Next...ApoC++alypse Now! - Carol's After-Action Report
Too long off The Net, I needed a mission. And a System Administrator always gets what she wants.
The man in the dosier photos was familiar, though older, fatter, balder than when when I'd known him so long ago. McMillan & I had been partners then, young and impetuous, anxious to try anything that held the promise of adventure. Then, returning from that close escape in Mexico, I went for a double half-caf mocha espresso with extra cinnamon while he waited in the Customs line, and when I returned, he was gone.
I'd heard he'd changed, and the dossier summary confirmed it. He'd retreated to the most remote of hi-tech backwaters and surrounded himself with a networked array of personal computers which he worshipped like gods. Pentiums, 486s, 386s, 286s, even an ancient Radio Shack Model III, 32k of RAM. The horror. There seemed no limit to the depths of his depravity.
The file contained a copy of one of his postings, downloaded from an Internet newsgroup...
"The abstract interface to an object is the set of its signatures, which characterize all messages which may be sent to it. Sub-classes inherit the supertype of the base. Object instances with identical interfaces may implement identical messages differentially. Virtual methods enable the context-specific behavior of an object to be determined at run-time via polymorphic dynamic binding."
Obviously, he'd gone completely mad.
He'd have to be off-lined -- with extreme prejudice.