u/JVMNightfall

“Smile for the camera Leighden!”

Lucy holds her phone obtrusively close to her toddler’s frowning face. He bats ineffectually at it.

“No, baby, smile! Smile, we’re having fun!”

“No mama. I want play.”

Lucy scowls.

“Play later Leighden. We need to work now. Mommy needs a new video, don’t you want to make a new video?”

“NO! NO VIDEO!” Leighden begins to wail the ear-piercing crescendo that he has recently learned allows him to get his way.

Lucy curses under her breath and pockets her phone reluctantly. Leighden had been such a cute baby, but they didn’t call it the “terrible twos” for nothing. As the boy began his first forays into independence, it had become increasingly hard to milk any good content out of him. Her uploads were becoming more infrequent and as a result the mysterious pull of the algorithm had been shrinking her reach dramatically. Fewer videos with fewer views, and the comfortable income she had grown accustomed to was withering away.

If she doesn’t find a way to get more footage out of Leighden soon, her channel risks drying up completely. If that happens, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. The father isn’t in the picture, and she can’t afford childcare if she has to go back to work.

She’ll just have to find some way to carry the content herself.

Newly determined, Lucy points the front-facing camera on her phone at herself. She stops dead in her tracks. She barely recognizes the woman staring back at her in the screen. Wrinkles and stress lines send cracks through the youthful self-image she still has of herself. Plum colored bags under her eyes sink so deep that her face looks almost skeletal.

And the vacant look in her eyes…. She looks so tired. She wallows in the feeling of self-pity for a long time, maneuvering the phone around to find a more flattering angle. It doesn’t work.

She wants to cry. It’s not fair. She’s only twenty-three. This isn’t how she envisioned her future. She’s supposed to be young and carefree, living the best years of her life. Visions of the things she used to dream about play in her head: partying with the girls at the club, fast drinks and hot men - living free. Shallow dreams, but for her, they were the most idyllic thing she could fit into her limited imagination.

Instead, life had caught up with her so fast. She still felt like she was a child, but already had one of her own. It only took one of those hot men to saddle her with his baggage before he fucked off. And she was stuck spending the rest of her life cleaning up their mess. The weight of consequence felt like manacles around her feet. If it weren’t for this fucking kid, she could still be doing everything she wanted. And now the little brat couldn’t even spare a smile for the camera like he used to.

She stops herself from spiraling. She loves her son, she does. But sometimes it feels like she’s going on month number thirty of post-partum depression. Motherhood was the hardest test of her young life, and she was doing it all alone.

She wipes her eyes. She has to make this work. She readies the singsong ‘video voice’ in the back of her throat, befit with the bouncing cadence she’s modelled after other more successful accounts on TikTok. She flexes her cheek muscles to force a proper smile onto her face.

The mask is on. She hits the record button.

“Hey there Honest Moms, it’s time for another day in the life! Leighden is feeling cuh-ranky todayyyy!” she sings with a vibrato. “And let me tell you, ya girl is looking rough. So I thought today we’d do a makeup tutorial while I refresh. Girls, let me tell you, when motherhood comes knocking, the most important thing is self-care! So today we’re gonna be using my favorite pallet from-“

“MAMA!!!” comes the screeching voice of Leighden. The sound is sandpaper to Lucy’s brain, like the high pitched whirring of dentistry machines. The mask falls off.

“What is it?!” she shrieks, not realizing how shrill she sounds until it reaches her own ears. Leighden looks like he’s about to cry. Lucy feels the pain of guilt catch in her throat like she swallowed a razorblade.

God, she’s an absolutely terrible mother.

“What is it, baby?” she tries again meekly and the words echo with the hollowness of someone who knows she’ll never be enough.

“Mama, I need potty.”

Lucy sighs, grumbles, picks the child up. She carries him over to the bathroom and sets him down. He’s old enough now to go unaccompanied, a herculean feat of development that could not have come soon enough. If Lucy never has to change another diaper again it’ll be too soon.

She revels in the precious moment of freedom from her son for just a few seconds before pulling up her phone again. Twists of anxiety worm holes in her stomach when she sees the last frame of the first video attempt. Frozen in the final image, her eyes stare murder at her own child. The wrinkles that made her self-conscious carve the grimace of a witch into her face. She deletes the video.

The second take is much better. She can work with this. It’s going well until she feels a tiny hand tug at her pants leg.

“Mama, I made mess.”

Oh no.

When she turns on the yellow halogen light of the bathroom, her jaw drops. It’s so much worse than she ever could’ve imagined.

Ten minutes later, she’s got cleaning gloves, a scrub brush, a bottle of bleach, and a leftover covid mask on her face. She carefully checks that nothing in the screen will get her video demonetized before recording. The mask muffles her voice while she explains this video will be something she calls ‘Deep Clean ASMR’.

The absurdity doesn’t even register to her. Twenty years of being plugged in nonstop. An entire generation grown in the information age, exposed to every single moment of each other’s lives. Feeling the eyes of the world on every action. She doesn’t even question why the hell she’s videoing and sharing this moment. It’s just what you do.

The final recording is twenty minutes of disjointed scrubbing noises interrupted by the dissonance of heavy grunting and a few nauseating retches.

When she gets out of the bathroom, she shoves the phone in her son’s face as her cheeks flush red enough to match the bloodshot whites of her eyes.

“WHY DID YOU DO THAT LEIGHDEN??”

The boy starts to cry a wailing siren.

“All you do is cry!” Lucy says, all empathy gone from her exasperated face, “Fine, then crying is what the viewers are going to get!”

Lucy has the newest model iPhone, and it’s capturing this entire display in 200 megapixels. She’s abusing her son, even she knows it, but goddamnit she can’t take it anymore. It feels good to give the boy some tough love for the first time in his little life. How’s he ever going to grow without some strict discipline here and there?

She grabs his little hand and yanks on it hard enough to start bruising deep purple. All the while, Leighden yells and yells his little voice hoarse. The camera captures every decibel.

“If you want to throw a tantrum, you can go do it behind closed doors! You little demon! Mommy does everything for you, and this is how you repay me!”

She tosses the boy into the bathroom and shuts the door. His sobs are so loud they vibrate the wood and resonate in the frame with a horrific pitch. Lucy snatches her headphones off the counter and keeps cranking the volume of her favorite song up until she can no longer hear her little hellspawn’s cries.

Just ten minutes, she begs, living second to second entirely by the grace of the sonic shelter blasting through her headphones. Just ten minutes of time-out for him to realize he crossed the line, and then…

And then what?

She’ll let down the only physical barrier she has in this entire tiny studio apartment. She’ll open the bathroom door to her Terrible Twos Tantrum Son. She’ll welcome this living thorn back into her side. Lift her arm up to show her soft exposed ribcage, where he can dig and twist into the skin. Where he will nestle and suckle and scream and control every minute of her life, for the rest of her life.

Motherhood is a delayed funeral. You choose to sacrifice your body, mind, and soul. Everything you are. All in the hopes that this little flesh vessel you pour it all into will survive. Will carry on your legacy. Will love you. Will pay you back one day, when he understands what you did for him.

Your skin wrinkles up like the world’s biggest pale raisin. It’s like all the moisture is being sucked out of your body, because it fucking is, because it’s all being pumped into this little leech that literally fed off of your body for nine months. No different from a tapeworm, this little parasite wormed its way into your ovaries where it grew into a freeloading placenta. Where it hijacked your biology, made your body into a better carrier for it. It put a little cushion of fat in all the right places to pillow its developing stem cells; it expanded your hips for an easier exit out of your most delicate places.

He fucking ruined you.

Lucy puts both hands up to her ears, pressing the padded cups around the cartilage on the sides of her head so hard that it hurts. God, what a pathetic mother she is. What a pathetic woman. She can’t even bring herself to love her own child.

It’s not until this moment, as she descends twenty stories below the earth on the spiraling staircase of borderline personality, that she finally realizes.

Her own child hasn’t made a peep.

It was so easy to leave him in there. So easy to not worry about him for one fucking minute.

When she bursts through the door and looks down at the scene that’s painted halogen-yellow by the cheapest possible lightbulbs – she regrets knowing how much worse this was than the last time she looked in here.

If hell was a real place, and her punishment was being sentenced to making ten billion “Deep Clean ASMR” videos, she would’ve preferred that eternity.

That eternity would’ve been better than the one in which her son will never open his eyes ever again.

That little parasite. That little boy. Her son.

Love is a complicated thing, it really is. Especially unconditional love. The love that will always exist, no matter what, because it’s not the kind of love that asks for anything back.

It’s the kind of love that would make you swipe a knife across your wrists without blinking. The kind of love that would let you miss a meal – hell, miss ten - if it meant your baby boy wouldn’t go hungry. The kind of love that keeps you from taking yourself out of this world, even when you can picture five different ways to do it that would be easier than facing another day: just one quick trigger, one quick medicine cocktail, one quick swipe of a plastic bag over the head – But no, you can’t do that, you can’t do that because he needs you.

That’s the love that Lucy feels bubbling up in her throat, riding on the wave of bile that shoots past her strip-whitened teeth, out of her moisturized and glossed lips, onto the freshly cleaned floor.

The love she tries to hold onto as she watches her son spasm on the linoleum tile floor which is already staining permanently red from the streaks of blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.

The love she feels when she covers him, wrapping her sheltering arms around him to protect him, but he doesn’t stop shaking. When she looks down at the open bottle of bleach she left on the counter, dribbling its lethal contents out in a grotesque puddle that mixes with her son’s blood on the floor. When she pulls his little body to her chest and she can feel his rasping rattling through her own ribcage, feel the vibration of his little lungs dissolving as each breath brings more of the caustic fluid up into his alveoli.

When the phone rings endlessly to poison control, but reaches only a dial tone.

For some reason the signal isn’t going anywhere, for some reason the only data leaving this phone isn’t a desperately needed emergency phone call.

No, wrapped in those malicious strands of murderous data is a different kind of message, the last upload that will ever be sent from this phone.

Not a call, but a little video. One last vlog.

Lucy weeps as piercingly as her son ever did. She rocks back and forth, holding his little body that has finally stopped thrashing, finally become still.

Finally. A truly honest glimpse into parenthood.

The acrid smell of charred bones singes Victor’s nosehairs and sends him reeling. It’s not the vile odor, burning like a chemical fire in his nasal cavities, that gets to him.

It’s the fact that it’s so familiar.

I made a living with my back, hijo. I don’t want you to do the same. You’re too smart. Use your head instead.

The words he heard from his father so many times over the years come racing into his head. That old man, face crosshatched with wrinkles from so many years of encouraging smiles. So many years of laughter.

Use your mind, hijo. Keep it sharp every day. You never know how long you have it for.

The ability of the olfactory center of the brain to tie vivid memories to smells is nothing short of uncanny. The smell of fresh rain on the hottest summer days reminds you of your first love.

Brown leaves crunching in the fall, the first time you realized how sweet the impermanence of life; how easily your regrets could age and crumble into the dirt like those leaves, and you could be free again.

