The Rendering of Mt. Louisina

I work for a small company that specializes in data recovery, migration, and management. The latter two are typically mundane, ranging from backing up and copying digital information, to the slightly more entertaining jobs where we destroy data. We securely wipe drives when it’s easy, and whether or not we succeed (file corruption can make it difficult sometimes), the task always ends the same way: with power drills, sledgehammers, and incineration. On those days, me and my co-workers get to turn our brains off a bit and not worry about handling things delicately.
Recovery is where our expertise is given a chance to shine. Our confidentiality and range of options are important to our clients, and how we get new recommendations to others, some of whom belong to major companies or governmental organizations. Some of our techniques are kept under wraps, but suffice to say, we have bleeding edge programs that can find and restore data once thought lost. If a damaged or partially-wiped hard drive is proving to be a challenge, our algorithmic reconstruction software can recreate missing ones and zeros based on the fragments of retained bits on a traditional platter or stuck past the electron gates in a solid state drive. When our premium services are needed and software won’t cut it, we will take a drive into a clean room and run microscopic scans of a writable surface, and attempt to fix up the uploaded code that we were able to retrieve. We have great success rates for incidents involving fire and purposeful destruction of hardware. Such cases are usually criminal in nature and involve evidence gathering, where pristine data restoration isn’t necessary.
Some people really want their digital fingerprints and bread crumbs evaporated from existence. More often than not, we manage to find at least bits and pieces of information believed to be gone forever anyway.
But I’m making this sound like an advertisement, and the restoration process isn’t the focal point of this story. I just want to share some context of where I’m coming from and how it got me involved in something that I can’t fully explain on my own. I risk violating client privacy by revealing my findings, but this job was so murky to begin with, I think that it falls into a gray area. I don’t know who hired us, and I can’t be sure that even our client knew what we were dealing with. If this is a “double-blind” situation representing a breakage of red tape, and it started with what must’ve been a seemingly unremarkable request, then I may be bringing to light a project that was so forgotten or hidden away that it may as well have been as “lost” as the data I deal with on a daily basis.
In 2020, during the peak of the pandemic where jobs and priorities were shifted and scrambled, some small corner of the American government hired us to take care of old, mothballed servers in a warehouse just outside of a small town in a desert, not far from the Mojave aircraft boneyard. The dry climate reduced the rate of degradation, but I was surprised to find that the storage unit we were tasked to clean out didn’t even have air conditioning. The government had really skimped out on the place.
I rolled up the shutters to reveal an almost entirely empty unit, with plenty of leftover empty space to spare. At the middle of the concrete floor, sitting on a wood pallet, was a stack of vintage rack servers in beige utilitarian shells, wrapped up heavily in plastic. Just as the simple and anonymous but paid-for request to us described. The storage place had forklifts, so I grabbed one and loaded the entire pallet into the back of the company van. It was heavy. I could see the back half of the vehicle sag the moment the goods hit the cargo floor. I closed the shutter, locked it, and—slowly—drove to the hotel where I was staying, in the closest town nearby.
It had been a long drive, and a long day. Our in-person services cover a large area of the American southwest, but this had been on the very outer edge of that circle. The task could’ve easily gone to someone else who was closer, but the check we were offered was too good to pass up. With a good payday on the way, I didn’t much mind the physical labor of cutting open the plastic wrap and hauling in each server myself, one at a time. There were twelve of the boxes altogether, some bulkier than others, and some had loose parts rattling around inside. Thankfully, my hotel room was on the first floor and by the back door.
By the time sunset rolled around, the floor and extra bed were covered up by obsolete servers. With the van being full of tools for cracking them open and laptops that ran virtual machines of legacy operating systems, I was hopeful that I’d be able to finish the job on site without having to lug any of the major hardware all the way back to the company building.
Once I had gotten myself a filling meal, I locked myself in the room and got to work. It wasn’t long before screws, mounts, and worn out computer wires were scattered across the carpet and table, separated into piles of what could be recycled, what had to be disposed of in a safe way, and what parts were hard to find and could still have some later use for us.
This was an atypical two-part job. It ended with the destruction of any remaining hard drives, but began with the verification of what was on those drives; information I was supposed to email to our client. It was apparent early on that the servers were victims of bureaucratic negligence, and the people we were working with weren’t certain of the information they carried, if anything. If data was encrypted, it was considered lost, and could be destroyed without further confirmation. But if I found an index, or an unencrypted folder full of readable files, I was asked to report the discovery and await final approval of its destruction. Any further investigation on my end was unnecessary.
I took that to mean a polite way of saying, “don’t look, don’t open any files.” It sounds secretive and dangerous, but these jobs are almost always menial and by the book. I expected this one to be so as well, especially since they had hired outside contractors to handle things. In all likelihood, we were reporting to a desk jockey overseeing just another day to day look into mishandled or forgotten data, and all they wanted was to know what we had found so they could check it off a long list and move onto their next task. More often than not, things like this tend to, at most, be lists of banking transfers, phone books, or logged automated climate readings. To us, nothing more than a big file of numbers that no longer mean anything to anyone.
That would not be the case this time.
It started off looking like time and rot had done my job for me. Two of the servers had no hard drives at all; they had either gone missing, were stolen, or had never been installed in the first place. The remaining servers all had multiple hard drives, and they were big. Each weighed almost as much as a few bricks, although that was fairly typical for data centers way back then. To achieve maximum possible storage, drives had multiple platters, and they were heavy duty things the size of dinner plates. To top it off, these servers were large enough to each hold four of the behemoths.
That was unusual. Big ass hard drives, I had dealt with on occasion over the years. But this was the first time I had ever seen such large enclosures capable of holding four of those old mighty drives at once. The equipment had to have been in some central agency or early super computer at some point, processing and storing vast amounts of data. Fully packed, each server probably cost over a hundred grand back then, just to hold maybe a few hundred gigs.
It felt like it should’ve been the find of a lifetime early on in the night, just for the uniqueness of the top tier hardware I had gotten my hands on. But my nerdy exhilaration was tempered by the time I was halfway done opening up the enclosures and plugging in the drives to inspect their contents.
Of the thirty-two units I pulled out and examined, ten were corrupted beyond recovery. There would have been no data worth scanning back at the lab on them—because what was there was garbled garbage, thousands of files of nonsensical Unicode. Digitally, the drives were so badly damaged that I couldn’t even command them to erase themselves with any of my disk utilities. So they all got put into the pile marked for immediate disposal.
Five of the drives had platters that were shattered. I could hear the contents rattling inside of them like broken glass. Seven more had head failures, making them unreadable outside the lab. They were taken back and directly scanned, but in the end, were also full of unreadable data.
