It was 22:18, on the 19th June 2024 when a strange object landed in my backyard.
No noise was made, the ground was barely shaken—the only reason that I managed to notice it was merely happenstance. I was staring out of the window absentmindedly when a faint luminescence caught my line of sight.
"...?"
Armed with only a packet of Simba and a smartphone flash in hand, I went and inspected the object with a blank expression. "It'll be fine. It'll be fine," I muttered repeatedly, as if practicing a new mantra.
The object was a silver box slightly larger than a Rubik's cube. Smooth all over with no discernible detail, and heavy when trying to lift it. After settling an internal conflict quickly, I took the cube into my house and placed it on my table.
Not knowing what exactly I was going to do with it, I observed it for the next couple of days.
A week passed. Nothing happened.
"—!"
As I got ready to write off this cube as just a quirky find or something my neighbour lost, I accidentally ended up cutting one of my fingers whilst peeling an apple.
The cube, as if "reacting" to the nearby blood, had a line appear in the middle of it—splitting it exactly into top and bottom halves. The top half slowly lifted and my chest rattled, expecting to see some advanced technology like the Omnitrix. It can't be… can it?
"...hm?"
Instead, even more (or less) confusingly, I was staring at a pitch-black USB drive. The only difference from the ones that I used was that it looked more expensive; premium quality build.
But that was not enough to curb my disappointment.
After cleaning and dressing my cut, I plugged the USB into my older computer (safety first). There was a single folder titled "ZB" and inside were hundreds of Excel sheets. Financial records, meeting minutes, project ideas—typical of any business.
Great. I'm probably looking at a company's shady dealings right now. Nothing extraterrestrial.
However, something weird happened once I started learning Python. The USB that I'd been combing through every week for the last four weeks, that only had Excel sheets, suddenly had Python files! There were full projects and documentation expanding on the purpose of the files. Initially, everything had been addressed to "ZB," but now new names were included—names of powerful people dating as far back as the 13th century!
What does this mean? How does any of this even make any sense?
I don't have the insight yet to give an answer, but I do have a game plan.
There's no guarantee that it will work, though.
Below is a list of all the technical I want to acquire to properly analyze the USB:
- Fundamentals (Data Types, Formulas, Shortcuts, etc...)
- Summarizing Data (Pivot Tables, Adv. Formulas, etc...)
- Power Query
- Python Integration
- Macros (Optional. Security Risk)
- Fundamentals (Print, Control Flow, Data Types, etc...)
- Intermediate (Functions, Error Handling, Methods, etc...)
- OOP
- Data Analyst Libraries: pandas, numpy, matplotlib, seaborn
- Advanced (Decorators, Context Managers, Multi-threading, etc...)
-
Relational Databases (RDBMS) + SQL
-
Dashboards + Power BI
-
Data Structures and Algorithms
As I've stated, there is no guarantee that it'll work. Perhaps learning more tools will only reveal more secrets that I couldn't see before leading to a never-ending loop.
But hey, at least I'm having fun figuring things out.
Note: If you are a government official or someone with political influence, then kindly note that these are merely the ramblings of a countryside bumpkin. Any overlap with real life is merely coincidental.