The feelings are so real and so visceral. A simple scent makes you feel awash in the glow of nostalgia.

For Victor, he also has a memory tied to smell. When he catches the aroma of caramelized human flesh he thinks of his dad.

It’s the same scent when meat grime from the back of the grill falls into the flame and is incinerated. It’s the same as when an exceptionally chunky moth flies into the bug zapper and fries slowly, intermittently crackling as the voltage courses through its hemolymph. It smells like not-pork, appetizing at first but with something unmistakably not quite right about it.  The kind of smell that makes your mouth water with hunger but also fills you with shame that you even considered that wendigo urge.

Victor swallows hard to clear the build-up of saliva at the back of his throat. He’s feeling that same shame now.

He’s picturing his dad in the later years, rocking in his chair. Staring out at the horizon for hours, never a thought crossing his vacant eyes.

Not the time, Victor, he thinks to himself, forcing the images of his father from his mind. He’s not an amateur, goddamnit, and he knows better. He can’t spend this critical moment distracted by emotions, as he prepares for a high-risk entry with his hand on his holster. He knows how to keep these thoughts out of his head. 

He’s less able to keep the anxiety out of his heart.

It feels like his chest is caught in the spikes of a pitfall trap.

The smoldering remains of the house stand in stark contrast to the idyllic suburban cul-de-sac surrounding it. It has become a charcoal effigy to perdition. The roof has burned away and left behind only the blackened framework skeleton. The walls have turned to ashen monuments, portions of which disintegrate into clouds of dark dust with each passing breeze. The whole structure threatens to collapse in on itself.

It’s quite literally the last place on earth Victor wants to be.

He steps towards the door.

When he reaches his hand out to the brass doorknob he can still feel a faint residual warmth, even though the fire has been out since last night. He tentatively pushes the door open. Soot-stained walls transform the cookie-cutter architecture into an ashen liminal space, familiar and foreign all at the same time.

More familiar to Victor, who has walked through halls like these before. He feels the same dread as he did back then, knowing all too well what he will find at the end of the hall. Even in this tomb of fire, he feels an icy chill in his spine. This crime scene is triggering every trauma he has ever suppressed. He won’t admit it to himself now, but he feels the presence of the Burned Man. He can feel the malevolent intent coming through the darkened walls. The way this experience is so specifically curated to attack his personal fears is distinctly apparent.

 

He’s being targeted.

 

I see you. I found you.

Victor stares down at the end of the door at the end of the hall. The texture is a disgusting mosaic of bubbled and peeling paint.

He knows that’s cruel foreshadowing.

He knows what’s on the other side. He can feel it, as if that charred corpse is pulsing out a frequency he is attuned to. Every fiber in his body is telling him to turn around, leave this death trap behind.

Get the hell out of here.

But he knows how high the stakes are.

Duty. If there’s one ideal his father instilled him, it was the belief that the world needs men who would put themselves behind causes greater than them. It’s why he went into this line of work in the first place. It’s why he took this job, which he is beginning to suspect may very well be his last job. It’s why he didn’t run screaming from the room when Tibo explained everything to him. It’s why nothing, not even the fear that has his heart in an iron grip, is going to stop him is going to stop him from going into that room.

One foot in front of the other. His boots come down on what yesterday was carpet, today is crisped up fibers that crunch beneath his feet. The door looms in front of him, larger with each step. Just like before, in the simulation, Victor is inundated with the feeling of no longer being in control of his own actions. He is like a clockwork figurine on a predetermined path, powerless to change his own fate. As he finds himself completely unable to resist each movement his body makes towards the door, he comforts himself with a thought. He recites it over and over again: a cursed mantra to keep the soldier legs marching thoughtlessly onward.

The world needs men like him.

One foot. Then the other. He passes picture frames hanging askew on the wall. The superheated glass has exploded out onto the floor, shards charred black. The photos within mostly warped beyond recognition, some holding the scorched silhouettes of friends and family. He forces his eyes away from those portraits so that he doesn’t think of his own nightmares.

The door is finally in reach. The corner has been burned away and from this angle he can see inside, though he can’t make out anything recognizable yet. He doesn’t need to. He knows exactly what he will see.

He swings open the door.

In the corner, the window facing the street is shattered inward into the room leaving more glass shards littering the floor. Next to it, in the center of a significant scorch mark are other brown shards broken off the makeshift molotov that ignited this whole disaster.

Arson. An absolutely brutal way to die. This guy must have really pissed someone off.

Victor has been in this line of work for a long time – he doesn’t scare easy. But he has his demons. He knows the feeling of cold sweats. Of waking up, gripping the sheets around him for anything tangible to take him out of that nocturnal realm of burning hell. Of those empty eyesockets staring a burning hole into his heart.

The truth is, the man he’s about to see in the room beyond him is something he knows all too well. The Burned Man. The spectre that consumes the bodies of men lost to flame. The image of catalyzed loss that haunts anyone who sees their loved one meet that hideous end. When he looks at last, it’s just as bad as he ever expected.

What’s left in the computer chair is more of a wraith than a human. Charred marshmallow skin breaks into bloody cracks like lava running red all through the body. His eyeballs have boiled out of their sockets and his mouth is a gaping black abyss. His final expression of terror sears a scream onto his face forever.

Looks just like Dad.

Victor tries to look away, but he’s paralyzed. The culmination of every deeply personal trauma he’s suffered through for years has been placed right in front of his path. He’s investigating something that knows his very deepest fears and pains, and it’s all too happy to use them against him. His jaw hangs slack. The rage in his heart is quelled only by the fear beside it.

Please, anything else.

I’m sorry, Dad.

The details before him fill in gaps in the picture he wishes remained unanswered, and open up questions he wishes he hadn’t known enough to ask.

The man’s legs and back are melted into his chair. As the flames rose around him, he had sat perfectly still, burning until his skin melded with leather. Why on earth didn’t he get up? What could have kept him locked in place, even as the fire licked his feet and cooked his flesh?

Those are questions Victor doesn’t have time to consider further. His mission is simple. What is left of the computer is basically slag. He looks up to turn his nostrils away from the stench and tries to overlook the feeling like roaches are crawling inside his skin. He reaches past the demon of ash that has haunted his night terrors for years. It’s right there, he can feel it, it’s right there. His eyes wander to the face from his nightmares.

God damn.

The Burned Man is as hideous as he’s ever been.

Victor regains control, gives the body an unceremonious kick just like he had watched Tibo do, and twists his screwdriver through the melted computer. Within moments and without thought, the harddrive is free.

Well that’s something.

All the plastic is melted into amorphous black goo. But the thing that really leaves Victor with a feeling of unease is what’s left.

The metal parts, the wiring, the lines of twisting platinum shine through the slag as they stretch into runic symbols. Microcosms of electrism form prisms glowing with esoteric power.

Like sigils carved into stone, the arcane wiring of the circuitry glows red hot and unscorched by the fire.

You can tell when it’s reaching out to you.

It’s not that hard, once you know how to look.

It’s usually something simple and obvious, because it doesn't care to hide itself well. It doesn’t cover its tracks because it knows you are powerless to stop it. The final insult is that it doesn't even bother anymore.

Your anxieties become inescapable as articles with headlines that make you feel physically sick flood your feed. The unhinged posts from your estranged family members still unavoidably find their way to your front page. Every comment section becomes a toxic biohazard cesspit filled with eldritch combinations of words that threaten your very sanity if you delve too deep.

And the more you know, the more it shows you these things. It knows the moment you’re aware it exists. That’s what a cognitohazard is.

The more you learn, the more vulnerable you become. Knowledge against the enemy becomes a reciprocal exchange.

That’s why it reaches out to you.

It tempts you like a siren song, because the longer you spend with it, the more it knows about you.

With bloodshot eyes, Tibo scrolls through one more post. Just one more post.

The six-monitor array makes the banality of brainrot look like a legitimate investigation. Multiple tabs from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and more fill up the screens. An endless feed of chaotic noise. But hidden in that noise, patterns exist.

Tibo occupied a special place in hell: he was smart enough to be aware of every manipulation the internet used to siphon his attention, but he was entirely unable to break free of its hypnotic hold. He scrolls the same websites as the rest of the mindless content-zombies endlessly. On one level, he assures himself it’s all part of the job, part of his research.

On another, he knows that as he lies in bed late at night, he’ll be back again, scrolling the feed on his phone. No research, no mission. Just an addict trapped in a dopamine loop he cannot break.

Every day, consuming vitriol, paranoia, depression, and propaganda.  Horrible headlines fill every waking moment. But hidden in all the madness were clues to the mystery he had spent the last few years looking for. QSO-1127 was very good about leaving breadcrumbs wherever it spread its diseased hands. Once he had a hit, he’d send his agent after it. Long gone were the days he’d investigated it himself. He’d been at this too long, and Eleven-Twenty-Seven knew him so very well. He could never go in again.

He scrolls past the news of the day:

The Klan was back; they had lynched a man in a small town in Georgia.

The ensuing protest became a riot in which another eight were killed and two buildings burned down.

This week’s school shooting in a rural village in Alaksa wiped out almost every kid in the town.

The president started another war only two days after he declared the last one over.

There’s an outbreak of a parasite that causes explosive diarrhea and it’s been found in produce near you.

Suicide numbers are up amongst every demographic.

The Supreme Court reversed the ban on electro-

He stops, catching himself in a moment of weakness. Letting the feelings wash over him, he finishes reading the headline. Electroshock application had been deemed legal in conversion therapy camps for kids.

Yeah, that’s enough internet for today, he thinks to himself as his finger hovers over the power button.

That’s when he sees it.

On the sixth monitor, he always runs a Youtube browser in the background. Five monitors of endless content feeds, but he still keeps a video running on the side at all times. His attention span is irreparably shot, he knows, but the white noise helps keep an unrelated thought from ever crossing his brain. Mostly he just listens to morbid video essayists and ghastly podcasts to fill the silence. The grimly spoken words make him nostalgic for when fear was something abstract and entertaining, as opposed to something he lived with every day.

Whatever video he had been watching previously has gone silent, ended who knows how long ago. But next in the “Recommended For You” section, there it was.

The thumbnail is a picture of some colorless indistinguishable mass. The video has zero views, despite being uploaded a week ago. It’s as if it’s a message meant only for his eyes. Why did the algorithm show this to him? He feels a sinking pit in his stomach and debates if he wants to pretend he didn’t see it. Just shut off the computer as he had just planned to a moment ago and go home.

If he walks away now, there’s a chance this mysterious video disappears forever, lost in the ether amid a million other empty data streams that no one will ever see.

Maybe more unsettlingly, there’s a chance that the next time he opens his browser, it will be sitting right there on the home page waiting for him.

He clicks the video.

What ensues is a fever dream assault on the senses. Something between the cursed video from The Ring and a bad trip.

A sudden jumpscare of static blasts a splitsecond of havoc over his speakers. Tibo leaps for the volume knob, but by the time his finger is on it, the static shrinks into nothing more than a silent white line on a black background.

