My old computer.
I was digging through the basement one morning, looking for the box of electrical supplies stacked upon the shelves. I had found it, but when I pulled it out, something peculiar caught my eyes. A white boxy object peeking out from behind.
I pulled it out from the shelves and was astonished to find it was a computer. It reeked of age. The darkened white color of the computer tower spelling years of abandonment. I turned it to look at the stickers on the front.
“Designed for Microsoft® Windows 2000”
A sense of familiarity and nostalgia washed over me as I stared at the dusty, scratched sticker. It took only that part to take me to the realization:
This was my computer from when I was a kid!
Swiftly, I pulled the box of electrical supplies out of the way, and looked into the shelves for the rest of the computer. In an old box, marked “Computer”, I found the keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
I put the computer tower inside of the box along with everything else and brought it upstairs into my bedroom. I connected the computer to an extension cord, as well as the monitor, and hooked up the keyboard and mouse. I then shuffled through the box for an Ethernet cable, which I quickly found, as the last thing that had actually remained in the box.
A sense of excitedness washed over me as I reached for the power button. Without skipping a beat, I pushed it down, and heard the familiar high-frequency whine of the analog monitor quickly come to life. The internals of the computer had no problem getting started. This was wonderful.
I was greeted with the log-in screen. At this point I realized that if I wanted to access my computer, I’d need to think.
Something told me that as a kid, I would have used my name and year of birth as my password. So, I entered into the password prompt:
Eric1993
Unsurprisingly, it worked, and I was happy to see my 20 year old desktop finally come back to greet me. But something was wrong. I could feel it.
The arrangement of folders, shortcuts, and files were all arranged neatly, as if someone prepared them for my return.
I looked at the time on the taskbar.
3:33 AM.
It was clearly somewhere around 2:30 PM. The specific time, 3:33 AM, scared me, but out of curiosity, I waited around two minutes just waiting to see if the time would change. It didn’t.
At that moment, I completely lost interest in exploring my decades old computer, and reached for the power button to turn it off before anything bad would happen to me. Right before I could press down on the button, I was shaken up by that sound.
That “ding”, almost xylophone or kalimba sounding noise that would play whenever a message box popped up. It was enough to convince me to look back up at the monitor. I read the message box on the screen, expecting it to be about the Ethernet or something. But no.
“HELLO ERIC, IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN”
I was admittedly scared by this message. Nearly every part of my mind told me to turn off the computer.
But that wasn’t the man I had grown up to become.
Quickly I looked at the options to choose on the message box. The only button was “OK”. I had clicked it only after noticing the absence of an X on the message window. Quickly, the window was replaced with a new message.
“WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME?”
The button had been replaced with a text input box. I assumed I had to respond by typing into the box. So, I typed out a reply:
“I forgot about you.”
The window quickly changed:
“STOP LYING TO ME ERIC.”
Then I remembered why I left it.
I was 12 years old. Scrolling aimlessly through news articles on one summer day. June 2005. Home alone.
I heard a sound outside of my bedroom door. Something had fallen. Or was dropped. I opened the door and immediately looked at the floor. There, on the ground, was a red floppy disk, unlabelled. At the time I was dumb enough to to assume it would be safe to just stick it in my computer.
As soon as it finished reading the floppy disk, a message box popped up.
“HELLO ERIC. YOU PICKED A NICE SHIRT TODAY. I LIKE GREEN AND WHITE.”
I was wearing a green and white polo shirt at the time. I was terrified by this message. I had quickly turned off the computer, put it in the nearest box, and stored it away for the next few decades.
Suddenly, I snapped back out of my flashback when I saw the message box change again.
“YOU WERE NICE TO ME ERIC. YOU TREATED ME WELL. WHY WERE YOU SCARED OF ME ERIC. I’LL SHOW YOU SCARED.”
The lights to my room shut off. I attempted to open the door, but it had been locked. I looked at the computer monitor and saw it. A man’s face. No older than his 20s. Light began sprouting from his eyes and engulfed the whole room until all I could see was white.
I heard a voice.
“Goodbye Eric.”
Everything went to dark. I fell onto the floor. It felt like I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I felt something giant grab me and pull me across the air. Pull me until it let go and I fell on to the floor again.
Not too long after, I heard a door open.
I was picked up and was crammed into a thin space that I somehow perfectly fit through. Sucked into the space, I heard mechanical noises surround me, and I began to regain my vision. The light of an unfamiliar room burning my unadjusted retinas.
I was confined behind a prison of thousands, if not millions of pixels. On the other side sat a boy, no younger than 15. I stared at him for a good while. He would take my place. I would be freed. The urge to speak overwhelmed me. And I spoke.
“Hello Noah. I like your shirt. The blue and white goes really good together.”