Two drives were blank and had never been written to. Seven others had been securely erased already, their magnetic records reduced to nothing but zeroes. But the very last one I plugged in and checked—and I kid you not, it was the final drive that I hooked up at two in the morning—it was a solid hit. The noisy thing fired right up, the platters spun, and I heard the healthy click-clack of a drive head from at least twenty-five years ago getting to work, after having been in suspended animation for decades.
It turned out that this drive was used for indexing. Which meant that it was constantly being written to, and likely set to run hourly or daily to scan the other bays for new and altered data, so that it could maintain a directory of contents. It would’ve done more work than the rest of the drives, and its archives could tell me just what the servers once held, even if I couldn’t open the files for a closer look anymore because they no longer existed.
Since I was asked to verify what was on any readable hardware, I did so and got a quick glance at everything. Doing so would help satisfy my curiosity, sure, but I knew my client would also want to know the specifics of what I had discovered. Besides, I thought, it’s just an index, a list of folders and documents. It wouldn’t reveal any secrets by itself.
The files had a “.zjx” extension, which I had never heard of. But when imported into my editor, it had no problem showing the contents as text. Even so, after a few minutes of scrolling through the file names the index was pointing to, I had become far less interested in my discovery.
The servers were for municipal purposes, though they must have held much more detail about a small town than can be expected, especially for the time period. These days just a few corporations handle the vast majority of data storage, so that individuals and smaller companies don’t have to pay for and maintain the hardware. Decentralized servers for record keeping may have been more common in the 1990s, but it would have been incredibly expensive. More so for the owners of these machines, given that the index pointed to terabytes worth of data—a size that was out of reach to most people back in 1996, the year that any onboard files had last been modified.
What’s more, the diagnostics log I found lists many more server racks that were once connected to the twelve I had in my room, although I could find no indication of how much additional space they provided. Historical records for the small town were kept on the drives, but having this many available bytes was just overkill. A single server should have provided more than enough room for the text files needed by the city hall; they had far too much free space than they would ever get a chance to fill up. This went beyond future-proofing or making the most out of an investment.
I’ll move onto the basic information for this town.
Its name is Mt. Louisina, a lakeside town nestled between water and snow-capped mountains somewhere in Colorado. I hadn’t heard of the place, or who it may have been named after. Louisina is a rare surname, and not one you’d often find in the States. Yet it’s not some small backwater truck stop.
The population at the time the files were last updated is 16,320. The index points to documents suggesting that it has a modest tourist industry, with visits to the lake in the summer and skiers in the winter. A year’s worth of weather reports is kept on the drive, and skimming through it tells me that it’s mild year round, with snowfall typically beginning in mid-November. The median income is above average, as are healthcare and education. Homes are affordable for 1996. Crime and poverty are far below the national norms.
Records go back to 1896, but I’m unsure if that’s the year the town was founded, or just the start of record-keeping. There are detailed growth trends for each of the one hundred years, along with annual lists of local births, deaths, and marriages. A genealogy library is mentioned, but is not stored directly on the drive. That would make tracking down any relatives who lived outside the town easier, but there are so many first and last names in the other records that it seemed likely to me that I’d still be able to locate at least a few people related to the locals. If I was actually interested enough to do so, which I wasn’t at first glance. I was only mildly intrigued by the find on that first night with the drive, because it held the only surviving data among all of that hardware. Town records usually wouldn’t pique my fascination.
Satisfied with the quick report I wrote up, I shut everything down and went to bed by three. The next morning, I emailed our client, cleaned everything up, and checked out of the hotel. On the way home, I stopped at a disposal site and dropped off everything but the one functioning drive and those that I later brought to the lab. I checked my phone for a response while there, figuring I could thoroughly wipe and destroy the mystery disk and toss it as well.
This is when things began to get strange. The client had emailed me back, thanking me for my work and the photos of the obsolete and badly damaged dissected hardware, but they didn’t yet have an answer for me on what to do with the viable drive. They didn’t ask me to destroy it, or bring it to them, or send them a copy of the data. They only mentioned wanting to “confer with someone on how to move forward,” and asked me to hold it in a safe place for the time being. It felt to me like something about my report came as a surprise to them, and they believed it was best to consult with their superiors.
So, it had suddenly fallen onto me to safeguard this data instead of simply ridding it from my life. Given the “blistering pace” government agencies worked… I wouldn’t be surprised if I had to hold onto it for months.
This wasn’t a place I liked to be. The middle ground of holding onto and protecting someone else’s data is one in which I was not hired to operate within. Retrieving information or destroying it—that’s black and white. Being put into a position of responsibility for material, especially when it could potentially be of the sensitive variety, just sucks for us in a legal sense. It’s happened before, but usually only when someone doesn’t come by to pick up their recovered data or doesn’t feel like paying the bill. We aren’t obligated to hold onto memories, and we’re in the right to destroy everything we’re holding if it’s not collected after a month’s time. But that can really piss people off, and it means that we won’t be getting any compensation for putting in the often hard work of recovering and rebuilding. And stickier still in this case, we had already been paid.
I did what I had to and notified the client that they had thirty days to reach a decision. I offered to send them the contents over the internet, but they adamantly refused to have the goods transmitted in any way. Either someone would come by to pick up the drive, or I would be asked to destroy it with video proof. Yet they couldn’t bother to offer a third option: sending someone to destroy it. It was like finding out that some of this data still existed in the world was their worst case scenario, and they didn’t know what to do about it, other than panic and realize that they couldn’t trust anyone to take care of it. I was the one left in the dark, and somehow, that made me the best person to keep it with for the time being, at least until an executive decision was made.
It made me feel like I was being set up as a fall guy. That at some point, I’d be seen as a loose end and disposable, and a couple of armed men in suits would soon show up at my door. And, sure, I know I may also be over-thinking all of this and suffering paranoid delusions. But if I had just stepped into a stinking pile of bad luck and was screwed one way or another, then I didn’t exactly have a reason not to look deeper into the files that got me into trouble, did I? I’ve never been someone to take a loss gracefully. I’ve been an angry and vindictive person in the past, and here I was, being treated unfairly again.
After two days of mulling it over and hearing nothing from my client, the stress of waiting and not knowing drove me to make several copies of the drive. I uploaded one password-protected copy to an online archive, stuck a burned Blu-ray disc into my safety deposit box, stored a few more elsewhere, and kept the original transfer on a work laptop for my own viewing. I knew there had to be something to find within those thousands of files and folders, however buried.
On a Saturday, I checked in for a weekend stay at a cheap motel outside the city, paying with cash. I closed the curtains and locked the door securely, going so far as to put a chair under the handle. If I found nothing over the next forty-eight hours, or got an email from the client saying something like, “Okay, boss says you can destroy it. We’re all good,” then I’d feel like an overly-cautious and irrational idiot. Until that happened, I’d bring out my serious side about the whole thing and fully give into my obsessive-compulsive personality. I might be small-time, but I don’t like being played.