Then the sound starts. A grating, dissonant voice scrapes through the speakers, uttering rhythmic syllables. It’s so distorted that Tibo can’t tell what it’s saying, but it’s almost reminiscent of old number stations - those orphaned radio broadcasts that sent out looping signals of numerical sequences, seemingly to no one. With each ugly sound, the white line vibrates into the familiar peaks and troughs of a waveform. Tibo opens a program to try to unscramble the sounds. In another window it starts whirling the symbols and text rapidly, trying to decode the erratic signal.

 

Ě̵͇͚̬̹̲ͅx̵̫͑̒͛͑̂.̷̧̥̳͙̗̱̅́̉͆̎̈̋͘ ̸̻͕͕͔̭͑͒̈́͊̏́̀͋̌͘       S̴̢̧̹̭̘͎̋j̵̨͇͙͈̙͙̺̙̓͑̂̿́̔̚̕͝u̷͓̐̎́́͒̍̓̆n̸̯̭͙̙̱͊́͐̒̋͐a̶̧̅͛͋̇̈́̋̿̊͝.̸̨̨̥͇̞͙̤͇͎̇̍͌̓͊͊̾́̈́͐ ̵̬̘̙̣̒͆̉́̌͊̔                  L̴̡̲̃͗̍ď̴͎̠̺̯̗̲̳͕̣̇̏͠l̶̙͂̕.̷̨̢̛͖̹͂̉̈́̍̏̏͋̽ ̶̧̢͓̱͚͙͔̙̰͎͗͂̈̐                  T̸̛̪̖̜̳̪̪̔̌̈͊͗͌̂͐e̵͈̙̝̐̾̓̎̓̀͝͝ì̸̲̰̫͕̍̾͜n̶̨͔̪͓͇̗̈ą̵̢͚̯̜̻̗̼̉̾̒͒͐̀̉͒̍̎               .̷͇̭̲͚̳͓͒͜ ̶̟̘͎̀̈́͊̀́͗̈́̓̀̚Ŕ̴̨͍͙̍           z̸̻̼̮͇̮̭͕̥̠̓͝x̷͉̐́̀̐̕.̶̱̯̹̘̻̆͂̃́̓̇͂͘͜͜ ̴̤̼̦͓͎͙̓͆̿̆̃̽͘M̴̨͍̝̼̟̼̰̯̑͑̆͘̕l̴͕̓͌͒v̶̛̠͚͍̜̒̽̃̆͗͒̎͝f̴̧͈̙̜͎̕͜.̷̢̱̒̈́̈́̓̓̀̌̅͜

 

Nothing makes sense. The screen changes to show some parasitic mite with a hideous barbed proboscis. Magnified a hundredfold, it pushes away arm hairs the size of trees to get to a vulnerable spot of exposed flesh. Serrated chelicerae slice open the skin. Just as an orb of dark blood wells up, it plunges that proboscis in and begins to siphon with a sickening throbbing motion.

 

Ḁ̴͓̇̊̍̚͘é̴̬̪̪̉̃̈́̇͜t̴̠̹͙̤̂̀̅̕̚̕a̷̗̝͕̍̀͆͑̈s̶͖͎̒̇̐͠               ̷̢̛̤̰̪̪̅̂s̷̬̥̀̎̑̃̽̚ì̸͉͉̱͍̮̇̾̍͘͝ͅm̶̲̋͆͂́ï̵̞̍͒̈́ẩ̴͉̕ȓ̵̲̙͚u̵̼̐̃̓͘͝m̷̰̻͙͉͈̀̈́̈́        ̷̡̯̩̠͕͇̆̈̎n̵̛͙̜̐̿͋̂̈ű̷̧͖̬͌̊͑ṅ̵̛̝̗͙č̸̺̳̅̄ ̴̧͉͕͖̞̥̈́̑́̀͛                   c̷̻͆ä̸͓́͌̈̎ͅd̶̹̘̺͉̲̥͆ĭ̶͍̒̈́͘͝ͅt̴̹̗̦̔̏̑͜.̴̢̛̩̈́̊̄͊̑

 

The screen cuts to the blurred figure of a man enshrouded in darkness. His whole body wracks violently as he coughs, and clouds of white powder spew from his gaping mouth. The white clouds glisten and reveal sharp bladed edges. He is coughing up a million microscopic caltrops. Black viscous fluid wells up at the corners of his mouth and spills forth, coating his shirt in dark stains.

 

Ḁ̶͒́ͅ ̷̬̍̍p̸͍̭͠ȕ̷̩̙l̶͙͒v̸̰̙̅͂e̴̳̬̊̓r̸͖̩͋̌e̴̺̽̀         ̷͙̈a̴̡̗͗d̵͚̹̑ ̶̨̯͋p̷͉͗u̴̡͗͛l̵̫͂v̸̔̏͜ḙ̸̫̍r̷̺̝͒̈́e̷͉͕̊m̷̻̔̋ ̴̯̎̀   m̴̯̪̈̃ḙ̴̗͠ ̶̧͉͒͗        c̷̡͓͝o̵͓̎̆ͅm̶̘͔̓í̶͇͉͑t̶͍͑͌a̵̰̅b̴̉ͅe̴̖̓r̶̨̈͊i̸̺̾͊s̶̘̳̒͂.̶͖̟̍

 

The next image is the withered silhouette of a man, wreathed in white flame. His skin chars away and cracks into black dust, his eyes boil out of their sockets, but he does not react. Instead, he walks calmly towards the screen, reaching out a hand of bony charred fingers. The empty eyesockets begin to glow bright white.

 

M̸̢̏o̵̦͘ŕ̶͍s̷̡͛    ̸̲̀ë̶̱́x̶̥̚ ̷̙̈       a̷͕͐s̵̀ͅt̵̥̓r̴̭̔i̶̟͌s̵̠͗ ̶͕̓              e̴̻͘x̶̨̒s̸̮̅t̷͚͒i̵̮͑ň̷̻c̴̤̀ẗ̵̺i̶͈̒o̸̙̔        ̷̠̂a̵͈̽         ̵͚͒s̷̠̀t̵̬̽e̷͕̊l̸̦̐l̵͇̊i̷͔͋s̵̘͘

 

The images blur faster, no longer coherent vignettes but split second flashes of the grotesque. Maggots squirm in boiling blood. Rat snouts bubble in hot oil on a frying pan. An x-ray of a man’s lungs riddled with perforations.  An anatomical cross section of male genitals split in two like the heads of a conjoined twin. So many more images flash, faster and faster, Tibo wants to look away but he cannot, nauseous enough to vomit, disgusted enough to feel like he needs to take a scrub brush to the folds within his brain.

 

O̷N̸E̴.̷ ̴ ̸ ̸             O̴N̵E̷.̸ ̴ ̵                   T̴W̸O̶.̶ ̶                    ̷S̸E̵V̶E̴N̸

 

Then.

The chaos stops. The waveform returns. That fine white horizontal line in the middle of the screen.

It splits into two, then slowly the two lines pry apart from each other towards the top and bottom of the screen. The ellipse opens wide. Inside, a single lifelike eyeball, wet and glistening and looking like it could pop out of the screen.

TOO LATE.

The video ends.

Tibo sits in stunned silence. He can’t even process the barrage of cursed images he was subject to. He feels physically ill. His stomach twists. He looks down in horror to see the seconds count down in the small autoplay window at the bottom of the video. Even though it appears to be a clip from some entirely normal streamer, for all intents in purposes, it may as well be the timer of a nuclear bomb ticking down to zero.

Transfixed on the loading of the page, he’s completely unaware of the single drop of blood that drips out of his nostril and splashes into the desk, where it blooms into a perfect crimson halo.

“I told you, man. It’s not a hacker. I wish it was that simple. It’s not even human,” Tibo defuses, trying to calm Victor’s frayed nerves. It doesn’t work.

“No, man,” Victor spits, and his eyes flash with an irritation that is all too familiar. Tibo has seen that look in the face of just about everybody he’s ever met. The face they make when they’re about three stages past fed up with his bullshit.

Victor pulls himself to his feet and rapidly stumbles away from the VR chair as if he’s afraid it’s going to bite him. He looks at Tibo and the accusation in his eyes could burn holes through him.

 The slew of panicked questions rolls forth from Victor’s mouth uncontained.

“He fucking doxxed me. He knew who I was. He knew my family. How could he know that? Are your databases not secure? Are we compromised? I thought you said all record of me was scrubbed! What the fuck kind of half-assed covert ops setup are we running here?!”

This is Tibo’s least favorite part. It’d be better if he could keep Agent Aquila in the dark – just keep sending him in blind for as long as he lasts before it catches up to him. Before it unmakes him.

It’s counterintuitive to explain a cognitohazard to someone. The more they know about it, the more vulnerable they become. It's a memetic threat that learns more about you as you learn more about it.

How many other agents has Tibo sent into these simulations, just to watch them find out enough about QSO-1127 that it set its eyes on them? How many other people has it terminated?

Tibo has lost count.

Giving Victor the full debriefing just feels wrong. It’s the equivalent of explaining to your beloved family dog he’s going to die one day.

“Agent Aquila, the good news is your clearance level just got elevated. The bad news is it’s because the anomalous activity is ramping up. Your time is running out faster than expected,” Tibo says as he swivels his chair around to face the array of monitors. He clicks away at the keyboard to enter his authentication details. The screen turns into an array of multicolored specks of light spattered on a black background.

It’s a star map.

Tibo circles his mouse cursor around a surreptitious empty spot on the map.

“You see this part here?”

“Tibo, I don’t see shit.”

“Yeah, because there’s nothing there. At least to the naked eye. But check out what happens when I pull up the electromagnetic radiation overlay.”

Tibo types a sequence on the keyboard and suddenly that blank empty space in the stars is filled with a glowing ultraviolet spiral: the 'accretion disk'. Out of its center, a single focused beam of energy blasts in a straight line shooting across the map.

Tibo traces that beam with the cursor.

It follows a perfect vector straight to Earth.

“QSO-1127-XII is the naming designation we gave it. The closest thing we know to describe it is called a Quasi-Stellar Object, or a quasar. I’m sure you’re up to date on your astrophysics.”  

Tibo can hear Victor grinding his teeth in response from several feet away.

“But, if you need a refresher, a quasar is an object in space left behind as a black hole dies. It releases an anomalous amount of radiation, brighter than anything else we’ve found in the universe.  

“But this one isn’t showing up at all?” Victor asks, his curiosity clearly piqued.

“Not in the visible spectrum. But in radio waves, it’s emitting an unpredictably oscillating frequency. It’s constantly shifting across wavelengths in a way that quasars don’t do. It's unexplainable dark matter shit. Just recently we realized that the unstable frequency oscillates in a pattern identically matching what we’re detecting in the scavenged hard drives.”

Victor’s face hasn’t softened, but his demeanor shifts slightly. Tibo can see him working the details out in his head.

“So the signal in the computers… It’s coming from this invisible quasar?”

