Forgotten Tech

The Bains are a happy family of three. It’s a typical Saturday. Carl Bain and his twelve-year-old daughter Sylvia are having a day out at the local museum. Sylvia is intrigued by the cow cream jugs, moulded ceramic farm animals with a hole in their back for filling, and an open mouth for the spout. “Dad, it’s like the cows vomit the cream up,” Sylvia laughs. Carl smiles and gives his daughter’s shoulder a fatherly shove.

In the next room, Carl stops. “Well, I’ll be…”

Sylvia asks him what’s wrong.

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just the things in here.” Carl goes on to explain that the room is full of stuff he remembers from his childhood, which makes him feel old because museums are for relics of a bygone age.

“Look, Sylvia. That’s a reel-to-reel tape recorder.”

Sylvia stares at the strange contraption, with its huge spools of tape, almost touching, and the complicated way the tape weaves in and around the pulleys and recording heads. Next is the black-and-white portable TV with its twin stainless steel antennae and bulbous, grey screen. Sylvia asks why the screen isn’t flat. Carl explains the cathode ray tube as best he can. Then she spots a black Remington typewriter.

“Is that an old computer?” Sylvia asks.

Carl smiles. “Not quite. There were no computers when I was a boy. People used typewriters to put the letters straight onto paper. See those little hammers, with the letters on them, and the ribbon with the ink?”

“Wow, that’s so retro.” Carl can see she’s genuinely impressed.

What Carl doesn’t want to tell his daughter is he’s a writer on the side. He has always loved writing, ever since boyhood. He has dreamed of making a career of writing, striking it big like Stephen King or Jo Rowling. But he knows that’s only in is dreams, so he finds more realistic ways to make money out of his hobby. He’s tried writing for niche websites online, making a few hundred dollars a month, writing on weekends. Then he found the best goldmine - pornographic literature. He found he was good at it, and now he writes for a handful of adult online magazines. He remembers his first attempts at the genre, back in his wild adolescence. No internet in those days; you saved your work on floppy disks and sent them via snail mail to your publisher. Not that Carl was ever published in those days.

“Dad! I asked you a question!” Sylvia’s voice - just like her mother’s - jerks him back to the here and now. He blinks and meets her eye. “What’s that?” she demands.

Carl sees that she is pointing to a 1970s cassette recorder. He explains patiently to his daughter what it was used for, reminiscing about his own machine, almost identical to that one, on which he’d record and play back Slade, The Sweet and others from the glam rock era.

In a location quite near the museum, if you allow for a minor dimensional shift, and at more or less the same time as Carl and Sylvia’s tech-driven 1970s reminiscences, the last member of a very old quartet takes its place in the only empty chair at a square, green baize covered table. Each one of the four figures has almost human appearance, although they have been holding these meetings far, far longer than the entire lineage of earthly Homo sapiens.

At the exact centre of the table sits a sphere of perfect crystal. Two figures are visible within the ball, one of them taller than the other. The smaller one has long hair. The two look happy in each other’s company. They are walking around a room full of objects on display, stopping to examine items every so often.

“They are perfect,” breathes the one who is obviously the leader. 

“Perfect,” chorus the three others, their faces - if they even have such things - shadowed by the cowls they wear.

All four repeat the word in perfect unison, exactly thirteen times. Then they fall silent. They rise from the table and follow their leader toward the portal that links their domain with the world of men.

It’s Sunday and Sylvia is bored. Her father has gone off on a business trip, leaving for the airport that morning. He had to leave early, he said, because he had to fly, stay overnight and be ready for a conference the next morning.

Her mum is out at the shops. She’s on her own in the house. Her mind goes back to yesterday and the museum. All that old stuff, bulky and heavy and completely fascinating. Dad said it was all part of his boyhood.