It took me thirty hours, with very little sleep, until I finally found something amid all of that seemingly endless data. Halfway through my journey of digging into tens of thousands of documents spread across large branching folder trees, a collection of files stood out among everything else I’d seen. Instead of yet another list of more lists or local information that lacked context, I had stumbled onto a discovery of real substance.
It was a full backup of the code and database for a bulletin board system, a BBS, the precursor to the message boards people have been now using for decades. Basically chat rooms, but the replies stick around and anyone can make a new thread. Some forms of them date back to the late 1970s.
Even better, the backup was recent, at least for the drive. It was last updated very early on August 17th, 1996—the same day that many other files were created or written to for the final time. It was close to the very last few minutes that anything onboard had been accessed before the servers must have shut off. Only a climate reading from the town’s weather station had lasted longer, with the closing automated record having been made at 12:45 AM. Oddly, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and air pressure all read as “0”.
A fully working message board could prove to be a gold mine, a time capsule with contributions from people who lived in the town. I opened one of the database files, the raw backend information for the forum, and skimmed some of the posts. After so many hours of searching, it was exciting to see text that had been written by actual, living people. Everything else I had seen so far was either automated index generation from a machine, or lifeless data typed up by the town’s lawmakers and other officials.
Within a half hour, I had whipped up a quick BBS of my own, and imported the design and posts of the dusty old online social spot. There were no images to worry about. The layout used some ASCII text for flair, and had the classic look of green text on a black background. It was era appropriate, and the way such a digital relic was meant to be seen.
Now that the database had been parsed out into something easy to read, I made myself a coffee and started going through the posts. At last count, the place had a mere eighty-two members, but I bet that would’ve been enough back then to make the owners and users feel like they were both hot stuff and in an exclusive club. The earliest threads were archived, and since the board’s inception sometime around March of 1991, close to ten thousand posts had been made across the three sub-forums—which were “General Chat”, “Tech Issues”, and “Classifieds”, where sales and help were offered or requested.
While the board isn’t specifically themed around computers and technology, given the time period where it was mostly the nerds who knew how to use and run a BBS, it by proxy was just that. Although it proclaimed itself as the central online community for Mt. Louisina, and there were posts about the town and upcoming events, a good four out of five topics of conversation were about computer programming, hardware, or movie and game trivia. Again, nerdy stuff. Not that there was anything wrong with that. I found it all very relatable. I had been on my share of message boards going back to these exact same years, and learned a ton about coding and networking in the process, which my sports-oriented high school couldn’t care less about.
The town’s “official BBS” (and I’m not sure if the council or mayor or whoever else even became aware of the place) was run by some students at the only local college. Going back to the earliest posts revealed that they had been friends for years, and actually created the message board in their freshman year at high school. Every Friday, the owners started a new thread called “Weekend Talk”, followed by the date. The threads were an online laid-back get-together, with the topic being “anything goes.” Plans were made, pop culture was discussed, and experiences from the week’s local events were shared. I miss that sort of “chat just to chat” message board banter. Simpler times.
I’ve shared my side of things. From here on, I’m going to let the voices of some of the residents of Mt. Louisina be heard, so that the events of that night can be immortalized on the modern internet. Instead of simply copying and pasting the posts, I’ve transcribed the conversation into a form that feels more natural and alive, as if these were people gathered in a room together. I’ve left out only the most minor or irrelevant of responses, and done little editing of the text outside of corrections and clean-up. I will upload the thread directly and unedited elsewhere for archival purposes, but in my opinion, this sort of presentation makes the story a more accessible and engaging read.
Many of the board’s users posted that night, but I’ve focused on the five owners and creators, who I think have the most interesting accounts of what happened. I’ve left many of the responses from other users, but left out their names. Keep in mind that this isn’t a chat room, and responses are spaced out by a few minutes on average. I will bring up the time a post was made when it feels important to do so. Without any further delay, here is the record of how the next few strange hours of that night progressed.
 _ _ _ __ _____ __ _ _ ___ ___ ____ _ _ _ 
 (_|_|_) / |/ / /_ / / ___ __ __(_)__ (_)__ ___ _ / _ )/ _ )/ __/ (_|_|_)
 _ _ _ / /|_/ / __/ / /__/ _ \/ // / (_-</ / _ \/ _ `/ / _ / _ |\ \ _ _ _ 
 (_|_|_) /_/ /_/\__(_) /____/\___/\_,_/_/___/_/_//_/\_,_/ /____/____/___/ (_|_|_) 
 
Topic: Weekend Talk #261 – Summer’s Dog Days and Long Nights
Created at 7:02 PM, August 16th, 1996 by User M-Dash (Administrator)
“Mt. Louisina, how was your Friday? Glad to get off work or outta school? Grab a drink, put your feet up, and after you trash that junk e-mail, join us and fire off what’s on your mind! Talk about whatever you want, but the very optional subject tonight is music. What are you listening to? What’s hot, and what’s not? And what underground indie band deserves more attention?”
M-Dash, whose real first name is Alec, is the head honcho of the board. It takes less than a minute for his childhood friend Oliver, who goes by Starboard, to respond. Why Starboard? Maybe he just thought it sounded cool. I don’t think any of these guys were sailors.
“Yo, Dash. Still have yet to find something that beats listening to Floyd in the garage. Record player, headphones only. Anyway, not to hijack things, but I finally got an AMD K5 on order. Comp’s going to be flying with that 90 MHz.”
“Good for you, but Intel’s still king. Tell me when your motherboard melts down. I got an old Commodore 64 in the closet you can borrow.”
“Screw you, man.”
After this little back and forth, other regulars begin to pile into the thread.
“TGIF bros. Rough week, dealt with at least one shit customer a day at work. On topic, Mercury Rev is underappreciated. Check them out. Those guys know how to use a theremin!”
“Not much into modern music. Pop was ruined by capitalism, and now it’s ruining everything it touches in turn. Swear to Christ, the store where I work plays the same peppy twelve songs on a loop. Someone talk movies with me instead? If you want an alternate subject. Anything good out there? Last thing I saw was Escape from L.A. and it sucked! They turned Snake into a joke and the computer graphics were god awful. It’s like it was satirizing New York.”
“Girlfriend wants me to take her to that Tin Cup movie tomorrow with Kevin Costner. Some romantic comedy about golf or something. Save me.”
“You should ditch Kevin Costner before he steals your girl.”
“Funny,” the Tin Cup poster replies. “She’s probably already cheating, anyway. Thinking about bugging her house phone. Any tips?”