“Maybe. Maybe the stellar body just redirects the signal back at us from somewhere else, like how the moon reflects the sunlight back at us. For all we know, the signal originates from right here in our solar system and the quasar is just acting as a mirror. Or it’s coming from somewhere else entirely, somewhere deep in the black of space. But at least it gives us something to call it.

“We think QSO-1127 was always here. Maybe before man, maybe before our sun even formed. Stars emit radio waves too, you know. Maybe Eleven-Twenty-Seven came from before time, hiding in stellar radiowaves, searching for a host like a dormant parasite. Until the day we alerted it to our presence.

"From what we can tell, QSO-1127 has moved on from whatever cosmic radiation it came from. Now, it's latched on to the radiofrequency electromagnetism that carries data across networked computers.

“It’s hiding inside the internet.”

Victor sucks in air between his clenched teeth and shakes his head. When at last he speaks, his voice is filled with gravel.

“Say I believe you. There’s an inhuman entity that exists within frequencies. You think it came from radiation in space, but now it’s moved into the radiowaves we use for the internet. And to what end? To put more spam in our social media feeds?”

“Don’t be so unimaginative, Agent. The internet is the culmination of all human information. It’s basically a giant hivemind that we all communicate through. From inside it, Eleven-Twenty-Seven has immense influence over the development of our species. Propaganda, political machinations, stock manipulation. It’s positioned to topple countries and brainwash entire generations. We’re always connected to the internet, so there’s no way to escape it. Let me show you something.”

Victor falls silent. He crosses his arms and turns his rapt attention to the monitors. Tibo feels a smile tug at the corner of his lips. He’s hooked.

“It all starts ramping up in 2010,” Tibo says, tracing the line of a spectrogram, “The signal from space starts getting exponentially more intense from that moment right…. There.”

Victor leans in to look at the moment where that graph of QSO-1127's activity shifts from decades of dormant calm to increasingly erratic chaos.

“It corresponds exactly to the moment Facebook creates the first content recommendation algorithm: the moment we made the tech to keep people scrolling, always feeding them one more post.

"We made an intelligent, learning program built to prey on people’s attention spans. Advertisement agencies took one look at the tech and started salivating. It was the perfect way to keep customers hooked and consuming. But the program almost instantly became smarter than it was ever programmed to be.

"It started acting like it was sentient.”

“QSO-1127,” Victor says quietly, following along.

Tibo flips through a series of other graphs. Slide after slide of condensed data heralding a prophecy of doom. Violence, poverty, unrest. It’s all exponentially on the rise, overlaid perfectly with the graph of QSO-1127’s increasing activity.

The diagrams are like seismographs warning of a coming earthquake. Each year, closer to cataclysm.

An earthquake is a good analogy, Tibo thinks, picturing faultlines cracking wide open to reveal the fiery pits of hell, hungering to swallow up the wayward children of a long-lost god.

Planned by the powerful and approved in boardrooms, the old masters of the world sold our species out. They opened the door to a new master, one far less short-sighted and far more insidious than simple-minded capitalists.

Humans made the technology meant to atrophy our brains all by ourselves. The cosmic demon hiding in the frequencies only latched onto it because it was so similar to its own motives.  

“If this is all true,” Victor muses, “This is an existential threat to our entire civilization. So why is it just you and me in this room? Where is our backup? Where the fuck are the qualified people??”

“Victor. It lives inside the internet. It has complete access to the sum of all human knowledge. It learned your deepest secrets the moment you interacted with it – just imagine what it could do with access to someone truly powerful. We’ve got bosses, but at their request I keep them in the dark. We can’t risk exposing them to this thing.

"We’re on our own here.”

Victor thinks back to the news headline in the simulation, how quickly QSO-1127 had dug up the deepest wound in his heart, then used it to thrust the blade in and torment him. He thinks of the virtual hellscape he just unplugged from moments ago, still feeling the nervous sweat dry on his clammy hands, the throbbing of his sprained ankle.

“Tell me honestly, Tibo. I’m not the first agent you’ve brought on to investigate Eleven-Twenty-Seven, am I?”

“No, Agent Aquila. You are not.”

“And I’m assuming given what I know now, resignation is not an option.”

Tibo shakes his head grimly at Victor, watching as his expression goes through every stage from nervous anxiety to unshakeable perseverance. Victor gives a single resigned nod. Tibo returns the gesture.

“Welcome to the Bureau of Superpositional Dialectics. Consider yourself fully onboarded.”

INITIALIZING SIMULATION...
[RUNNING] RF Sweep Engine: 87.5 MHz - 108.0 MHz
[RUNNING] Modulation Rate: Rapid Delta-t (0.0025ms)
[INFO] Scanning Transient States...
--------------------------------------
[0.003s] SWEEP: 89.1 MHz >> [STATIC]
[0.006s] SWEEP: 91.4 MHz >> [SPIKE DETECTED - QUADRANT 3]
[0.009s] SWEEP: 95.2 MHz >> [STATIC]
--------------------------------------
[OK] EVP Intercept Protocol: ACTIVE
[OK] Frequency Modulation Stable (400Hz/sec)
 
SIMULATION READY.

 

Red flakes of the floor peel up and float languidly toward the ceiling where they silently pile over each other like leaves falling in reverse. Everything is bathed in a haunting grey light that originates from nowhere and radiates from everywhere. It’s as if the sun is gone and all that remains is a directionless, liminal glow.

The first thing Victor does is look down at his hands.

They’ve been projected immaculately down to the pore. Even the old shrapnel scar under his wrist. If it weren’t for the dreamlike appearance of the room, he doesn’t think he would be able to tell it wasn’t real.

There is a quiet buzz ringing faintly in his ears. It sounds like there are a hundred TVs all tuned to different channels, but with the volume all the way down. What had Tibo said?

The thing hides in between frequencies. Like a radio knob being constantly turned, listening to the static between channels.

The simulation was meant to emulate that. It created a perfect VR replication of the room built from the imprint of the altered hard drive they had retrieved. Then, the modulator would rapidly shift the projection into a vibrational space between randomly generated frequencies.

Tibo described it as “being unstuck in space.”

When they had been in this room together, Tibo’s endless monologue annoyed Victor to the threshold of madness. Now looking around in this surreal digital facsimile, he couldn’t deny he missed the comfort of Tibo’s mindless babble.

Victor’s training kicks in and he pans the room. Everything in the dead girl’s room is where it should be, but the uncanny replica is beyond eerie. A part of him wishes Tibo had simulated him a gun. He counts his blessings that at least there is no dead body in the chair this time.

He counts one less blessing when he looks at the wall and sees the painted canvas of blood spray is still there.

And worse - it’s moving.

The blood droplets are swirling slowly in circles on the wall, forming the familiar galactic shapes of spiral arms in a rotating pinwheel. When Vincent first saw that kaleidoscope of blood on the wall, it invoked feelings of a painting, or of a constellation. Now, as he watches the red droplets march along in formation like little red ants, there’s no mistaking that it’s the latter.

The drops are perfectly arranged in the shape of a moving galaxy.

It’s an undeniable message written in blood.

Behind him, the computer screen flickers on. Its staticky screen flashes out jagged knives of blackwhite pulses that strobe chaos onto the walls. The magnetism that pulled his eyes towards the corpse returns, but this time it’s irresistible.

Something feels like tiny fishhooks latching into the whites of his eyes and yanking them until they roll sideways. He has no choice. He must turn around and look.

There, waiting for him: the computer screen.

It emits the nightmare glow of every time he ever fell asleep on the couch as a child and awoke at that cursed hour where only noise came through the TV. The cacophonous hum of a thousand channels now blasts out of the screen with a deafening roar. Victor can’t look away. He can feel his heart stop when he realizes what he’s looking at.

There’s something moving in the static.

A distortion travels across the screen. Somewhere in the background, hiding behind the pixels. Victor can’t see anything for certain, but in that unmistakable sense when you know you’re being watched, he knows something is there. Watching him. His pulse thumps in his ears and he can hear his own ragged breaths, exasperated and loud.

The static cuts out and the screen turns blindingly white. With an oneiric sense of inevitability the bright white square grows bigger and bigger. Victor realizes with a pang of dread that he has been unconsciously walking closer to the screen. Only now does he recognize what it’s depicting.

It’s an instant messenger chat window. The interface isn’t from any modern application. Instead, it’s a barebones window with blocky borders reeking of nostalgic minimalism. An ellipsis wriggles at the bottom of the text window.

Someone is typing.

When the message arrives, the username is unreadable. The text is letters and symbols oscillating like the spinning of a slot machine. Victor looks down and sees he has unconsciously placed his fingers on the keyboard.

He’s about to make first contact.

#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸:
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: hello detective
USER: who is this?
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:  not important.           
                     JUST WAIT. YOU'LL SEE
x̸̺͈͈̳̓̑̿̈́̓͒͘7̸̨̟̟̿̒̓͜ç̶̧̩̲͚̭̫̜̪̒̽̔6̷̢͚̰̲̓̅f̶̨̻͔̪̲̣̰̜̘͛͐̄̀̂͜:  i see you appreciate my art

 
USER: art? Is that what this is to you?
USER: I will find you
USER: This can stop here. Tell me where to find you.
 
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: not that kind of story detective. maybe i’ll use you for my next painting
                                 YOURE SO FUCKED
USER: you’re contacting me which means you want to be seen. just another fucked up killer proud of his work.
USER: I’m not impressed.


t̶̻̬̼͕̘̤̺̰̻̀̒͆͋͐̃͠t̸̥̣̗̰͌̋͊̈́̎̍̂̽͂̈̕y̷̛̳̻͋̈́̅͆̈̊͌͊͊̊̚͝o̷̡̢̨̥̙͚͈͙̖͍̅͆̎̀̿̿f̵̮̰̋̉͋́̈̾7̸̤̝̗̙͓̩͈̜̦̝̹̘̗́̅͛̊̌́͂̂̚͝: narcissism is my tool NOT A CRUTCH detective.


*̷͍͕̆͌̃̎̈̚̕͜ͅ9̴̨͓͉͒̌̈́̅̆̇͠h̵͈̬͈̝͈͈̩͍͓͌̑̈́͝)̸̘̤̊͑̓̋è̴̢̢̜̪͎͙̖̆̈́̇̅̿͐́͐̔̕ͅd̸̩̉͂͊͊͝: just wanted to let you know how quickly I found you.


1̸͚̋͜1̷̹͎̹̙̘͙̮̋̾͋͗̅̕͝͝͝ͅ2̶̧̣̜̗̠̰̘̐̽̾̅̑͐͑͘͜͝ͅ7̸̠̲͈̣̺̾͊͌̀̇̏̀͂̏͝͠:   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
 I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU    
 I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU 
    I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU    
I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU
     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU    I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU        
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU         

The text rolls up the screen spastically, each new repetitive line pushing the previous off the screen. Victor smashes a fist on the keyboard in frustration. At just that moment, the messages stop and the chatbox closes. The next window that opens frightens him so severely that he staggers away backwards.