She’s in the living room. She flops into her father’s armchair. She picks up the TV remote. When Dad was a boy, TVs didn’t have remotes. Colour TVs were a new thing in those days. Flat TVs didn’t exist. That portable TV in the museum had looked like a goldfish bowl. For a moment, she has a flash vision of a solid goldfish bowl, all glass, with four unspeakably old faces grotesquely reflected in its polished surface. She shivers and hopes Mum will be home soon. Then she thinks of the attic. She doesn’t know why. It just comes into her mind. Attics are where people put things they don’t use any more. Like the old stuff in the museum. Stuff Dad didn’t think was old. Things that people had, in his lifetime.

Without really knowing how she got there, she’s on the upstairs landing. She knows how to release the ceiling trapdoor. The long handle, with the flat key to turn the slotted latch, is sitting in the cupboard at the top of the stairs.

In a moment or two, she has the trapdoor open. Sharp cold air pours down, smelling stale. She blinks away a few specks of dust. The other end of the long stick is hooked, and she pulls the ladder downward, locking its three sections as her father taught her to when she was quite small. The she’s on the ladder, and her head’s above the trapdoor. She pulls her phone from the pocket of her jeans, flicks on the flashlight and shines it around.

The same green baize table top is in a different place now. The first of the quartet arrives and takes his seat, at the same time Sylvia pulls down the ladder. “Excellent, it says, gazing into the crystal ball.

Sylvia inhales the cold air and lets her eyes adjust to the shadowy gloom. Scanning around, she sees there is a plywood floor on top of the wooden joists, so she doesn’t need to worry about putting her foot through the ceiling. That’s good. She climbs the last few steps and stands on the makeshift floor. There are boxes, labelled in black marker pen - her mother’s bold capitals. CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS. SYLVIA’S EXERCISE BOOKS 2019. One stands out from the crowd: COMPUTER.

The box doesn’t look like anything special. She sees the four flaps on the top have been interlinked to keep it closed. She reaches out to slip her fingers under the top flaps. She feels as though she shouldn’t be doing this.

The second of the quartet - its name, in its original ancient script, would translate roughly as Temptation - arrives at the baize table, taking its seat at the right hand of the first arrival, whose primordial name approximates to Curiosity. Both place their hands flat upon the table top, intent upon the glinting ball before them.

Sylvia doesn’t find the computer too heavy as she lifts it out of the box, holds it to her chest and makes her way toward the double plug socket at the side of the attic. Also in the box is a mouse - she recognises that - with a peculiar round plug at the end of its cable. There is a mains lead with a wall plug at one end. She finds a QWERTY keyboard, too, with a similarly strange round plug.

Connecting it all up, she realises there is no output device. Was there another box up there, with a monitor inside? A second scan of the attic confirms there is. It’s heavier than the first box but she simply has to get this rig working. Taking utmost care, she inches the second box across to her new workspace and liberates the old CRT monitor. Just like the TV they saw in the museum, she thinks.

Booting up the computer, she’s intrigued by what appears on the screen. Windows 3.1. That must be from a long time before Windows 11, she thinks. It’s very slow, too. First there’s some white-on-black text in a really old font, then the screen is white and there are several boxes of icons. They mean nothing to a young girl who’s used to apps and split screens.

It’s at that moment she notices what’s in the bottom of the computer box, revealed now the computer itself has been removed. It’s a blue plastic square - no, not quite square - with a white label and what looks like a thin aluminium shutter. It looks for all the world like a 3-D printout of the Save icon. Sylvia remembers her dad talking about floppy disks - the only way to share and move files, at one time - and she realises that’s what she’s looking at.

There is a slot on the front of the computer that looks about the right size to fit the floppy. Without hesitation, Sylvia slips the disk in, and it goes all the way home with a satisfying clunk. A window opens on the monitor screen. There is a file there, with the name DO NOT READ ME.

Sylvia hesitates. This must be Dad’s old computer, and it must be his disk. DO NOT READ ME. She can’t disobey her father. But she has to know what is in that file. Her hand trembles about the old PS/2 mouse. A hard, determined expression fleets across her visage. She double clicks. 

A prompt box says, Enter password to open file.

