I work for a news organization...I should be able to research this. We should have some sort of records, right?

After asking a few co-workers, I was able to figure out that we supposedly have a room of archives in the basement. But nobody seemed to know exactly where it was, or what was in there, or what format anything would be in; I get the feeling that nobody's been there in ages.

"I don't even know if it exists, " Ryan said. /*note: he's the assistant editor*/ "I heard that basement gets kind of creepy...don't disappear down there, alright, Kate?"

He sent me down there with all six keys he couldn't identify, either because he'd never used them or couldn't remember what they were for.

The basement seemed well-maintained, at least at first. I was greeted with typical cement walls, old-yet-bright flourescent lighting and a clean floor. I passed by marked storage closets, where I assumed we kept cleaning supplies. None of my keys opened these, so I figured there was nothing in there worth investigating.

After turning a few corners, I felt as if I'd gone through some sort of portal into another dimension. My feet were tearing up the carpet of dust covering the floor. The lighting flickered, where it worked at all, and the doors I now saw were no longer marked. This was when I expected my new set of keys to start working, but none of them opened the first unmarked door.

Using my portable as a light, I moved further into the depths until I found a second door. Tried one key...then a second, then a third...

...the unmarked, old and generally sad-looking door opened easily.

It was pitch-dark inside. I figured that the switch by the door might have controlled lights in here at some point, but right now it didn't seem to do anything. Using my portable to look around the room, though, I didn't see any sort of light a switch would have turned on...except for the same kind of vintage lamp I'd only ever seen in pictures of the 20th and early 21st centuries. I did some reading on that stuff; I should be able to get it to work, right?

The lamp wasn't cordless, and the one cord I found had a plug on the end with two prongs. Two prongs? I'd seen a few old things with three-prong plugs, but never had I seen two. They looked exactly like two of the prongs on a three-prong plug, though. I wonder if they're compatible...and, I'm pretty sure we still have some three-prong adapters upstairs. Those used to be all over the place, although they're not so common any more. Nevertheless, I'd have to deal with my portable's light for now.

I'd thought that the carpet of dust on the floors outside was thick, but it was nothing compared to the blanket covering just about everything in here. Perhaps this room's only been visited by armies of dust bunnies over the last 50 years. Seeing no dust carrots, they simply decided to collect here by the millions and wait until the day they might magically appear...is that what's going on here? Ugh. They weren't going to stop me, though, despite my lack of gloves. I'll just wash my hands, later, I thought...

There was some equipment that I couldn't identify. The stuff was both heavy and bulky, so it's not like I could just drag it into the light...but since my portable's camera had a low-light mode, I snapped some pictures, at least. A rectangular-shaped box...wait, is that actually an old computer? I recognized the brand name, "hp," from some research I'd done for an old school report.

I'd seen pictures of old computers, but this one was huge! I needed both hands just to lift it. There were a bunch of different slots for who-knows-what in the front, and a ton of different ports on the back. One of them was a three-pronged power plug, I'm guessing. But computers back then needed screens to actually display any information, and the screen wasn't built into this one. I couldn't find a screen in the immediate area around the computer...

My first thought was that I should take the computer upstairs anyway, but then I wondered if anyone would mess with it. I decided to leave it with the dust bunnies for now, and continued to explore the room. An old, tall metal container, with...drawers? It was locked... another member of my mysterious key collection was able to open it. Wait, what's this...

...it's paper. And it says The Boston Globe on it. That's our organization...

On this paper are articles. And pictures! Is this...what our product used to look like? We put the news...on paper?

Wait a second. I know I've heard someone use the term "newspaper" before. Right...there was that crazy old woman we had as a consult when I first interned here, a few years back. She'd mostly complain about how society had changed into something she couldn't recognize, but never really elaborated on what that meant. And she'd use the term "newspaper," as if news belonged on paper. Like this was something that had actually existed.

And here I was, looking at it. "Newspaper" was, in fact, a term for something that indeed existed.

This... "newspaper" was dated November 6th, 2028, the day after Election Day that year. It talked about a landslide victory for the Moderate Party candidate for President; okay, so that means government must not have changed much in the last 170 years. But wait...it says they only won about a third of Congress, with the rest mostly split between two other parties I'd never heard of.

There was more than one political party back then?