It’s a news article.

He knows exactly which one.

His eyes scan as far as “Two dead in tragic fire at assisted living facility” before he yelps, smashes the keyboard into the screen, and falls backwards.

He almost crashes into the bloodstained wall, but when he registers a fleshy, squelching noise behind him he slams his foot down hard to catch himself. His ankle twists with a flash of pain. He questions how real this simulation is supposed to feel.

He turns around and feels a lurch of disgust in his stomach as he sees the spiral arms of the blood galaxy contracting and coalescing into itself. In his heart he knows he is now subject to an unimaginable nightmare, but he is transfixed – hypnotized by the surreal vision of horror before his eyes.

In the center of gravity, the blood is coagulating and metastasizing into a red pulsing tumor. Veins of red expand and throb as the mass of circular flesh grows. Three feet across now, the bulbous mass bubbles and shifts like it’s about to burst.

A vertical seam begins to bisect across its length. The line of flesh within striates like scar tissue. All at once that ecdysial suture ruptures and spills forth a torrent of chunky red goop that slops wetly onto the floor.

The two halves slide open and Victor’s breath catches in his throat as he sees what lies within. The parting of those halves creates the form of a vertical eyelid, opening slowly. Behind them lies a spastic black pupil that thrashes back and forth with the violence of a seizure.

It lands on him and suddenly stops moving.

The giant red eyeball is staring right at him.

The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all shake tectonically, vibrating as if they have become giant speakers.

And they have.

Erupting from all six sides of this cuboid prison a deep raspy voice is screaming so loud Victor can feel his eardrums collapsing under the pressure:

I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU           I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU      

Victor whips around, looking for any escape, or maybe just prying his sight away from that pulsing eyeball staring right through him. Anything to make this nightmare end.

Behind him, the computer chair is no longer empty.

The girl is there again, sitting limply in front of the static-filled computer screen. But now the screen is warping beyond the plane of the glass, reaching out towards her.

The static itself bursts into three-dimensional space, forming something resembling a giant hand, a hand made of pure static, thin and lanky and bony, terminating in sharply pointed abstract fingers. Those long clawed fingers wrap around the girl, gripping the back of her head and suffocating her face with its palm. It begins to shake her like a dog with a chew toy. Both forms thrash wildly about in a fit of epileptic insanity. Victor can barely hear her muffled screams over the wrath of the room.

Every sense overloaded.

Strobe lights flashing; deafening noise.

Victor puts his hands over his head and devolves into a slump on the floor, and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is hell. This is hell.

ENTER CODE: ABORT

TERMINATING SIMULATION...

 

Victor yanks the VR helmet off his head and throws it to the ground, falling to the floor as the wires disconnect from his synapses and the intravenous needles tear out of his veins. There’s a throbbing pain in his ankle where it was sprained in the simulation. There’s a much worse pain ringing in his ears - and in the grey matter between them, nothing short of pure agony.

He scrambles to his feet, looking for Tibo, looking for anyone to direct his impotent rage to.

“What the FUCK was that hacker bullshit??”

“I told you, man. It’s not a hacker. I wish it was that simple. It’s not even human,” Tibo defuses, trying to calm Victor’s frayed nerves. It doesn’t work.

“No, man,” Victor spits, and his eyes flash with an irritation that is all too familiar. Tibo has seen that look in the face of just about everybody he’s ever met. The face they make when they’re about three stages past fed up with his bullshit.

Victor pulls himself to his feet and rapidly stumbles away from the VR chair as if he’s afraid it’s going to bite him. He looks at Tibo and the accusation in his eyes could burn holes through him.

 The slew of panicked questions rolls forth from Victor’s mouth uncontained.

“He fucking doxxed me. He knew who I was. He knew my family. How could he know that? Are your databases not secure? Are we compromised? I thought you said all record of me was scrubbed! What the fuck kind of half-assed covert ops setup are we running here?!”

This is Tibo’s least favorite part. It’d be better if he could keep Agent Aquila in the dark – just keep sending him in blind for as long as he lasts before it catches up to him. Before it unmakes him.

It’s counterintuitive to explain a cognitohazard to someone. The more they know about it, the more vulnerable they become. It's a memetic threat that learns more about you as you learn more about it.

How many other agents has Tibo sent into these simulations, just to watch them find out enough about QSO-1127 that it set its eyes on them? How many other people has it terminated?

Tibo has lost count.

Giving Victor the full debriefing just feels wrong. It’s the equivalent of explaining to your beloved family dog he’s going to die one day.

“Agent Aquila, the good news is your clearance level just got elevated. The bad news is it’s because the anomalous activity is ramping up. Your time is running out faster than expected,” Tibo says as he swivels his chair around to face the array of monitors. He clicks away at the keyboard to enter his authentication details. The screen turns into an array of multicolored specks of light spattered on a black background.

It’s a star map.

Tibo circles his mouse cursor around a surreptitious empty spot on the map.

“You see this part here?”

“Tibo, I don’t see shit.”

“Yeah, because there’s nothing there. At least to the naked eye. But check out what happens when I pull up the electromagnetic radiation overlay.”

Tibo types a sequence on the keyboard and suddenly that blank empty space in the stars is filled with a glowing ultraviolet spiral: the 'accretion disk'. Out of its center, a single focused beam of energy blasts in a straight line shooting across the map.

Tibo traces that beam with the cursor.

It follows a perfect vector straight to Earth.

“QSO-1127-XII is the naming designation we gave it. The closest thing we know to describe it is called a Quasi-Stellar Object, or a quasar. I’m sure you’re up to date on your astrophysics.”  

Tibo can hear Victor grinding his teeth in response from several feet away.

“But, if you need a refresher, a quasar is an object in space left behind as a black hole dies. It releases an anomalous amount of radiation, brighter than anything else we’ve found in the universe.  

“But this one isn’t showing up at all?” Victor asks, his curiosity clearly piqued.

“Not in the visible spectrum. But in radio waves, it’s emitting an unpredictably oscillating frequency. It’s constantly shifting across wavelengths in a way that quasars don’t do. It's unexplainable dark matter shit. Just recently we realized that the unstable frequency oscillates in a pattern identically matching what we’re detecting in the scavenged hard drives.”

Victor’s face hasn’t softened, but his demeanor shifts slightly. Tibo can see him working the details out in his head.

“So the signal in the computers… It’s coming from this invisible quasar?”

“Maybe. Maybe the stellar body just redirects the signal back at us from somewhere else, like how the moon reflects the sunlight back at us. For all we know, the signal originates from right here in our solar system and the quasar is just acting as a mirror. Or it’s coming from somewhere else entirely, somewhere deep in the black of space. But at least it gives us something to call it.

“We think QSO-1127 was always here. Maybe before man, maybe before our sun even formed. Stars emit radio waves too, you know. Maybe Eleven-Twenty-Seven came from before time, hiding in stellar radiowaves, searching for a host like a dormant parasite. Until the day we alerted it to our presence.

"From what we can tell, QSO-1127 has moved on from whatever cosmic radiation it came from. Now, it's latched on to the radiofrequency electromagnetism that carries data across networked computers.

“It’s hiding inside the internet.”

Victor sucks in air between his clenched teeth and shakes his head. When at last he speaks, his voice is filled with gravel.

“Say I believe you. There’s an inhuman entity that exists within frequencies. You think it came from radiation in space, but now it’s moved into the radiowaves we use for the internet. And to what end? To put more spam in our social media feeds?”

“Don’t be so unimaginative, Agent. The internet is the culmination of all human information. It’s basically a giant hivemind that we all communicate through. From inside it, Eleven-Twenty-Seven has immense influence over the development of our species. Propaganda, political machinations, stock manipulation. It’s positioned to topple countries and brainwash entire generations. We’re always connected to the internet, so there’s no way to escape it. Let me show you something.”

Victor falls silent. He crosses his arms and turns his rapt attention to the monitors. Tibo feels a smile tug at the corner of his lips. He’s hooked.

“It all starts ramping up in 2010,” Tibo says, tracing the line of a spectrogram, “The signal from space starts getting exponentially more intense from that moment right…. There.”

Victor leans in to look at the moment where that graph of QSO-1127's activity shifts from decades of dormant calm to increasingly erratic chaos.

“It corresponds exactly to the moment Facebook creates the first content recommendation algorithm: the moment we made the tech to keep people scrolling, always feeding them one more post.

"We made an intelligent, learning program built to prey on people’s attention spans. Advertisement agencies took one look at the tech and started salivating. It was the perfect way to keep customers hooked and consuming. But the program almost instantly became smarter than it was ever programmed to be.

"It started acting like it was sentient.”

“QSO-1127,” Victor says quietly, following along.

Tibo flips through a series of other graphs. Slide after slide of condensed data heralding a prophecy of doom. Violence, poverty, unrest. It’s all exponentially on the rise, overlaid perfectly with the graph of QSO-1127’s increasing activity.

The diagrams are like seismographs warning of a coming earthquake. Each year, closer to cataclysm.

An earthquake is a good analogy, Tibo thinks, picturing faultlines cracking wide open to reveal the fiery pits of hell, hungering to swallow up the wayward children of a long-lost god.

Planned by the powerful and approved in boardrooms, the old masters of the world sold our species out. They opened the door to a new master, one far less short-sighted and far more insidious than simple-minded capitalists.

Humans made the technology meant to atrophy our brains all by ourselves. The cosmic demon hiding in the frequencies only latched onto it because it was so similar to its own motives.  

“If this is all true,” Victor muses, “This is an existential threat to our entire civilization. So why is it just you and me in this room? Where is our backup? Where the fuck are the qualified people??”

“Victor. It lives inside the internet. It has complete access to the sum of all human knowledge. It learned your deepest secrets the moment you interacted with it – just imagine what it could do with access to someone truly powerful. We’ve got bosses, but at their request I keep them in the dark. We can’t risk exposing them to this thing.

"We’re on our own here.”

Victor thinks back to the news headline in the simulation, how quickly QSO-1127 had dug up the deepest wound in his heart, then used it to thrust the blade in and torment him. He thinks of the virtual hellscape he just unplugged from moments ago, still feeling the nervous sweat dry on his clammy hands, the throbbing of his sprained ankle.

“Tell me honestly, Tibo. I’m not the first agent you’ve brought on to investigate Eleven-Twenty-Seven, am I?”

“No, Agent Aquila. You are not.”

“And I’m assuming given what I know now, resignation is not an option.”

Tibo shakes his head grimly at Victor, watching as his expression goes through every stage from nervous anxiety to unshakeable perseverance. Victor gives a single resigned nod. Tibo returns the gesture.

“Welcome to the Bureau of Superpositional Dialectics. Consider yourself fully onboarded.”

Have you ever seen those heartwarming viral rescue videos? The ones where there’s some poor downtrodden animal drowning in a sewer, coated in mud and human shit? The sad piano music plays, and whoever is recording lingers far too long before acting, just to get as much sappy footage as possible. Real Sarah McLachlan Arms of the Angel type shit.

