Provenance

    When I was young, like many youths, I had phobias. What I was scared of usually had something to do with the dark; I was a mountain kid, so bugs and climbing and such were normal for me. The darkest place in my room while I went to sleep was the closet. A little nightlight dimly illuminated most of the room, but it couldn't penetrate the shadows in the closet. One of two sliding doors hung askew, the door's tilt created a large crack, and through it, a mysterious shadow loomed. After I was put to bed, often I would vacillate between staring at the shadow behind the sliding door and prying my gaze from it to stair at the ceiling, trying as hard as I could to not look back.

    One night, I was trying to sleep whilst staring at the ceiling, as I had done every night up until then that I can now remember. Out of my peripheral vision, toward the closet, I caught a glimpse of a white blue light. Like a flash, an impossibly small moment in time, and accompanied by a barely audible zapping grumble type of noise, there it was lit. Needless to say I was more terrified than normal, and had no idea what to do. Waking my parents or siblings didn't sound like a good plan, they didn't take kindly to being roused any time of the day, let alone in the middle of the night. I couldn't close the closet door any tighter than it already was, and had my doubts that closing it would help with whatever was in there. I finally decided to risk looking in there, if its going to kill me that warbled closet door isn't going to stop it, I thought as I got out of bed.

    I turned the lights on. Slowly at first, I approached the door in question, grasped the edge of it gingerly, and flung it open. A small black plastic box with a cord sat atop a disheveled pile of my toys, looking as though it were carefully placed there. I touched it lightly, what the heck is this, there was no obvious ways to open it, and I didn't recognize the cord connector at all. Utterly baffled, I threw a shirt over it and went back to bed, but with a much different thought process. I lay in wonder, I'll ask mom what it is tomorrow... but maybe I shouldn't tell anyone... no one will believe me, and finally after considerable consideration and time, I drifted off to sleep.

    The next day I went to school. I left it right where it had appeared, under the shirt, and decided that no one else needed to know about the mysterious plastic box and cord that had flashed into my life. While at school, I looked at every cord I could find. When I got home, I looked at the cords on the TV, VCR, and cable box. Nothing I saw matched my cord, and I was at a loss. Some day I'll find what this plugs in to...

    I figured out what the connector was. I never told anyone about it, actually this accounting is the first about that night, light, and mysterious appearance. Some time in the mid 90s I was at a friends house and they had a new computer. It had a port that looked familiar, a port that I would later learn as USB. Uh, so wait... what? how? That doesn't make any sense at all. That standard hadn't been invented when I first discovered the plastic box among the shadows of my closet.

    It took me a few years to get a computer that I could plug my futuristic hard drive into while having some privacy. When I got the computer it took a few years still to find software that would open the files. One of the files is a .odt file and the rest are .rns, roughly ten years after its appearance I was able to see what was on the hard drive.

To be continued...