Moreover, some of these election results appeared to be very close. And more perplexing: even after re-reading the entire article twice, I still couldn't picture what the government-provided abstract would have looked like. The article seemed more original than anything I'd ever seen from a news organization. Is it possible that there wasn't one at all? Did news organizations work without abstracts back then? Weird...

I looked further into the drawer, but all I found were more copies of the same paper...dated November 6th, 2028. There were probably about 20, in total. The other drawers were empty. It was as if this specific paper had been saved for a reason.

I had no way of knowing whether this was factual or not, but...I had a strong gut feeling that this was a clue. A clue telling me that the old woman, perhaps, wasn't as crazy as we'd thought, and that things weren't always like this. Another strong gut feeling told me that the government would frown upon my having found this.

I took a few pictures with my portable, and took one of the papers with me, but locked the rest back inside the drawer, and left everything else where I'd found it. This was going to be my little secret, for now. It was already an hour past the time I'd normally go home, so I locked up the room, went back upstairs, dropped the keys on Ryan's desk and then left for the night.



I was unusally exhausted after I got home, so I didn't look at my spoils any more than I already had back in the room. I'd passed out shortly afterwards. Slept really well, in fact. I must say, I felt really refreshed when I woke up the following morning. My findings from last night were leading me in a new, exciting direction, and I couldn't wait to put more time into the case.

Entering the office, I sensed a really odd vibe. Everyone seemed on edge about something, as if something had gone wrong.

As soon as anyone seemed to notice my arrival, Ryan called me into his office.

"What, uh, exactly did you find down there last night?"

"To be honest, I'm not quite sure."

The fact was, I still didn't quite know or understand exactly what I was dealing with. Just in case, I figured it'd be a good idea to investigate further before I told him anything.

"I found a lot of potentially interesting things last night," I continued, "but I figured I'd investigate them thoroughly, then give you a full report."

"Well, I'm sorry, kiddo, but you're not going to get a chance. The police were here early this morning..."

"What?!"

"They went down there, and I'm pretty sure they took everything. Feel free to see if I'm right."

I didn't wait for him to say another word. I ran full-speed to the back of the office, down the stairs, down the corridor, back through the carpet of dust...if the door to the room had been sad-looking before, this was even worse. It'd been ripped from its hinges and was lying against a nearby wall, practically cracked in half.

I glanced inside...yeah, it was just as Ryan had said. Dust bunnies remained but everything else--the computer, the cabinets, the old equipment that might have been used to create the papers locked inside the cabinets--all gone. What could the police have wanted with these? And, why now? Why did this happen right after I'd started this investigation? Something wasn't adding up. And, all of a sudden, I felt like I couldn't trust anyone around me.

As I stood there processing what had happened, I heard a cough behind me. It was Ryan.

"Are you ready to tell me what you found?"

"Ryan, did...did you already know about what was in here?"

"No...I didn't have any idea what was in here, and I still don't. I wasn't even allowed to come near it while they were cleaning it out. You, on the other hand, were IN here last night. You must have found something...why else would the police take a sudden interest?"

"Even if I did find something, how would the police have known? Wouldn't somebody have had to tip them off?"

"Oh, come on, Kate. You should know as well as anybody that this place is lined with cameras. Is there actually one in this room? I don't know. But they're everywhere else, at the least. You didn't actually remove anything from this room, did you?"

Uh, oh.

"I can see it written on your face...you did, didn't you? It's entirely possible that the cameras picked whatever it is up, and the police didn't like what they saw. So what was it, anyway?"

My internal debate over whether to tell him or not had already been interrupted by the realization that my only piece of evidence was in danger. My stomach didn't have time to sink; I was already halfway out of the building, running full-speed.

I was at my apartment within minutes. I threw open the door and...

...sure enough, I'd left it right out in the open, on the table in my kitchen. It was gone. That wasn't a surprise, I suppose, after what had happened at the office, but...more surprising was the fact that my door and windows were undamaged, there were no other signs of forced entry, and if not for the fact that the paper was missing, I wouldn't have been able to tell that anyone had visited at all.

What did this mean?

My investigation, obviously, was far from over. But I had just one lead now: the police. This was both exciting and frightening at the same time. After all, I felt too excited about my search for truth to back out now. The simple fact, though, is that news organizations don't ever ask the police for information...so I couldn't just knock on the door and say, "Hi, can I ask you some questions?" Whatever way I try to figure this out is going to be totally illegal. So this will require some ingenuity.

Fortunately, I'm the best reporter we've got.