Preface

                                    

                                          

You were indoors, and it was still cold. In your hand was a tin cup of water. You feel the familiar sensations of your homeworld, the steam, lick at your cheeks. You finally take in your surroundings, you were sitting on a cold gray stool, there were concrete walls all around you with steel beams occupying each edge. Above you were small cracks, nothing of importance. Along the wall to your left, you see a door which is powered by hydraulics and next to the door was a cork board situated at the waist level. The cork board had a dozen push pins sitting in a neat row in the bottom right corner. You could barely make out drawings that must have bled through the paper that was once there. In front of you, was a table, and a collection of hard drives encircling a laptop as if it was a display of sportsmanship.
A worker drone comes in through the door, his face is covered in hair, and he wears a vest similar to yours, the red logo on the name tag reliably signals that you are colleagues. He seems disappointed in your appearance. He stops right in front of you, taking a glance at the laptop before relaying the job to you.
"You're the recorder, the boys sent, huh?"
You lightly nod as you sip the warm water.
"So business. They need you to record all the data on these drives. You don't need to put it in chronological order, just put it down as is. This stuff is level 10 corruption, memetic viruses and what not, so I guess your kind would be perfect for this job..." You understood his hesitation; it is believed that drones live only by logic and always pick the most optimal solutions. You held your beliefs to yourself and maintained your professional attitude.
"Oh! One more thing, remember the format regulations!"
As you mount the drives onto the laptop, you recall your training.
"--" signified a small time jump or a shift in perspective. Older drone models oftentimes focussed on one piece of information, while ignoring the world around them. It also made transcribing multiple sounds at once easier.
 This drive dates centuries ago! Scrolling through the files, you begin to dread the task at hand. File formats and encryption methods were in the thousands, disorganized and most likely each different file was an entirely different generation. 
"Italics" You mutter to yourself, italics symbolized entries that would play after the previous one, going against chronology. One minute you are watching a drone use a drill, then the next entry shows him being activated for the first time. Of course, these weren't necessarily flashbacks, drone memories don't give insight to their thought process. The fact that this drive may be a compilation of millions of drones would make this job a living nightmare.
You recall the formatting of even older records.
"||XX||" symbolize video feeds that date even further back.
"--XX--" was used in documentation.
"//XX//" are typically for headers and to list out any information that the file itself provided, as the Universal Memory regulation only became enforced as of 2 years ago. Specialists like yourself in old world monopolized technology were far and few between.
And so the journey begins...