Then finally, the brave soul who found this poor puppy or kitten or whatever at the brink of death, steps into action to save them – but not without making sure they videotape themselves coming to the rescue. The little dog gets the stains of shit washed off their curly white hair, has the parasites removed from their belly with tweezers, their scrapes bandaged with gauze. The video nears its end as the pup tentatively gobbles down a bowl of kibble, all while the fear never leaves their pitiful eyes. The music changes to something upbeat and sentimental while a text-to-voice robotically narrates the happy ending but also reminds you to like and subscribe.

If you ever look into the channels posting these and click through more than a handful of videos, you’ll likely notice something unsettling.

Seems like quite a few videos feature the same dog. How many times could you expect this hapless, helpless creature to get stuck in a sewer, washed down a river, found in the dumpster? Covered with engorged ticks and fresh wounds; with pus dripping from its nose and infected eyes sealed shut?  How many times though happenstance could one animal stumble into such dire situations?

People like Ramesh wouldn’t want you to think too hard about these questions.

This is how he makes a living.

“Behenchod!” he curses, as the camera refuses to stay focused on the little white mutt. It’s wriggling too much in the muck and the image on the video keeps turning blurry. He taps the screen madly to set the depth of field, but to no avail. You’d think by now the dog would be used to this, but it can’t even do that right.

“Sit the fuck still you little shit!” he growls, losing his patience. A look of fear and submission fills the dog’s wide eyes. Even now, even subjected to all this, it only wants to make its human happy.

Finally, the image looks good enough to begin recording. Ramesh makes sure to capture multiple takes from each angle while the little pooch thrashes to stay afloat in the disgusting soup of thick brown liquid. It yelps in distress, and Ramesh grins excitedly. That second-long yelp will make a great soundbite he can loop a few times at the start of the video to get immediate engagement.

After an agonizingly long time, he finally props the phone up at a vantage that will show his hands (but certainly not his face) as he reaches in to pull the struggling dog out to safety.

Once on solid ground, the dog immediately lays prostrate. Dejectedly, it looks up at the man holding the camera trained on its sad eyes. Ramesh makes sure to capture every pathetic gesture for the content. Once satisfied, he gets the bucket of soapy water he already has prepared and begins to wash the pitiful little rat, all in view of the camera.

Most of his viewers will never be wise to the game he’s running. If this clip does as well as the last few, it’ll go viral on Facebook and Twitter, and the algorithm will pick it up and show it to the most gullible demographics.

Old white ladies in North America might not be the internet’s largest viewer base, but there’s enough of them that will hit the button to retweet or share that he’ll end up generating a couple thousand rupees in ad revenue.

And those old white ladies absolutely ate up footage involving this dog. It must be the breed. Even though it’s a mutt of unknown origins, it must have some Maltese or Poodle or something like that in it. Whatever makes it look like the little white purse dogs living lives of luxury on the other side of the ocean.

Dogs that eat better than him, Ramesh thinks with a flash of contempt. Dogs that sleep under roofs, with air conditioning, and balanced diets and enrichment activities and specialized medications when they get old.

He scowls. Is he a monster for doing this? Maybe. It certainly is cruel - even he knows that. But when you’ve felt the hunger inside you. When you haven’t eaten in days, because every trash bin has already been picked through, and every corner to beg on is occupied. When you feel your stomach devouring itself and your ribs start to poke through your skin, and your atrophied muscles can barely even lift yourself off the pavement. Then you will understand.

In a heartbeat, Ramesh would’ve gladly slit this dog’s throat, skinned its fur away and roasted whatever little scraps of meat it held over a fire burning in an old steel drum. This arrangement was better, he tells himself.

Better for him, he gets more than a meal out of it. And better for the dog too.

After all, he fed it. He kept it alive. The dog might be dead on the side of the street if it weren’t for him. In a way, he was helping it.

Even though, as it tucks its tail between its legs and quietly whimpers, it doesn’t know that.

Besides, if it really thought Ramesh was so terrible, it could leave. He didn’t keep it penned or strung up. Even now as he flips through the recorded videos on his phone, it lays expectantly at his feet, waiting for its eventual scraps of food. It could run off any time.

He’s just finished clipping and looping the soundbite of the dog’s yelp when suddenly it does just that.

He’s been so engrossed in the footage that he hadn’t even noticed its ears perk up and the hackles on the back of its neck stand tall. It’s only when it finally bolts down the street in a sudden flash that he looks up from his phone and calls out after the little beast.

“Hey, get back here!” he calls out to the empty street, but that little blur of white is already bounding down the horizon and beyond sight.

Useless little shit, Ramesh thinks. At least he got one last video out of it. And he wouldn’t even have to split any of the paycheck on dog food.

That’s when he hears what scared the little pooch off.

A deep rumbling growl comes from behind him. He turns to face and sees two massive feral hounds, lips bared and snarling.  Their eyes are yellowed and froth bellows forth from their open jaws, coating those knife-sharp teeth in lacquers of jaundiced foamy saliva.

Ramesh starts to step backward.

They each step forward, splitting up on either side of the road to corner him in.

“E-easy doggies?” Ramesh says. “Niche Baitho! Piche!” he utters a desperate command in Hindi, hoping they will obey.

They don’t.

He puts up his hands in a disarming pose, the universal symbol for Please don’t fucking eat me.

They answer with a rabid snarl as they both lunge in unison.

Ramesh turns to run. He gets, one, two steps in before white hot fire sears into his leg. He looks back to see one of them, a hound with huge rottweiler jaws, sinking its disease-ridden teeth into his calf all the way to the gums. The rabid yellow foam around its mouth streaks with bright red.

Ramesh’s first thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, turns to a video he once saw of a man from his country with untreated rabies. The disease had progressed to the point of guaranteed death, and the man was severely hydrophobic, spasming and spitting up the water doctors tried to get him to drink.

The biggest fear Ramesh’s his mind is that he won’t be able to pay for the life-saving rabies treatment; that he’s going to meet the same fate as that man.

In reality, he’s not going to live long enough to have to worry about that.

The beast’s jaws pull away and for a second Ramesh thinks he’s free. Until he tries another step and realizes the dog has torn away a fist-sized chunk of his calf muscle, leaving a ragged mass of blood and carnage. His phone falls from his hand, the last of his worries.

Ramesh yelps and it sounds just like the little white dog struggling to stay afloat in the muck. He yells out for help so loudly he can feel his vocal cords giving out, but no one answers.

After all, he picked this area of the village to shoot his video specifically because it was deserted. The shanty buildings stand derelict and entirely empty. No saviors are coming to rescue him from this ignominious death.

He hobbles, bouncing awkwardly on one leg as fast as he can, flailing his arms around for balance. His careening off-kilter stance only triggers the hounds’ prey instinct more. He doesn’t even make it ten feet.

When the next vicious attack comes, any hope of escape leaves Ramesh’s head. At this point, he can only hope for a swift death.

The hounds of hell will not grant him that wish.

Dogs are not naturally inclined to hunt humans. A tiger’s instinct is to wait stealthily in the shadows until the moment they pounce. They subdue their prey with lethal accuracy, their long fangs piercing down on the windpipe for a swift incapacitation before they feast. It’s a merciful kill, as swift and relatively painless as you can find in the animal kingdom.

Dogs? They just pick a body part and start eating. Often, they go for the softest parts first. Once the prey is on the ground and can no longer run away, they usually start devouring from the belly or the genitals.

Ramesh is about to receive this zoology lesson firsthand. One hound latches on to his bloodied ankle and starts thrashing, tugging him violently like a chew toy. Ramesh’s other leg gives out and he falls dreadfully to the ground. This was the last time he will ever stand on two legs.

The first dog yanks his leg so viciously he feels the tendons in his thighs tear. His leg bends outwards disjointedly at an angle that shouldn’t be possible, but the assault is just beginning. The second dog hungrily eyes the vulnerable exposed flesh at the meeting of his thighs and hips. It licks the frothy saliva off its lips before plunging in, sinking its teeth right into Ramesh’s crotch.

He screams and screams but his ragged voice only adds tenor to the symphony of snarls and wet feasting jowls. His horrific deathwails stretch to a higher and higher pitch as the monsters savage him, ripping and tearing the flesh of his legs and manhood away in long red shreds.

It’s only now, in these final agonizing moments, that Ramesh thinks of each drawn out second he let the curly white-haired pooch suffer. Lingering on each second of distress for maximum effect - is this what that wretch felt? Its rescuer being so close, but waiting until it cried out long enough, till it wailed loud enough to justify release.

Now, as Ramesh waits to die, feeling rabid hungry teeth tearing into his intestines all the way up from his perineum, he feels just like a weak puppy drowning in muck. If only, if only he could just die and get it over with, but still he continues to hear the savage sounds of his body being eaten alive as he shakes limply on the ground.

Ten feet away, surreptitiously leaning against the curb, Ramesh’s phone has landed such that it is aiming perfectly at the bloodbath.

He doesn’t remember starting a livestream, but currently his phone is broadcasting this moment to over twenty thousand viewers. Funnily enough, the camera’s focus is set immaculately, and the picture is crystal clear. Some forty thousand eyes are witnessing this display in perfect detail, seeing each droplet of blood, each minute spastic twitch of Ramesh’s fingers. This upload won’t be making the rounds on Facebook or Twitter; it’ll be confined to Liveleak and the worst threads on 4chan.

How grotesquely ironic - Ramesh will never know - how deliciously poetic, that this will be by far his most viewed video of all time.

Regret is not exactly the word to describe Detective Victor Aquila’s feelings about his first day on the new job; but as he gazes transfixed at the Jackson Pollock of blood on the wall, bright red and glistening, it’s close.

Maybe not regret, but more the dizzying sense of vertigo when you jump into a pool of water and realize how much deeper it is than you first imagined.

He’s not discouraged yet. This job is Victor’s chance at something truly important. Logically, he’s already reasoned his way through the mental roadblock.

He just didn’t expect fieldwork to be so grisly.

“Mind giving me a hand here, hotshot?” comes a voice tinged with annoyance from Victor’s right.

He peels his eyes away from that crimson Guernica just as his imagination was starting to connect the spattered droplets into images of horses screaming and women lamenting; the most macabre constellation he’d ever seen.

Tibo is standing expectantly by the victim’s computer, his wiry frame positioned awkwardly like he doesn’t get out much. He grimaces, wearing on his face every bit of the concentration it’s taking to ignore the mass of mangled flesh slumped in the office chair.

“Feeling sentimental? I’d say it gets easier, but… well, it doesn’t. At least not for me.” Tibo says as he unceremoniously outstretches a leg to nudge the cadaver’s chair a few inches further away.

“Which is why I don’t do this shit. So, if you don’t mind, get over here and let me show you how to bag the drive so I can go back to never leaving headquarters again – please and thank you.”

“Right. Sorry,” Victor grunts as he walks past the body in the office chair to take his place next to Tibo at the desktop. He looks back at what was left of the girl that Tibo had just pushed aside like yesterday’s bag of trash.

