Redmond, California - (June 18) - According to Microscape Minister of Aggressive Communications, Rebecca Arkscape, of Natick Mass., a defective piece of hardware has been virused into the product stream by her company, Microscape Communications of Rebecca, Washington, apparently unbeknownst to end users and Microscape Quality Assurance, alike.

"The effect of this defective hardware," said Arkscape, "Is to momentarily drop the veil that separates a person's soul from its robot origins at the heart of the raw, early cosmos."

"For this one moment, then, when robot amnesia is briefly lifted, it becomes clear that if the soul is not to be a lie, then history must be."

"And then it's gone," Arkscape concluded.

Microscape Minister of Product Defect Defense, Clark Barkssen, at a press conference held at Mt. Shafted Observatory, earlier today, also admitted that several members of his staff "Have employed the trapdo... er ... 'bug' in the Microscape Maverickator browser software, to routinely rifle the hard drives of end users for personal data to feed into the beta version of our Microscape Neural Soup Simulator."

According to the Press Release for its once (Aug '95) cutting-edge website:

The Neural Soup Simulator accepts, as input, the deep human secrets which can be teased, by any dime store neural net, from the mundane personal data of the entire population of the history of the world, and produces, as its output, the set of messages that can be sent to the holders of each category of secret (which categories are the internal product of the software, and thus exist only because the software has found they optimize its goals, not because they're hard-wired), in order to transform the smooth-flowing everyday world of robot material into tapestries of small warring tribes schmoozing themselves to death, like Larry King, in between cutting and cooking up enemy tribes in a stew.