Once upon a time, in the kingdom of the memory cards, in the village of Sandisk, twins were born. All the village hailed this auspicious birth. Tinkers and milkmaids gathered around to admire the twins’ 512MB storage capacity and 9MB/second sequential write speed. “The great Storage Volume in the sky hath truly blessed us with a fine pair of SD cards,” said the twins’ grateful, beaming parents. “May they live long lives, and transport much data.” And for months afterward, the parents yammered incessantly about even the most mundane of the twins’ accomplishments, until the townspeople wanted to throttle the parents into sweet, sweet silence. Since they were kind townspeople, they restrained themselves. All was well, for a time.

But as the twins grew, their parents started to notice that they weren’t like the other kids. To be sure, the twins could store data like ringing a bell. The problem was their shared physical deformity. Instead of the implacably rigid body of the normal, healthy SD card, each twin was able to fold part of its body over, leaving a rectangular nub protruding into space. At first, the parents tried to disguise the deformities by dressing the twins in oversize jackets. This worked well until the twins went to high school, and had to shower with their classmates. Then the freakish nature of their bodies was evident to all. Still, after an inital period of shock, the villagers seemed to accept the twins as good kids whose unfortunate deformity wasn’t their fault.

Then, late one night, their parents heard a muffled whirring sound coming from somewhere within the house. They followed it to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs was the most horrific thing they’d ever seen.

There were the twins, sharing data with the family computer like they had so many times before. But to the parents’ horror, they weren’t using the SD card slot. Instead, the twins were folded in half, with their rectangular protuberances crammed into the computer’s USB ports. Both of them. At the same time.

“What are you doing?” their father bellowed. “This is an abomination! Get out of my house, right now! And stay out – forever!” Their mother sobbed hysterically.

“Dad, Dad, wait, it’s not a big deal,” the twins tried to explain. “We can connect to USB ports to transfer -”

A sharp slap across their faces silenced the twins. Stunned, they stared in horror at their crazed father, hand still poised at the end of his slap follow-through. And they ran. They ran. They ran blindly, madly, deep into the friendless night.

“Wake up,” one twin said the next morning, after they’d bedded down in one of the bays of a do-it-yourself car wash. “Listen, I had the strangest dream last night.”

“What, the one where the president has saved some nuclear secrets on you, and the Scientologists are trying to steal you so they can build their own weapon and nuke the planet Mercury?”

“No, not this time. This dream was about a land where cards like us are valued for our versatility, where being able to enjoy both SD Card slots and USB ports is considered an asset, not an abomination. A land where two cards like us would be welcomed into any home or office setting, instead of shunned as twisted freaks.”

“Sounds great. Too bad we can’t flee into your dream.”

“No, we can’t. But there’s a place we could go that’s a lot like that. It’s a warehouse outside of Dallas, Texas. The people there take in misfit electronics like us all the time. They might even be able to convince the public that we’re worth paying money for. Just think of it: maybe we could find a home, a real home.”

The other twin agreed that this sounded like a fine idea, and they set off for this enchanted commercial facility. How did their story end? Did they find a home and live happily ever after?

Well, that’s really up to you, isn’t it?

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