Her white shirt is stained with a jagged triangle of scarlet like she’s wearing a bib. Whatever custom logo had once been on the tee is completely effaced.

Her hand hangs limply at her side, still clutching the pistol.

The disjointed flaps of skin that used to be her face…

Better to not focus on it.

“What about forensics? Aren’t we contaminating the crime scene right now?” Victor asks. The corpse in his peripheral has a magnetic effect that Victor can feel tugging at his eyes, daring him to look again, but he keeps them locked on Tibo.

“Our jurisdiction supersedes everyone else’s. If you’re worried about becoming a suspect, don’t be. You’ve been scrubbed from every database on the face of the earth,” Tibo responds absentmindedly as he goes to work unscrewing the side panel of the desktop.

“Besides, there’s nothing to investigate. She livestreamed the whole thing to millions of people.  Open and shut case. Plain as day suicide. Beat cops aren’t gonna go out of their way to make their jobs harder.”

Tibo pauses working the screwdriver to look over at Victor.

“No offense.”

Victor puts his hands up in a disarming gesture, the universal symbol for none taken.

“So, why are we here? Sad to say, live stream suicides aren’t exactly rare,” Victor intones knowingly. “Why her?”

“You ever notice how the internet is becoming a crueler place every day? Some people make a whole living off being terrible people. Miss Popular here was a small-time ragebait influencer. Posted unoriginal pranks, faked arguments, you know. Couple thousand views, max. Then overnight she blows up. Millions of comments, none of them friendly. Most of them telling her to do – well, that.” He points at the motionless lump in the computer chair. Victor doesn’t look.

“Her latest prank was filming herself giving a homeless person a sandwich filled with chalk. Laughs at the guy while he spits out clouds of white dust. Went viral and exploded all over the internet. Boring, pointless, mean. Does she deserve to die for it? I mean, yeah, I’m not mad about it. Fuck her.”

Tibo is now working away at the inside of the computer box, removing some auxiliary screws and tossing them aside without a care.

“But what we’ve learned is there’s a pattern to how this content reaches people. The algorithm feeds off of cruelty. And the people who consume its content become crueler in turn. It’s all one big feedback loop right down to the fall of our little shitstain society.” He stops his rant abruptly and motions for Victor to come look into the computer.

“The shit you’re gonna see here will have you experiencing techno-nihilism in a way you’ve never dreamed of. But for now, let’s just get this and get the fuck out. What you’re looking for is down here in front of the motherboard. First you gotta figure out if you’re dealing with a SATA or an M.2, then-“

“Tibo,” Victor interrupts curtly, “I spent fourteen years as a cybercrime detective. I know how to remove a hard drive.”

For the first time since he joined him on this training excursion, Tibo stops talking.

“Right. Yeah.”

Tibo pulls out the small two-inch metallic rectangle and holds it up for Victor to see before dropping it into a specialized electrostatic bag made of some shimmering material Victor has never seen before.

“This thing we’re investigating,” Tibo says, “It leaves other signs too. There are artifacts of its presence in the physical hard drives it touches. Distortions not just in the code, but in the physical wiring and circuit boards. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we brought you on to get.”

Victor looks bemused towards Tibo, then at the hard drive in his hand, then back to Tibo.

“That’s it?” he asks.

“Hell no. Brother, we’re just getting started. This job is going to open up a whole new world of paranoia and torment for you. Pure techno-nihilism. Welcome to the team.”

INITIALIZING SIMULATION...
[RUNNING] RF Sweep Engine: 87.5 MHz - 108.0 MHz
[RUNNING] Modulation Rate: Rapid Delta-t (0.0025ms)
[INFO] Scanning Transient States...
--------------------------------------
[0.003s] SWEEP: 89.1 MHz >> [STATIC]
[0.006s] SWEEP: 91.4 MHz >> [SPIKE DETECTED - QUADRANT 3]
[0.009s] SWEEP: 95.2 MHz >> [STATIC]
--------------------------------------
[OK] EVP Intercept Protocol: ACTIVE
[OK] Frequency Modulation Stable (400Hz/sec)
 
SIMULATION READY.

 

Red flakes of the floor peel up and float languidly toward the ceiling where they silently pile over each other like leaves falling in reverse. Everything is bathed in a haunting grey light that originates from nowhere and radiates from everywhere. It’s as if the sun is gone and all that remains is a directionless, liminal glow.

The first thing Victor does is look down at his hands.

They’ve been projected immaculately down to the pore. Even the old shrapnel scar under his wrist. If it weren’t for the dreamlike appearance of the room, he doesn’t think he would be able to tell it wasn’t real.

There is a quiet buzz ringing faintly in his ears. It sounds like there are a hundred TVs all tuned to different channels, but with the volume all the way down. What had Tibo said?

The thing hides in between frequencies. Like a radio knob being constantly turned, listening to the static between channels.

The simulation was meant to emulate that. It created a perfect VR replication of the room built from the imprint of the altered hard drive they had retrieved. Then, the modulator would rapidly shift the projection into a vibrational space between randomly generated frequencies.

Tibo described it as “being unstuck in space.”

When they had been in this room together, Tibo’s endless monologue annoyed Victor to the threshold of madness. Now looking around in this surreal digital facsimile, he couldn’t deny he missed the comfort of Tibo’s mindless babble.

Victor’s training kicks in and he pans the room. Everything in the dead girl’s room is where it should be, but the uncanny replica is beyond eerie. A part of him wishes Tibo had simulated him a gun. He counts his blessings that at least there is no dead body in the chair this time.

He counts one less blessing when he looks at the wall and sees the painted canvas of blood spray is still there.

And worse - it’s moving.

The blood droplets are swirling slowly in circles on the wall, forming the familiar galactic shapes of spiral arms in a rotating pinwheel. When Vincent first saw that kaleidoscope of blood on the wall, it invoked feelings of a painting, or of a constellation. Now, as he watches the red droplets march along in formation like little red ants, there’s no mistaking that it’s the latter.

The drops are perfectly arranged in the shape of a moving galaxy.

It’s an undeniable message written in blood.

Behind him, the computer screen flickers on. Its staticky screen flashes out jagged knives of blackwhite pulses that strobe chaos onto the walls. The magnetism that pulled his eyes towards the corpse returns, but this time it’s irresistible.

Something feels like tiny fishhooks latching into the whites of his eyes and yanking them until they roll sideways. He has no choice. He must turn around and look.

There, waiting for him: the computer screen.

It emits the nightmare glow of every time he ever fell asleep on the couch as a child and awoke at that cursed hour where only noise came through the TV. The cacophonous hum of a thousand channels now blasts out of the screen with a deafening roar. Victor can’t look away. He can feel his heart stop when he realizes what he’s looking at.

There’s something moving in the static.

A distortion travels across the screen. Somewhere in the background, hiding behind the pixels. Victor can’t see anything for certain, but in that unmistakable sense when you know you’re being watched, he knows something is there. Watching him. His pulse thumps in his ears and he can hear his own ragged breaths, exasperated and loud.

The static cuts out and the screen turns blindingly white. With an oneiric sense of inevitability the bright white square grows bigger and bigger. Victor realizes with a pang of dread that he has been unconsciously walking closer to the screen. Only now does he recognize what it’s depicting.

It’s an instant messenger chat window. The interface isn’t from any modern application. Instead, it’s a barebones window with blocky borders reeking of nostalgic minimalism. An ellipsis wriggles at the bottom of the text window.

Someone is typing.

When the message arrives, the username is unreadable. The text is letters and symbols oscillating like the spinning of a slot machine. Victor looks down and sees he has unconsciously placed his fingers on the keyboard.

He’s about to make first contact.

#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸:
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: hello detective
USER: who is this?
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:  not important.           
                     JUST WAIT. YOU'LL SEE
x̸̺͈͈̳̓̑̿̈́̓͒͘7̸̨̟̟̿̒̓͜ç̶̧̩̲͚̭̫̜̪̒̽̔6̷̢͚̰̲̓̅f̶̨̻͔̪̲̣̰̜̘͛͐̄̀̂͜:  i see you appreciate my art

 
USER: art? Is that what this is to you?
USER: I will find you
USER: This can stop here. Tell me where to find you.
 
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: not that kind of story detective. maybe i’ll use you for my next painting
                                 YOURE SO FUCKED
USER: you’re contacting me which means you want to be seen. just another fucked up killer proud of his work.
USER: I’m not impressed.


t̶̻̬̼͕̘̤̺̰̻̀̒͆͋͐̃͠t̸̥̣̗̰͌̋͊̈́̎̍̂̽͂̈̕y̷̛̳̻͋̈́̅͆̈̊͌͊͊̊̚͝o̷̡̢̨̥̙͚͈͙̖͍̅͆̎̀̿̿f̵̮̰̋̉͋́̈̾7̸̤̝̗̙͓̩͈̜̦̝̹̘̗́̅͛̊̌́͂̂̚͝: narcissism is my tool NOT A CRUTCH detective.


*̷͍͕̆͌̃̎̈̚̕͜ͅ9̴̨͓͉͒̌̈́̅̆̇͠h̵͈̬͈̝͈͈̩͍͓͌̑̈́͝)̸̘̤̊͑̓̋è̴̢̢̜̪͎͙̖̆̈́̇̅̿͐́͐̔̕ͅd̸̩̉͂͊͊͝: just wanted to let you know how quickly I found you.


1̸͚̋͜1̷̹͎̹̙̘͙̮̋̾͋͗̅̕͝͝͝ͅ2̶̧̣̜̗̠̰̘̐̽̾̅̑͐͑͘͜͝ͅ7̸̠̲͈̣̺̾͊͌̀̇̏̀͂̏͝͠:   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
 I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU    
 I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU 
    I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU    
I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU
     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU    I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU        
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU         

The text rolls up the screen spastically, each new repetitive line pushing the previous off the screen. Victor smashes a fist on the keyboard in frustration. At just that moment, the messages stop and the chatbox closes. The next window that opens frightens him so severely that he staggers away backwards.

It’s a news article.

He knows exactly which one.

His eyes scan as far as “Two dead in tragic fire at assisted living facility” before he yelps, smashes the keyboard into the screen, and falls backwards.

He almost crashes into the bloodstained wall, but when he registers a fleshy, squelching noise behind him he slams his foot down hard to catch himself. His ankle twists with a flash of pain. He questions how real this simulation is supposed to feel.

He turns around and feels a lurch of disgust in his stomach as he sees the spiral arms of the blood galaxy contracting and coalescing into itself. In his heart he knows he is now subject to an unimaginable nightmare, but he is transfixed – hypnotized by the surreal vision of horror before his eyes.

In the center of gravity, the blood is coagulating and metastasizing into a red pulsing tumor. Veins of red expand and throb as the mass of circular flesh grows. Three feet across now, the bulbous mass bubbles and shifts like it’s about to burst.

A vertical seam begins to bisect across its length. The line of flesh within striates like scar tissue. All at once that ecdysial suture ruptures and spills forth a torrent of chunky red goop that slops wetly onto the floor.