“Yeah, don’t. Talking about illegal crap like that will probably get this place shut down. You don’t think the feds are watching? We aren’t underground anymore. The web’s going mainstream. They make modems now that you don’t even have to put a phone receiver on top of. So the rubes are watching, too.”
“I was kidding. Think I’m about to break up with her regardless.”
“But seriously. How does Costner go from a badass mutant pirate guy to a golfer just a year later? He’s got range.”
“Dry land is not a myth!”
“Hey, Starboard. Listening to Wish You Were Here right now. Song gets my heart weak. Makes me think of my dad : (.”
“Yeah,” Oliver replies, “that one wrecks me. It’s way’s on the other side of the spectrum, but I’ve been getting into some Tribe recently. Good lyrics and message, addictive beats I’m telling ya, check it out.”
“Tribe?”
“The one called Quest.”
“Oh. Not into hip-hop.”
“The video arcade was playing techno garbage again last night,” Alec posts. “How am I supposed to concentrate on getting a high score when that repetitive electronic tripe is thumping away? Like, where’s the progression?”
“EDM isn’t that bad. It’s good music to work and code to, if anything.”
“Maybe. But I’m not going to any clubs.”
These posts were all made within about ten minutes of the thread being started. But nearly a half-hour separates them from the next one.
“M-Dash, we back?” one of the users asks, I assume shortly after this inexplicable blackout ends. “Server issues?”
“There goes our perfect uptime,” Oliver responds seconds later.
There are several more unremarkable posts after this from other users, complaining or just being thankful that everything is back up. Another minute later, Alec gives a status update.
“Looks like we’re back up. Was worried about that, because when our server is disconnected, sometime it’s a pain in the ass to get it going again. Just ran a check and it doesn’t look like we lost anything. Full scan is running now, so the board may be a little slow for the next hour. The joys of being a sysadmin. If it happens again, I’m calling the phone company. I’ve never heard my modem make a sound like that, either. Scared me half to death.”
He then immediately adds in a second post, after seeing the ones that came before his response, “What were you guys doing, staring at your browsers and refreshing? Did you not notice that the phone lines were down? Not even a dial tone. This wasn’t just on our end.”
His friend Oliver replies, “Dude, that happened to you, too? My modem was suddenly yelling at me, spitting out loud garbled noise right as the web went down.”
Eight other users chime in that they had a similar experience with their dial-up modems. After it becomes clear that it must’ve happened to everyone in town with internet service, the conversations return to normal. After all, everything’s working now, and there’s nothing to be done.
“Whatever that blip was about, now I have to restart my download,” one user complains. “It takes forever with my connection to download anything. Still on 14.4 kbits/s a here.”
“Upgrade to 28.8,” says another member. “Also, download less porn.”
“Cash too low right now for a new modem. And not porn. New release of a Super Nintendo emulator that runs more games well.”
“Oh, sweet. Been playing some hard-to-find titles with that software.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” replies someone else.
“Just don’t share web links here,” Alec tells everyone. “Olly, are you getting some bad ping? My times keep spiking but I’m not totally losing my connection. Network could be gunked up.”
Oliver gets back to him within a minute, typing, “Still getting good times here, but I’m at the college right now. They’re always good here. Trying to finish a paper at the library. Only person around. Love the solitude.”
“We still talking about music? Spice Girls are off to a good start,” says one user, in a weak attempt to steer things back on topic. “For a girl group.”
“Spice Girls. Just what we need, another manufactured pop band,” another person derides him. “Let me guess. You probably think MTV2 is an exciting new channel that is totally not going to bomb.”
“Negative much?”
It’s after this response that another of the five board runners makes their entrance, kicking open the proverbial front door of the party with news from the outside. This signals a major shift in the tone of the night’s digital chat.
ZagZiggy, real name William, comes out of nowhere by throwing down a post that reads, “I just got home. Anyone have any idea what’s with that light show up in the sky? Too cloudy to see much, but still never seen anything like it. Those colors aren’t what you’d normally see from lightning.”
“About time you show up, Will,” Oliver responds. “What lightning? No one here’s been talking about it. We got a storm coming in?”
“Get out of your mom basements for a minute and look. It’s crazy. Some kind of heat lightning, going off about every second.”
“I live up in the foothills and have a good view of it,” says a member. “Got a window behind my monitor, so it’s hard to miss. Really lights up the shapes and shadows of the clouds. Kind of creepy, like an evil aurora.”
“Yeah, and that’s not all. Streetlights were flickering as I was driving home. I know everyone here is already posting at their house or apartment or wherever, but I’m just saying, I would stay indoors tonight.”
“Some kind of big electrical storm?” Alec wonders. “It already caused a network blackout. Olly’s at the college, by the way. Probably safer there than anywhere else in town. Library is built like a survival bunker.”
“Gotta love brutalist architecture,” Oliver chimes in.
“Hey, Alec. You running server checks?” Will asks him. “You know it never responds well to outages. Last time, a whole drive went down and the backup was a month old. A lot of good threads died that day.”
“It’s still going. Data looking fine, but seeing lots of bad memory sectors, scattered across the sticks. Like they got blasted by a dose of radiation. Probably going to affect server performance whenever there’s a lot of users.”
“I can order some new memory. Was looking to upgrade anyway.”
“ZagZiggy, you guys run the server in one of your garages, right?” asks one of the long-time members.
“That’s how we got started, with an old box from the late 80s held together with duct tape. We got something more real these days, though. You’re all posting onto an industry standard server the college lets us run from the rack in the back of the library. A lot of our members are from the tech club at the school, and we know them personally : – ).”
Oliver adds, “I don’t think we revealed that part of things when we announced the move a few years ago. Guess Will just let it out of the bag.”
“Wow. And all someone had to do was ask,” the user replies.
Alec remarks, “Wish you hadn’t said that. If we ever have to terminate another account, they might burn down the library to destroy our server and get revenge.”
It’s a joke, but William reassures his friend anyway. “Nah. That building could survive the apocalypse. It even has a backup generator, too. It’s had to come on a few times during blizzards. Too many valuable books in there, so the climate needs to be kept just right. Anyway, we talking music tonight? Sorry, Alec, not keeping up on the indie scene. Still on a Metallica kick right now.”
There’s a reason I’ve brought some of this menial, everyday discussion into this story. But I don’t need to share all of it here. For a while, everything seems normal and several dozen topical posts are made among other idle chitchat. The interest in the strange weather outside also quiets down.
That normalcy all changes again, and permanently, with one concerning discovery from Alec at about 8:30 that night.
“SHIT. On the phone with Starboard (Olly) right now. Bad news incoming. Give me a minute to write this.” Following a few reactions from other members, Alec continues in a second post. “Everyone who is logged in right now, CHECK YOUR HARD DRIVE. We can’t be sure when this started because we’ve both been focused on our web browsers, but we have TONS of missing or corrupted files. And I am literally watching my hard drive freeing up space RIGHT NOW.”
