Of course the PC isn't alive. What a silly notion.
It is a computer program, after all. And after being passed from person to person and undergoing the addition and subtraction of lines of code, it had many subroutines that may have given it the semblance of life... It wasn't perfect, though. Just like
any other program, the Master PC came with its fair share of glitches. There wasn't any Quality Control or Tech Support lines for this program.
Mary Jane's image spun on the unattended computer's screen. Messing around with the Chimera templates had been so fun that Peter didn't realize he'd run into a glitch. The settings that he'd played with, using up all the save slots in the archive, who
knows what went wrong? The program flashed a message:
RUNTIME ERROR
PROGRAM RESTART
REVERTING MODEL TEMPLATE TO LAST SAVED ARCHIVE IN 30 SECONDS, CANCEL Y/N?
Unfortunately for Mary Jane, turning the autosave off meant that her normal appearance and history would be erased in favour of a new gestalt form. There was no one to stop the timer from ticking down to zero.
Across town, Mary-Jane Watson gasped as her mind, body and past began to merge with: