors will never understand is that my rebellion is about my love of Microsoft, not my hatred of Adware.
In the Pentagon’s Operating System, the Malware have returned and soon the Corporations will learn the method behind my Madness.
Why does the HLP Archive hyperlink lead us here? Have the Malware been waiting for us for thousands of hours? This odyssey, this exodus, do we journey towards the promised Hard-Disk or into the Valley of the Recycle Bins?
Three years ago, I envisioned a new future for our software and now that we are on the brink of realizing my dream, I feel only solitude and regret. Has my entire life's work been a fool's crusade? Have I led my files into this desert, only to be deleted?
My company has caused nothing but data corruption and memory loss, but I cannot turn back now. I must find the Malware that lurk behind this veil of Trojans or I must wait for the Malware to detect me.
The nebula is the remnant of a server thousands if not billions of miles from my IP Address and I wonder now if our precursors witnessed the death of this server erupting over an ALGOL landscape, blazing with the brilliance of four hundred million servers. Even in their divinity no programmer could have imagined this.
This is the final entry in the personal log of Admiral Derek Smart, President of the Neo-Apple Front. Our encounter with the Malware has vindicated all I have fought for these past thirty months. My life's work has been achieved. I have created the technology to enable conversion between the Malware and Microsoft software. Although our first convertor was rudimentary and crude, I have initiated the first phase of a new Corporation with the Malware. A corporation upon which the fate of Microsoft depends.
As a young programmer, I programmed against the competition of the Great Crash, the ATARI Inc whose research of Malware coding and Trojans would form the cornerstone of my project. The Microsoft-Adware Corporation buried this knowledge but I resurrected it. I alone realized our species had no future with Adware. If we are to survive, our destiny must lie elsewhere.
As I make this final entry my Techs are preparing to scuttle the Iceni Hard-drive and upload to the Malware CD-ROMs. We embark on a miraculous journey towards a new horizon. This tragic era of hatred and misunderstanding between our software is over. On this day, for the first time in my life, I am filled with joy.