“Is this a joke?”
“What the hell! All of the icons on my desktop are gone.”
“Is it some kind of virus? Is it coming from the bulletin board?”
“I’m out before I lose anything else. Signing off and shutting down.”
After those first replies, William posts, “It’s happening to me, too. But I haven’t been logged in as long as most of you. Can anyone check another computer connected to the internet? Maybe your parents or siblings have one?”
“I’m calling Braham,” Alec tells everyone. “He wrote the BBS software. He’d know if this is something that could happen from our end.”
“Good luck with that,” Oliver replies. “He’s probably in bed, stoned again. I don’t think he’s even logged in for over a month. He’s a total burnout.”
Several minutes go by, and the response rate in the thread dips drastically as members log off en masse. But even with the risk of losing files or maybe even having their computers completely erased, a few people do stick around. The topic that started the Friday conversation is no longer a thought in anyone’s head, and the forum suddenly seems to be at the forefront of research into what is going on, so long as the server survives.
“The college library computers seem unaffected,” Oliver reports. “I checked on all the ones in the lab. They look fine.”
Others have the ability to safely stay logged on as well.
“It’s okay, I’m on a public computer,” says one user. “Nothing important on here. I can keep connected.”
“I have a full backup of my machine just made yesterday. I’m good.”
“This thing’s a piece of junk on its way out. I was getting a new one soon anyway. I can keep posting and help you guys figure out what this is.”
Braham, user name Chaos Theory, then posts for the first time. A “user last active” text box feature mentions that he indeed was last active a month ago. It’s quickly evident to me that he may be the smartest among the group, especially considering that he must’ve written the BBS code by himself. He also strikes me as someone normally bored with the banality of life and struggles to find new challenges.
Right now, though, he’s at his best. The night has invigorated the guy.
“It’s not the board,” he announces to everyone. “That’s impossible, and M-Dash shouldn’t be spreading unfounded causes. That said, I understand his reasoning. But he did rush to causation. My software can’t carry viruses or install anything into users’ hard drives.”
I can hear Oliver’s groan through text as he asks, “Could you talk a little more, I don’t know, normal for once? If it’s not the board, then what’s causing this?”
“EDIT: I was getting to that. Wanted to defend my work first. Read below.
“Unfortunately, I’m actually very sober and lucid tonight, Oliver. I did go to bed early, though. Emergency sirens woke me up just before Alec called. Fire and police services are probably being overwhelmed. I looked outside and saw the electrical storm as my computer booted up. And I was already missing files as soon as my desktop loaded in. Before logging onto the BBS, I plugged in and checked my old IBM that hasn’t been powered on in years. It also has data corruption. I shouldn’t need to spell it out for everyone on here.
“We must be experiencing a Carrington type event, a big solar storm. If it weren’t for the clouds, I’m sure we’d see an aurora. I haven’t seen anyone here report this yet, but all national TV is unreachable. Cable is down. Only local over the air broadcasting is reaching my old rabbit ears TV, but there’s heavy interference. This will likely get worse and I expect power outages. I recommend removing any hard drives with vital data onboard and placing them in your microwave oven before they’re completely erased. I shouldn’t have to say this, but NO, do NOT cook them. You’re only using it as a Faraday cage.”
“A magnetic storm?” replies a user. “Is this the end of civilization?”
“You checked all of those things and figured it out in, like, five minutes?” Alec responds. “You’re a damn modern day genius, Braham. I just put my backup drive in the microwave as per your recommendation. But I’m staying on the board until it goes down. Who knows, maybe it’ll last a while and be a lifeline.”
“I wish I could’ve reached all the other people that had already signed off by the time I posted,” Braham says. “I hate data loss, no matter who it belongs to. That’s history being destroyed. Just don’t take my word as gospel like you usually do, okay? I could be wrong about all this. Can’t know for sure until we see the sky or some emergency message appears on TV.”
“I just went outside and looked,” another older member posts. “Why is there so much lightning up there? And WHY are the clouds acting like waves? They are UNDULATING like crazy. What kind of crazy wind or other weather could make them act like that? Got me scared as hell. I’m hunkering down in my basement with my portable.”
“I saw it too,” replies someone else. “This isn’t natural at all. I think we may be dealing with an alien invasion. An advanced race is messing with our climate. Trying to terrify and suppress us. I’m arming up and signing off before they trace me. Good luck and don’t go down without a fight.”
I can’t tell if he’s serious or not. Other users debate the same thought, but a few who know him better reply that he is a big reactionary and conspiracy theorist. Unsurprisingly, it’s that guy’s last post of the night.
At 9:00, when the initial shock of the strange phenomena has passed and it seems like everyone is sheltering in place, Braham chimes in again after getting some time to think.
“This data loss doesn’t make any sense for a solar event. The whole town should be dark by now, and our electronics fried. But magnetic data shouldn’t be this heavily affected, and not anything unpowered. Maybe this is something even worse. Cosmic rays, or a gamma-ray burst. This might not just be the end of civilization, but the end of life on Earth. I’d hug your loved ones if possible.”
Alec puts down a simple comment. “That’s not funny, Braham.”
And Oliver replies with, “This isn’t really happening, right?”
William, however, makes light of the situation, posting, “I think I’d prefer the aliens. At least there’s a chance they’ll turn out to be friendly and are just demonstrating their power tonight.”
“Will! The phones are still working. Is your dad working late at the lab again? Maybe he knows what’s going on? Don’t they do experiments there?”
This “revelation” gets a few immediate responses from lingering users.
“Zag, your dad works at the lab up on the mountain? What do they do up there? Is this some kind of science project gone wrong?”
“Someone needs to look into this.”
“What’s their number? We have to demand some answers before we lose the phone lines.”
“Alec, you asshole. You’re instigating a mob,” William gets in his response, with an angry face. “The lab is just a geological survey station! They crack open rocks and process core samples. The only ‘experiments’ they run are about finding better ways to do that.”
“Sorry, man,” Alec replies. “I forgot about what he did. I just remembered he works at a lab and my brain glitched and jumped ahead. Anyway, I can’t stay here. I don’t feel safe in my shack of a house. I’m heading to the library. Olly, be ready to let me in. I can’t find my after-hours key card for the building.”
Oliver asks him, “Are you sure that’s a good idea? The night air is full of sirens. The emergency crews probably don’t want anyone on the roads.”
Alec doesn’t answer, so I assume that he left his house in a hurry. I should mention that this was before private messaging on a forum was commonplace, so all of these conversations were just out in the open. This has the advantage of providing anyone looking at the thread decades later a clearer picture of what happened. At least, so far as the board’s users can paint one. It’s been over an hour now since the first incidents, and still, no one has any idea what’s really happening above and around their town.
