THE BARBIE
Hello. This thing happened to me a few months ago; I just need to share it with somebody.
It all started at my friend’s party. He’s an artist who rented out a loft in the industrial part of town. If you can picture what a place like Detroit looked like in the 1920s – that’s what this area looks like. A bunch of old turn-of-the-century factories crammed into ten blocks.
Most of them are abandoned.
So I partied a little too hard that night and decided to crash on a couch at the loft. I woke up at around 4 am, the sun wasn’t out yet but you could still make things out in the dim blue light. I went to the bathroom, carefully tiptoeing around the people that were passed out on the floor. As I was taking a piss I tiptoed to look out the bathroom window and I saw the panorama of deserted urban decay.
I remembered how much I liked places like this. It was so dark and devoid of life, and strangely serene.
So I went back to the couch and tried to fall asleep. After 45 minutes of staring at the ceiling I decided I didn’t want to be there any longer, so I swallowed my pride and decided to wake my girlfriend up to beg her for a ride, since walking around the vacant streets at this time was not an option. Being an awesome girlfriend, she was totally cool with it, and told me she would be there in about a half-hour and that she would give me a call when she was outside. My phone died ten minutes later so I decide I would sit by the window and watch for her car. I sat there for a while and my eyes started getting heavy and I began to doze off.
A crashing noise outside woke me up. It wasn’t loud, but just enough to snap me into reality. I looked out the window and scanned the area, but didn’t see anything. Across the street from the loft near a mountain of garbage bags and one of those enormous dumpsters I see a computer and a monitor smashed against the floor that hadn’t been there before.
When my girlfriend arrived I went downstairs and greeted her. Just as I was about to get in the car, I remembered a friend of mine who had blown out his power supply. So I decided to walk over to the dumpster and see what I could salvage. The monitor was worthless, but the tower seemed to have suffered almost no damage, so I put it in the trunk and we drove off.
About a week had passed and I had completely forgotten about the tower until my girlfriend called to let me know that it was still in the trunk and that she wanted it out. That night I brought it home. Before I took it apart I decided to hook it up to my monitor to see if it still ran, and to my surprise it did. It ran Windows XP and it looked like it had been wiped clean. I decided to do searches for words like “tits” and “pussy” in hopes of finding some secret stash full of weird deviant porn the previous owner had forgotten about. Morbid curiosity, I guess. Search came up nothing. Searched for picture Files – nothing. Then I searched for movies and one file came up. It was an .avi inside a folder titled “barbie” hidden in the WINDOWS/system32 directory.
So I played it, now this is where it gets disturbing.
The movie was about an hour long, and was made up of what seemed like raw exported footage. The footage was of this woman sitting on a chair and talking against a white backdrop. I skipped through most of movie and it was all the same continuous shot. Then I decided to sit though the footage to find out what she was talking about. Fifteen seconds into the footage the audio goes completely bad and her voice is drowned in harsh static/background noise. I couldn’t make out a thing.
So I imported the footage into final cut and tried to mess with the levels to isolate her voice. It helped a little, but I still couldn’t hear what she was saying. I was intrigued now, and I began to really pay attention to her face and body language. It seems that she's being asked some kind of questions, because she stops at times to listen, and then continues talking.
