I picked up the ancient disk and blew the dust off the label, curious. I would have sworn that I'd thrown all these out years ago.

"Cosmophos," I say out loud, more than a little confused. I remembered all the games I had, and indeed still had copies of them somewhere, albeit not on floppy anymore. Something in my mind twitched with familiarity, though. It was a nagging thing, because normally I would have just snapped the disk in two and thrown it in the trash. This time, though, I had to know.

I sat down at my desk and rummaged through my drawers. No floppy drive anywhere; of course there wasn't, no one used these things anymore. No big deal, I thought. Google will know what this Cosmophos is. I was sure it wasn't some game. Something important was on this disk, I knew that. But what?

I tapped the name into the search bar and, to my surprise, Google returned no results.

"What?" I asked no one in particular. I tried the full name, hoping to find a forum somewhere. No luck. In desperation I tried Yahoo, and wasn't at all surprised to get the same result. The internet was simply not aware of what was on this disk, not on any surface level. A large part of me tried to let it go and simply move on, but an even bigger part was already trying to locate a floppy drive I could use.

I searched high and low. I managed to find a next day delivery on Amazon, but that wasn't good enough. No local computer shops had one, nothing close by at any rate. It was getting late, but I placed a desperate call to a tiny little shop I'd never heard of, tucked away about a half hour from me.

"Do you have a floppy drive available?" I asked the grumpy fellow who answered.

"Yeah, a couple USB ones. About to closing up soon though," he said. I nearly panicked.

"I can be there in thirty minutes. It's an emergency!" I pleaded.

"We close in an hour," he said with a grunt. I felt a bit foolish. I muttered a goodbye, grabbed my keys, and practically ran out of the house. When the cold air hit me, I ran back in for my coat, then to the car. I muttered in a panic the whole trip, and I'm sure I got more than one ticket from speed cameras along the way.

The disk was important. No, it was critical. The data on that thing was imperative to...something. I remembered nothing about it, but I knew it was vital. I was going to find out, tonight, what I'd forgotten. It was like a hole in my mind, and that disk had what I needed.

I parked the car in precisely the way that everyone hated and bolted into the tiny little store. Luckily, the man behind the counter had taken my urgency to heart and had the device set out on the counter. I quickly swiped my card, not really bothering to check the amount I paid, and the moment the receipt printer started clunking away I was out the door and speeding my way back home.

After another perilous drive I arrived home, and set about the methodical work of plugging in a USB device and pleading with Windows to hurry up with the drivers. Once the green check marks appeared, I stopped myself. I had to move carefully, now.

Carefully, I slid the floppy into the drive, and felt that familiar satisfaction as it clicked into place. After a few tense seconds, the drive appeared. Good old floppy noise, how I'd missed it.

I opened the drive to find the disk miraculously intact. There was a single notepad document of a many thousands of bytes there. I quickly copied it to my hard drive, and my breath caught when the progress bar stalled and the drive clunked away on the magnetic tape.

"Moment of truth," I said to myself, and opened the document.

I was suddenly overcome by a desire to avoid reading this thing. It was important. Very important. Too important for me, by a long shot. But someone had to know what it was, even if it was lowly me.

Cosmophos: A Text Adventure it read across the top. Just underneath the title: a novel by Esther Lily Jacobs.

"Hi mom," I said to the document. How had I forgotten she wrote? She always loved writing. "I guess this was your last one, huh?"