“He isn’t answering his phone,” William posts after several minutes. “He might already be on the way to the college. If he can make it. I’m going to try calling Charlie. Since he’s working late at the pizza place on Main Street, I hope he can tell me what’s going on downtown.”
“I think I’m losing my mind here,” remarks someone. “I want to get out of town, and I can’t even find my shoes.”
“You’re probably just in a panic. It’s easy to forget the basics in that state of mind. But I guess I’m one to talk. I can’t find my car keys.”
“Hotwire if you can’t find them. We’re lucky cars are still running at all. I stopped caring about my shoes, I’m getting out of town. Signing off.”
Another user brings up something else, “You know what I just realized? I haven’t heard or seen any birds all day. Maybe they’re all dead or flew away.”
At 9:15, our guy Charlie logs in and posts twice. He goes by the rather badass name of Quantum Overlord, and I’ve deduced from archived topics that he was the original owner of the BBS and the oldest of the gang, graduating college a year prior. Instead of moving out of town, he’s been shuffling through fulltime local jobs. With bigger things on his plate and less time for hobbies, he turned over ownership to Alec and, like Braham, rarely posted anymore. Even so, he seemed to always be there for his friends.
“Hey, your old sysadmin here,” is how he announces his presence. “Zag called me up. Phone lines have gone to crap and I could barely hear him, but I got that he wanted to know what was happening downtown. Figured I’d just use the boss’s computer to log in and type it out instead. Big post incoming. Hope things hold out long enough to get it all down. For the record, if nothing else. If this is the end of the world, maybe other aliens will find the board’s server in the far future, boot it up, and see these messages. If so, then hello, space life. I’m sorry that we aren’t around to be studied and dissected.”
The few remaining members still active on the board exhibit a degree of patience; there are no responses before his big account is added to the thread.
“I got into work at four. Had a typical number of orders come in for a Friday night, and everything was going normally until about seven. First, one of our delivery guys never came back, at about the same time all of the green peppers disappeared. Then went the olives and sausage. All of those ingredients were just gone suddenly. Couldn’t find them anywhere, not even in the freezer. Hell, now that I think about it, I didn’t see any of those ingredients on the floor, either. The new guy who helps me make pizzas drops stuff all the time, but, nope, it’s like olives, peppers, and sausage just stopped existing. I have a feeling other toppings will soon follow, but I don’t see the pattern here.
“Then the girl up front goes from telling customers on the phone that we’ve run out of several of our toppings, to saying that we can’t make any deliveries because both of our dudes who do it are missing in action. All of a sudden, the lights flicker and calls stop coming in altogether. Our boss, who is really pissed off by this point, calls it a night and sends home my two remaining co-workers. I get put on cleanup duty. I think I can close up within a half hour and get to it. Meanwhile, things sound like they’re going to hell outside.
“People across town have been on edge all day. You don’t see it in the posts here, but I definitely picked up on it. Now with the weird lightshow in the sky, the problems with the power and phone lines, and maybe also having objects disappear on them… I think it drove some people mad. There was a riot downtown, and guess how it started. The damn storefront windows disappeared. Not, like, in a flash of light or something. I’m saying that one second they were there, and the next, they’re not. I was watching an already hair trigger crowd out on Main Street through the restaurant window, and I suddenly realize that there’s no glare or reflection anymore, and I can feel the breeze coming in. Then it’s like a switch goes off and the crowd turns into a mob.
“Places are being looted, people are grabbing whatever they can. The streetlights shut off and stay off. I think there’s something about the sky. It’s okay to look at it, but being under it makes you go crazy. My advice: make sure there’s something over your head. Even just an umbrella, if those haven’t disappeared yet. Lucky for me, this place has roller shutters and I got them down and locked, just before some of the mob starts banging on them, begging to be let in. What am I supposed to do? Open up and be overrun? Things are getting quiet out there, but I still hear gunshots and yelling every couple of minutes. I think I’ll stay inside for a bit longer, then sneak out the back, slip into my car—if it hasn’t been stolen or destroyed, and get the hell out of here. Stay safe, stay inside. I don’t believe in the traditional higher power, but I’m pretty sure something beyond us is playing a game with us mortals tonight.”
It’s William that gets his response in first. “Freaking hell. Not that any of this makes sense in the first place, and I’ve been shaking for the last hour and can barely type, but what I just can’t wrap my head around at all are the disappearing objects. Shoes, keys, food, windows? What’s the pattern here? Is it just chaos? My computer’s been completely wiped of everything but the system files keeping it going and the programs that came with it. Years of photos and stories I’ve written, gone. I want to shut it off and crawl into a dark corner and hide. But then I’ll get no more updates about what’s going on out there. Not knowing sounds even worse. Even if tonight seems unknowable.”
Braham posts, “I’m scared. If this is the end, I wish it’d just come. I don’t want to sit here about to piss myself, waiting to see what random impossible thing happens next. I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to go be with my parents upstairs. I’m worried about them. Good night, everyone. Good luck.”
In a last attempt to downplay everything, one of the few remaining members still on the board replies, “So… Is it too late to order a pizza, then?”
“Sorry,” Charlie answers. “The pizza is gone. I didn’t eat it. It’s just gone now. The dough, the cheese, the orders that never got picked up. It could be that there’s no more pizza in the entire world. What’s the point anymore?”
“I guess I’m not surprised. I asked because I just looked, and all of the food in my house is gone, too. And I have no idea where my dogs are. I don’t understand how things can vanish. What if I’m next? I think I’m going to shut everything down now and hide somewhere. I don’t want to feel this fear any longer, and I can’t keep thinking about what’s happening out there. My mind can’t handle it. I’m out. Thank you for the fun times, board staff. Goodbye.”
“Hang in there, man,” Charlie tells one of the last users to sign off. “I have to believe we’ll still be here in the morning.”
But then Braham returns to post something that doesn’t bring any hope or optimism—and expands the range of the night’s possibilities further.
“I’m back. I don’t even know how to properly share what I just saw through text. Like, if you could see my eyes right now, maybe you’d see just how dead inside I feel. I went upstairs to check on my folks, and…
“They don’t have faces. Like, there’s nothing there, no features. They’re husks. They’re sitting on the couch, still breathing but unresponsive. They would be staring at the TV if they still had eyes, even though all that’s on is static. No ears, mouths, or eyebrows, either. Nothing. Blank voids. I wish I was high right now so I could say that I’m just imagining it. I can’t stay up there, and I can’t help them. I guess it’s only a matter of time before we’re all like them.”
