Just letting you guys know now, I’m not writing this for attention or whatever. I’m just trying to share something that I found pretty damn interesting. Not for any noble reasons, either, I’m honestly just a bored guy and this is some pretty freaky shit that I’m not used to being around.
My name’s Jay. I work in a small office building as a sales associate of a small-brand security software. I’m not going to bore you with the details of my unexciting job – the only reason I put up with it is to provide for my girlfriend and my daughter, who was born about 11 months ago. I usually spend most of my time in the office screwing around on the internet and wishing something interesting would happen besides the stupid typical workplace gossip that went around all the time.
My wish was granted in a pretty unfortunate way two weeks ago.
My co-worker, an HR rep who we’ll call Dan for the sake of anonymity, came into work freaking out about a USB flash drive he had lost. He made a huge scene throwing people’s stuff off their desks, yelling at our manager, and basically just having a panic attack right in the middle of the office. He kept saying it was a little red flash drive with the letter “K” written on it in black sharpie. It threw us all off-guard, we had no idea what was going on, but building security came and took Dan off the premises. That night, Dan killed himself in his home with a bullet to the head. We were shocked and saddened to hear about it the next day.
The thing about Dan was that he used to be a very outgoing and friendly guy, but about six months ago his eight year-old daughter, Katherine, was hit by a car while riding her bike and fell into a coma. Dan was a single father and loved his daughter more than anything, his desk was always full of pictures of her and he always talked about her accomplishments; she was apparently an amazing cello player. Needless to say, he was devastated by her injuries and became a quiet shell of his former self.
Katherine stayed in a coma for about three months before she passed away. Dan held a very private funeral for her, or so another co-worker had told me, and refused to talk about her death with anyone. He distanced himself from the rest of the office and hardly made a noise until his breakdown right before committing suicide.
I wonder, if he had just found the flash drive, would he not have killed himself?
Fate works in mysterious ways – while Dan couldn’t find what he was looking for, I found it this morning. I was making myself a cup of coffee in the break room and accidentally dropped a packet of sugar behind the coffee station. I bent down to pick it up and, lo and behold, underneath the table there was a red flash drive with a “K” written on it in sharpie. Shocked, I picked it up and wondered what to do with it. I mulled it over all day, and eventually decided to take it home and see what was on it.
I know it sounds selfish, I probably should have maybe contacted his family about it, but I’m honestly glad I took it because it has made this one of the most intriguing days of my life.
I went home and put it onto my computer. The drive was called “K” and it had just four folders inside it, all titled in caps. One was named “PICS”, one “ROLAND”, one “TEACH” and the last “TALK”.
In the “PICS” folder were some nice pictures of Dan and his daughter having fun together at some amusement park that I wouldn’t really feel comfortable sharing on the internet. Those are his memories, not something for us to ogle at.
The next folder, “ROLAND”, was a little more disturbing. It seemed to be a couple of scanned articles. They were a little hard to read, but they all referred to projects being done by some company called “Roland Biomech” (I tried Googling them but nothing came up). I guess this company experimented with applying certain technologies to help disabled and injured patients. One article referenced an experiment in which the patient had lost all his teeth, so they replaced his entire jaw with some sort of grinding system that would shred the food in his mouth before it went to his esophagus. An addendum on the bottom of the article said that the system collapsed and the patient’s entire face sunk into itself, killing him.
Another article referred to an experiment done by hooking up machinery into a depressed patient’s brain and using software to try and “remove” the depression by streaming happy images from the internet directly to the patient. At first it was successful, but soon the patient was determined to have been receiving “too much information” and she went into a catatonic state after hours of screaming about “knowing everything all at once”.
Then it looked like there were some forms that Dan himself had filled out for Roland Biomech.
The applications, which were dated about three months ago, documented Dan’s personal information, Katherine’s comatose state, her blood type, age, and other stuff like that. One Yes/No question asked on the forms was “Are you comfortable with any alterations, major or minor, that the patient may have after operations have been completed?” to which Dan had ticked “Yes”.
Under a line titled “Procedure requested”, Dan had written in: “Uploaded Awareness”. Stamped over this was the word “APPROVED”.
One of the last articles was the hardest to make out, but to be fair some areas of it were highlighted and notes were scribbled along the sides of it in pen. Now, I’m not a programmer, I just sell software, but I swear the article looked just like program executions and codes. A lot of it was sorted into columns, which were titled things like “Memories”, “Emotions”,“Problem-solving”, etc. One of the hand-written notes I could make out read, “FOLDER NAMES FOR INPUT/OUTPUT: TEACH/TALK”.
Deciding I’d had enough of this cryptic bullshit, I clicked out of the “ROLAND”-folder and went to “TEACH”. This one had the most files by far, a bunch of scripts with strange filenames like “hello.cpp”, “howwasyourday.cpp”, and “playthecello.cpp”.
There was also one downloadable file called “KATHERINE.exe”. I clicked on the file and a download started, just a colored loading bar launched and nothing else. When it was finished downloading, a small black screen came up with white text that read “INSERT COMMAND”.
Confused, I minimized the program and clicked out of the “TEACH” folder. I went into the last folder, “TALK”, and saw that it was empty.
I was pretty disappointed. What was this nonsensical shit? I clicked back into “TEACH” and clicked on two of the script files at random: “hello.cpp” and “playthecello.cpp”. The small black screen that showed up earlier closed. Then, all on its own, the “TALK” folder opened with a new file in it – “whoareyou.wav”.
Here is the sound file uploaded onto Youtube. There are some LOUD moments so take it easy on the volume. It is approximately one minute and forty seconds in length. At around 46 seconds in I can clearly hear a cello playing. I also hear at 1:31 “who are you?”.
I honestly don’t know exactly what to make of this, but I do know that Dan loved his daughter more than anything, and if there was any way for him to keep her around, no matter how sketchy it seemed, he would have done it. Why else would he be in contact with that company? What could be in this flash drive that was so important to Dan, that he killed himself when he thought he had lost it?
Those Roland people turned that little girl into a computer program, and I just fucking downloaded and communicated with her.
UPDATE
So. I just came home to this tonight:
Half of me is pretty freaked out, the other half wants to tell these people to go fuck themselves. I need some time to think things over.
In case you can’t read it from that photo, the letter says:
“To home occupant,
It has come to our attention that the occupant of this house, Mr. Jay Durst, has recently come into contact with property belonging to Roland Biomech or one of its affiliated entities. It is on record that the occupant has intended to redistribute the property, as seen on this site:
The property in question is as filed: Uploaded Awareness. Please keep in mind that redistribution of any property belonging to Roland Biomech or one of its affiliated entities will result in removal of aforementioned property and compensation to the amount of what our nearest operator sees fit.
If you would like to make an appointment with Roland Biomech for our unique charitable services, please consult an operator or any Roland Biomech property.
We will be monitoring any further activity we view as questionable.
Lana Porter
Roland Biomechanicals
Security & Property Management”
What the fuck? What do I do? 