Sylvia tries Vienna2023, which she knows is her father’s current password. She scolds herself. This PC has been in its dusty box for years, decades. She racks her brain. Her parents honeymooned in Vienna, in 2008. She tries Vienna2008. No joy. Right. Think hard. She knows her father went on a school trip he remembers fondly, in 1995 when he was in his last year of school. It was a biology field trip to Wales. He talks about it a lot. She tries TENBY1995. The file opens. The screen is filled with text.

“SYLVIA! Where are you?”

Sylvia panics and yanks the plug out of the mains socket, before she has time to ready any of the wall of text before her. The text shrinks to a white spot as the monitor dies.

Skittering down the ladder as fast as she dares, Sylvia smiles at her mother. “Sorry, Mum. I got bored and went up to the attic. Nothing up there, just dusty boxes.”

Carol Bain’s lecture to her daughter on safety is short and not very vehement. She can’t really get angry with the child for being curious, can she?

At the green baize table, both sigh together with ecstatic contentment. “The others will be here soon,” breathes the leader.

As if on cue, a third figure takes its place at the table.

At Heathrow Airport, Carl Bain sits uneasily in his window seat. At the same time that its ancient manifestation took its seat at the green baize topped table, Trepidation crept into Carl’s mind. Now he breaks out in a cold sweat, as the purser announces, “All ground staff please leave the aircraft. We shall shortly be closing doors for departure.”

For some reason, he’s thinking of his old 486 PC, long since boxed up and stowed in the attic. He’s pretty sure there are some floppies in the box with it, and they have some highly explicit content - his first forays into the world of pornographic prose, before he took up that kind of writing as a side-earner. What if Carol or Sylvia found it and read it? But no, he is sure he protected all such files with a password Sylvia would never guess, and Carol would have no reason to go poking about up there. A curious child, perhaps, but not Carol.

But still, what if they did?

The prickles of sweat grow more intense.

“No, Mum! Dad doesn’t want us to!”

Sylvia is wearing her pyjamas. She’s come from her bed and climbed the ladder to the attic. As soon as she saw it down, she knew what was going on. Her mum had gone up there to check the disk. She must have found the old PC, all set up the way Sylvia had left it when Carol came home from shopping and surprised her.

Carol turns. “It’s OK, sweetie. It’s password protected anyway. I’m putting it all back in the boxes. You run along back to bed now.”

Obediently, Sylvia does as her mother tells her. She lies in bed, wide awake. Has Carol opened the file? Does she know what’s in it, and will she tell Sylvia?

The three ancient ones at the green baize topped table turn as one, hearing the approach of their fourth member. All three sigh again. The time is near.

Carl Bain opens the front door, entering quietly lest he wake his wife and daughter.

The other passengers had glared at him as he’d risen from his window seat, disturbing the two fellow travellers between him and the aisle, and as he’d wrestled his carry-on bag out of the jam-packed overhead bin. They all knew there would be a further delay while the baggage handlers offloaded his checked suitcase

But he just could not fly off to New York, knowing that they might find his guilty secret up there in the attic.

A creak on the landing. Sylvia, pyjamaed, beaming, running down the stairs, jumping and locking him in a bear hug that wasn’t easing any time soon. Then Carol, walking down with calm grace, for a long kiss.

Had they found it? Had they read the files? If he asked them, and they hadn’t, then it wouldn’t be long before they did. If they had, would they tell him? Would either or both of them take heed of the label on the disk?

After a shower and a late supper, Carl lies and waits until Carol’s breathing becomes deep and even, then he creeps from the room and lowers the attic ladder as smoothly and quietly as he can. Shining his phone around, he feels an icy hand around his heart as he sees that the boxes have been disturbed. Working quickly, he boots up the old 486 and inserts the disk. About to hit the Erase command, he notices that the disk is blank. Empty. Someone has already erased the file.

At the table, the final member of the quartet has arrived. 

“He doesn’t know if they accessed the disk,” remarks Trepidation.

“He’ll agonise over it for ages,” says Temptation.

“He’ll ask them if they read it,” says Curiosity.

A fourth voice says, “And will he believe them when they say no?” Mistrust sits down to complete the four, and deals the cards.