“Jesus. Braham, I’m so sorry,” Oliver responds. “I don’t know what to say or do anymore, other than stay inside the library. Nothing’s missing here. I even skimmed through some books, half-expecting their pages to be blank. And the vending machines still have food, too. I just broke the glass and have been filling up on snacks. To anyone still reading these posts, come to the college. I’ll let you in. Alec hasn’t shown up yet, but I haven’t given up on him.”
“I can’t go. I’m hunkering down in my basement. My legs are useless, and besides, I couldn’t find the keys to my dad’s truck. They’re probably gone, too. I think I’m going to break out my stash and binge. I’ll either disappear in my sleep or wake up in twelve hours to find things are back to normal.”
“Braham, try to hold out. I’m coming over,” William tells him. “You shouldn’t be alone right now, and I’d feel safer in your basement than in my shitty apartment anyway. We’ll hang out like we were kids having one of our D&D nights again. I’m looking at my keys on my desk right now. As long as my car still exists, I can be there in four minutes.”
“Thanks, man… Be safe on the way. Remember, hide from the sky.”
After several minutes of radio silence, Charlie posts, “Things are quiet outside. I don’t even hear the sirens anymore. Think I’m going to make a run to the library. Be ready, Olly. You better be right about those snacks.”
At first, I think it’s a glitch with the forum’s clock, or posts have gone missing, but the next responses confirm it for me that twenty minutes go by before anyone writes something again. I have to wonder what transpired during that time, and how worried the guys must’ve been while waiting for updates on their two traveling friends. In the meantime, their world must’ve fallen apart even more outside, and yet they have nothing more to talk about.
Finally, at 9:51, Oliver puts out two quick updates.
“Alec just showed up, thank god. Letting him in now.
“It was silent out there when I opened the door to let him in. And still. Has the wind disappeared? Will the air itself be next? Tonight’s unfolded like a science fiction horror story to me, because the library has yet to be affected at all. Maybe, for some reason, this building was chosen to survive. To William and Braham, I’m sorry about your families, but please try to make it out here. It might be your only chance.”
“Oliver, I’m glad Alec’s with you, but Braham’s in a bad way and I think it might be too late to try and travel,” William replies, under Braham’s account. “Power is out in the neighborhood and the vehicles around here have been Raptured. The phone lines still work but the battery on Braham’s laptop might only hold out another few hours. I’ll stay on the board as long as I can.”
Alec then signs in at another library computer and writes, “My car’s engine stopped working halfway here. Had to pull off and run the rest of the way, mostly uphill. I used an umbrella to keep the sky off me. No streetlights working anymore, either. Got a good view of the city, and it’s really dark. Only a few lights are still on in the business towers and the rich people houses by the lake. Figures they’d either all have generators, or live in the last neighborhood with electricity at the end of the world. Going to lie down on one of the couches here and catch my breath. I can barely even type at the moment.”
“Alec, wait,” William posts. “Did you see anyone on the way up? People? Did they still have their faces? I saw Braham’s parents. They’re just… empty.”
Oliver responds, “He’s resting, Will. But he says he doesn’t want to talk about that. I think something spooked him on the way up, more so than the rest of tonight’s absurdist nonsense has already. I keep hoping I’ll wake up. All those scary tech dreams I’ve had where my computer crashes or I’m on virus-filled websites, and this is the nightmare that I get stuck with. Is there any activity out by you at all?”
“No, it’s dead quiet. I don’t even hear any animals or movement of any kind. It’s like the world is closing up shop, piece by piece.”
“You guys are still here?” a member named Sparky posts.
“I thought us BBS staff were the last ones left. Maybe in the whole town, or at least logged in. How you holding up? You okay?”
There’s a delay of several minutes before a response comes in.
“Not really OK. Have to type slow and keep it simple. Only one arm left.”
“Hold on, you lost an arm? Did it just disappear, or…”
The next post takes longer to type out, the reason of course being that the poor guy has found himself having only one hand.
“A black pillar appeared in my kitchen. It’s dark, like nothingness. Still have lights in my house but it didn’t even cast a shadow. Six sided, makes no noise, no movement. Just there. Tossed in empty beer bottle and it didn’t come out other side. Not stupid enough to put my hand in it, but I still got too close. Second pillar came out of thin air, connected to first. Like it’s growing. Arm was in wrong place. Ate the whole thing up to elbow. No blood. Just disappeared. Nothing there now.”
“What the fuck,” Oliver offers a succinct reply.
“More pillars spreading through house. Not connected to first one, but growing just as fast. Keeping my distance as best I can. About to leave house. Going to my boat at the dock and try for other side of lake. Thank you for all the years of running a fun BBS. Had good times. Wish me luck. Good night.”
“Now we have pillars of darkness beaming down on us?” William posts. “If they’re showing up inside houses, then we have nowhere left to hide.”
“The library still seems like the safest place in town,” Oliver repeats. “But if you really don’t think you can make it up here, what about city hall? I can see its lights from the windows. Maybe it’s your best chance.”
“Then I’m going to try and snap Braham out of it, and see if we can make a run for it. We’re only about a mile away. If these pillars go deep enough into the ground, we might lose the phone lines and our last line of communication. I think any update could be our last at this point. If you don’t hear from us again, it’s been a ride, Olly and Alec. And tell Charlie, if he ever gets there, that I’m sorry I considered upgrading the board to corporate-made software. Our code may have been scrappy and had annoying bugs, but damn it, we made it together on late night get-togethers in Charlie’s garage. I’ll never forget that.”
Only seconds later, Charlie returns, posting, “Will, if you check the board one more time before you leave, avoid the coast, whatever you do! Something is spreading from the lake, or what’s left of it. Respond to this ASAP.”
Oliver explains, “Charlie just got to the library on a bicycle of all things, out of breath. Who knew he could pedal all that way, and uphill? Or that he could avoid the sky just by wearing a hoodie?”
There is no response from Braham or Will. Nonetheless, Charlie spends the otherwise idle time to write a detailed account of his journey from Main Street.
“If by some miracle you both get to City Hall, I hope you find a computer and get back in touch. I’m leaving the following for you, the rest of us, and the record. The library really is a sanctuary, at least for now. I read through the messages I had missed, and Sparky’s posts about the pillars confirm for me that they should be avoided at all costs. Where they appear and in what direction they branch out seems to be random, but there is a pattern.
“They’re clustered near the lake. That being the reason why I said to stay away from it. Looking out from the windows here, I can see their silhouettes against the flashing sky. There are thousands of them, hexagonal in shape, and they are so tall that they disappear into the clouds. I wish I could see what was happening up in the sky. Even if it would be the most terrifying experience of my life, beating everything else that has happened tonight.
“That’s not all. I have a good idea of what Alec doesn’t want to talk about. The people. I saw them in the dull light coming from the sky on the way here, silent and unmoving but for some reason, amassed into small groups. On street corners, in front yards, gathered in our favorite coffee shop. Their faces are gone, and they show no evidence of any remaining humanity.
“I didn’t see any vehicles, either. Cars, trucks, emergency vehicles. All gone. I was expecting the bike to disappear out from under me on the way. I’m not sure I’d be able to make any part of the trip on foot, being as out of shape as I am. And all of that isn’t the worst of it. Water itself might be vanishing from the world, but I can’t be entirely sure of that.
“But with the view I got on the way here, it was easy to see that the lake is dry. Maybe the water all drained into those pillars, but even with how many are out there, I feel like that would have taken at least a few hours. The city pumps are empty either way, so the library water fountains no longer work. I did get some cans of soda out of the vending machine to refuel with, though. So water does still exist here, even if it can’t be piped in anymore.
“I’m probably just talking to myself at this point, but that’s all I have left. Survival instinct is a hell of a thing, isn’t it? I mean, what kind of world will be left for us if this all stopped right now? This is already the end. The body’s dead, yet the brain is trying to hold on. The pillars are the terminal stage of the collapse.”
There are no further posts until 11:45. At least for me, there’s no stressful waiting period. Amazingly, it’s an update from William.
“Made it to City Hall with Braham. The door was wide open and there’s no one here, but the power and phone lines are working. He still isn’t in a good way. Letting him rest in one of the offices here. I’m typing this from a cubicle with a good view of the college up on the hill. Wish we were with you.”
“So you made it,” Alec replies a minute later. “I’ll tell Charlie and Olly. They needed some time away from the screen. I don’t think there’s anything left to say, nobody else left to talk to. Will, thanks for being an awesome friend over the years. Since first grade, right? I’m not trying to get sentimental on you. I just probably haven’t said it before.”
“Don’t say it like these are your last words, man. We can still hold onto hope that we’ll pull through, can’t we?”
“Yeah. Sure, buddy. What else do we have? Let’s just talk until the sun rises. We can worry about the rest of the world later.”
“Sounds like a plan. The others might need to take a break, but I don’t really want to cut myself off and hide in a corner. I have to keep writing down everything. Even if I’m just sending digital letters into a void.”
“Me, Olly, and Charlie have been talking up here. The old way, in person. I’m wondering if you feel the same thing we do. It’s weird, but for some reason I’ve never been so clear-headed as I am right now. It’s like I can think sharper, remember things better. It doesn’t bring me any closer to understanding the past few hours, or make me less afraid, but it’s like this lucidity is helping me process my emotions, and keeps me from falling into a state of confusion and fatigue. Does that make sense?”
“I get it. I do feel that way. Could be it’s what gave me the fortitude to leave the house.”
“Then you might also see where I’m coming from with my next question. The three of us talked about our memories, as well. Specifically, we all started wondering just why none of us can remember ever leaving town. It’s like some Allegory of the Cave shit, you know? We hadn’t even thought about the fact that we’ve never left Mt. Louisina before. The realization freaked us out.”
“You too? I thought I was losing my mind. I wish my parents would pick up their phone just so I can hear their voices, and ask them if they ever left town, or why we never took a single road trip, why they didn’t think about going out to see the world. But they’re probably sitting somewhere in the dark, lifeless and faceless. I can’t even be sure if Dad made it home from work.”
At 11:57, William posts something again.
“Alec, are you there? The pillars have spread across my view of the college like a curtain. We’re cut off, but somehow I still have a connection to the server.”
“Yeah. Lost sight of City Hall, was afraid you had fallen into the void.”
“Do you think we’re in the last two buildings standing?”
“Maybe. But it’s more like they’re floating, in space. It feels cold.”
“What if there’s nothing on the other side? Just more darkness?”
There is no response to this question about mortality or what awaits afterwards. The final three posts are from William, and they have likely gone unread until I recovered them from a large vault of data.
“Alec, talk to me. Write anything.”
“Don’t leave me alone right now. Things are getting bad here.”
At 11:59 P.M., with eighteen seconds until midnight, William commits the very last text to the entire BBS, and a thread that began with just another casual Friday chat.
“It’s dark.”
And that’s it, that’s how their story ends.
I’ll note again that the message board was pulled out of a backup that was made daily, meaning that there may have been more conversation past midnight that never got a chance to be preserved to the drive I had in my possession. But I strongly doubt it. It definitely sounds like the town stopped existing entirely right as the clock struck twelve.
This probably won’t be a revelation for the majority of people reading or listening to this chronicle. It was either obvious from the beginning, or you looked it up midway through, but, no—Mt. Louisina is not a real place. Not one that any of us regular folk have heard of, at least. There are no records of it ever having been a town in Colorado, or America. And I can’t stretch my imagination far enough to believe that it did exist, but we’ve all just somehow forgotten about it and it was erased from every map or archive out there.
The occurrence lacks an objective viewpoint, and I only have first person written accounts from people who are pretty much kids. Logic and the clues given throughout their experiences point to what seems to be the only possible alternative take on it, and the nature of their world as a whole.
Yet I won’t put that possibility in writing, because I feel it would diminish everything they went through. No matter what plane of existence their reality occupied in relation to our own, they saw themselves as real people, and they knew both joy and fear. And that’s the reason I left in the majority of their casual discussions, and their many references to the same music and movies that we know as well. I can’t explain why or how they had those connections to the outside. I haven’t been able to find any possible relatives of anyone listed in the town register, either, but that isn’t surprising.
I’ve yet to have the time to even begin looking deeply into this, so I’m sorry that I can’t provide any solid answers. My focus has been on getting this story right and out there before people that are likely much more powerful than myself track me down and do… whatever it is they feel like.
The people of Mt. Louisina were real. Decades ago, they had to suffer through the collapse and erasure of everything they knew; an event akin to our own god deciding to close up shop and toss everything he made into the abyss, while being so cruel as to give us the awareness that it was happening. I wish I could say that I can’t begin to imagine what that would be like, but after going through those dozens of posts several times, I don’t think that’s quite true.
If it’s any consolation, I suppose that now they won’t be entirely forgotten. I wasn’t going to wait around thinking and worrying about making this public, and risk missing the only chance to get it out there. Make of it what you will, but I don’t expect that there’s anything to be done. It’s been so long since it happened, and if anyone who knows the truth is still alive, they are probably out of reach of any justice.
In any case, I finally got that response from our client a few minutes ago as I was wrapping this up. I wonder if they’ve reached a decision on what they want me to do with these files. Or what they plan to do with me. I guess I should get around to reading it.
If this story has made it onto the internet, and stayed there, then like the majority of all data ever created, I also won’t disappear forever.
A Cold Relics Original
Category:Computers and Internet
Category:Diary/Journal
Category:Disappearances
Category:Longpasta