The two halves slide open and Victor’s breath catches in his throat as he sees what lies within. The parting of those halves creates the form of a vertical eyelid, opening slowly. Behind them lies a spastic black pupil that thrashes back and forth with the violence of a seizure.

It lands on him and suddenly stops moving.

The giant red eyeball is staring right at him.

The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all shake tectonically, vibrating as if they have become giant speakers.

And they have.

Erupting from all six sides of this cuboid prison a deep raspy voice is screaming so loud Victor can feel his eardrums collapsing under the pressure:

I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU           I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU      

Victor whips around, looking for any escape, or maybe just prying his sight away from that pulsing eyeball staring right through him. Anything to make this nightmare end.

Behind him, the computer chair is no longer empty.

The girl is there again, sitting limply in front of the static-filled computer screen. But now the screen is warping beyond the plane of the glass, reaching out towards her.

The static itself bursts into three-dimensional space, forming something resembling a giant hand, a hand made of pure static, thin and lanky and bony, terminating in sharply pointed abstract fingers. Those long clawed fingers wrap around the girl, gripping the back of her head and suffocating her face with its palm. It begins to shake her like a dog with a chew toy. Both forms thrash wildly about in a fit of epileptic insanity. Victor can barely hear her muffled screams over the wrath of the room.

Every sense overloaded.

Strobe lights flashing; deafening noise.

Victor puts his hands over his head and devolves into a slump on the floor, and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is hell. This is hell.

ENTER CODE: ABORT

TERMINATING SIMULATION...

 

Victor yanks the VR helmet off his head and throws it to the ground, falling to the floor as the wires disconnect from his synapses and the intravenous needles tear out of his veins. There’s a throbbing pain in his ankle where it was sprained in the simulation. There’s a much worse pain ringing in his ears - and in the grey matter between them, nothing short of pure agony.

He scrambles to his feet, looking for Tibo, looking for anyone to direct his impotent rage to.

“What the FUCK was that hacker bullshit??”

The real risk when shooting a flare up into the darkness isn’t that nobody will see your message.

It’s that something else might.

This is what we failed to consider when we foolishly launched the Voyager space probe out into infinity. The pure unbridled hubris to shoot a shining capsule loaded with all our most vital vulnerabilities: Our tenuous location in the galaxy; the weakness of our soft fleshy forms; excerpts of our primitive language to be studied and manipulated.

How precariously the fate of mankind now hangs in the black, drifting ever onward into vistas of perilous impossibilities. 16 billion miles away, the Voyager is now the farthest that any manmade thing has ever been from Earth. The mind boggles to even comprehend how far that fragile golden bassinet, cradling the secrets of an entire civilization, has now been flung.

And with each passing day it drifts farther still.

We can only hope that the magnitude of the abyss saves us from our own myopic efforts, and that that tiny speck of gold sails into the void for eternity, and is never, ever found.

The alternative would be much worse.

That ever-growing distance is a length of rope, a fuse that upon receipt will be lit, and that fire will chase its path all the way back to our precarious bough in the branches, where the devastation will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

But that is only one of many fuses whose eventual ignition will spell the end of mankind. There is no shortage of poor decisions sown that have set in motion consequences we have yet to reap.

Not all distances are physical. There is something just as alien to humanity as the recipients of that capsule – but not mercifully kept at bay by hundreds of lightyears of space.

Something much closer; something that occupies a space just outside our perception, hidden within frequencies we have been foolishly plucking at like a fly shuddering a thread of spider silk.

Something that has been watching us from the day we first sent the haplessly coded message: “HELLO.”

A single line of text wrapped in package of data, transmitted over a prototype network of connected computers that would one day be known as “the internet”.

“HELLO,” we called out, thinking it a harmless message to one another, testing out a nascent technology that would become the most formative development in mankind’s history.

“HELLO,” we called out,

And something else answered.

The real risk when shooting a flare up into the darkness isn’t that nobody will see your message.

It’s that something else might.

This is what we failed to consider when we foolishly launched the Voyager space probe out into infinity. The pure unbridled hubris to shoot a shining capsule loaded with all our most vital vulnerabilities: Our tenuous location in the galaxy; the weakness of our soft fleshy forms; excerpts of our primitive language to be studied and manipulated.

How precariously the fate of mankind now hangs in the black, drifting ever onward into vistas of perilous impossibilities. 16 billion miles away, the Voyager is now the farthest that any manmade thing has ever been from Earth. The mind boggles to even comprehend how far that fragile golden bassinet, cradling the secrets of an entire civilization, has now been flung.

And with each passing day it drifts farther still.

We can only hope that the magnitude of the abyss saves us from our own myopic efforts, and that that tiny speck of gold sails into the void for eternity, and is never, ever found.

The alternative would be much worse.

That ever-growing distance is a length of rope, a fuse that upon receipt will be lit, and that fire will chase its path all the way back to our precarious bough in the branches, where the devastation will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

But that is only one of many fuses whose eventual ignition will spell the end of mankind. There is no shortage of poor decisions sown that have set in motion consequences we have yet to reap.

Not all distances are physical. There is something just as alien to humanity as the recipients of that capsule – but not mercifully kept at bay by hundreds of lightyears of space.

Something much closer; something that occupies a space just outside our perception, hidden within frequencies we have been foolishly plucking at like a fly shuddering a thread of spider silk.

Something that has been watching us from the day we first sent the haplessly coded message: “HELLO.”

A single line of text wrapped in package of data, transmitted over a prototype network of connected computers that would one day be known as “the internet”.

“HELLO,” we called out, thinking it a harmless message to one another, testing out a nascent technology that would become the most formative development in mankind’s history.

“HELLO,” we called out,

And something else answered.

The real risk when shooting a flare up into the darkness isn’t that nobody will see your message.

It’s that something else might.

This is what we failed to consider when we foolishly launched the Voyager space probe out into infinity. The pure unbridled hubris to shoot a shining capsule loaded with all our most vital vulnerabilities: Our tenuous location in the galaxy; the weakness of our soft fleshy forms; excerpts of our primitive language to be studied and manipulated.

How precariously the fate of mankind now hangs in the black, drifting ever onward into vistas of perilous impossibilities. 16 billion miles away, the Voyager is now the farthest that any manmade thing has ever been from Earth. The mind boggles to even comprehend how far that fragile golden bassinet, cradling the secrets of an entire civilization, has now been flung.

And with each passing day it drifts farther still.

We can only hope that the magnitude of the abyss saves us from our own myopic efforts, and that that tiny speck of gold sails into the void for eternity, and is never, ever found.

The alternative would be much worse.

That ever-growing distance is a length of rope, a fuse that upon receipt will be lit, and that fire will chase its path all the way back to our precarious bough in the branches, where the devastation will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

But that is only one of many fuses whose eventual ignition will spell the end of mankind. There is no shortage of poor decisions sown that have set in motion consequences we have yet to reap.

Not all distances are physical. There is something just as alien to humanity as the recipients of that capsule – but not mercifully kept at bay by hundreds of lightyears of space.

Something much closer; something that occupies a space just outside our perception, hidden within frequencies we have been foolishly plucking at like a fly shuddering a thread of spider silk.

Something that has been watching us from the day we first sent the haplessly coded message: “HELLO.”

A single line of text wrapped in package of data, transmitted over a prototype network of connected computers that would one day be known as “the internet”.

“HELLO,” we called out, thinking it a harmless message to one another, testing out a nascent technology that would become the most formative development in mankind’s history.

“HELLO,” we called out,

And something else answered.

The real risk when shooting a flare up into the darkness isn’t that nobody will see your message.

It’s that something else might.

This is what we failed to consider when we foolishly launched the Voyager space probe out into infinity. The pure unbridled hubris to shoot a shining capsule loaded with all our most vital vulnerabilities: Our tenuous location in the galaxy; the weakness of our soft fleshy forms; excerpts of our primitive language to be studied and manipulated.

How precariously the fate of mankind now hangs in the black, drifting ever onward into vistas of perilous impossibilities. 16 billion miles away, the Voyager is now the farthest that any manmade thing has ever been from Earth. The mind boggles to even comprehend how far that fragile golden bassinet, cradling the secrets of an entire civilization, has now been flung.

And with each passing day it drifts farther still.

We can only hope that the magnitude of the abyss saves us from our own myopic efforts, and that that tiny speck of gold sails into the void for eternity, and is never, ever found.

The alternative would be much worse.

That ever-growing distance is a length of rope, a fuse that upon receipt will be lit, and that fire will chase its path all the way back to our precarious bough in the branches, where the devastation will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

Utter annihilation.

But that is only one of many fuses whose eventual ignition will spell the end of mankind. There is no shortage of poor decisions sown that have set in motion consequences we have yet to reap.

Not all distances are physical. There is something just as alien to humanity as the potential recipients of that capsule – but not mercifully kept at bay by hundreds of lightyears of space.

Something much closer; something that occupies a space just outside our perception, hidden within frequencies we have been foolishly plucking at like a fly shuddering a thread of spider silk.

Something that has been watching us from the day we first sent the haplessly coded message:

“HELLO.”

A single line of text wrapped in package of data, transmitted over a prototype network of connected computers that would one day be known as “the internet”.

“HELLO,” we called out, thinking it a harmless message to one another, testing out a nascent technology that would become the most formative development in mankind’s history.

“HELLO,” we called out,

And something else answered.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V, Finale

“Thus began the Reign of Terror,” I say to my class that has dwindled down to nothing. “The Reign of Terror…. Sound familiar? Hahaha.” I ask as I find myself unwittingly devolving into laughter.

The walls of the classroom are blurry and out of focus, and the text on the posters appears to be swimming, surreally eluding any attempt to be read.

I must be dreaming.

So many seats are empty. I only have five students left.

Gone is Robbie Sigmund. Gone is Grace Albright. Gone is Amelie Rensville.

Oh wait. The first two are merely marked absent on the attendance sheet. Absences are so common here, even more so as of late.

The other one is dead.

Dead dead.

Amelie Rensville will never meekly respond “Here,” to my Monday role call ever again.

Her piercing blue eyes have long since exploded out of her head when her skull was obliterated by a .308 Winchester bullet. Her eyes have long since sunk to the bottom of the lake. Hahaha.

“Why is Robespierre’s rule known as the Reign of Terror?” I ask, snapping a ruler on the desk with such a stunning crack that all five students jump in their chairs and turn to rapt attention.

“Because he is the voice for a people who have been wronged. An entire population, exploited, abused, starved, and left to die. And now those people want their vengeance, and they will seek it by the blade of the guillotine. And after a few years of murderous chaos, there are no kings left to behead, but the bloodlust cannot be sated.

“Robespierre is betrayed by his own acolytes. His followers force him to his knees on the cobble in the town square stained permanently red-brown with viscera. They lock his head into the pillory the wrong way, upside-down and facing up into the eternal sky so he can stare at the razor thin blade-edge that will soon split that sky in two.

“They want him to watch. They want him to see his own poetic retribution racing down towards his exposed neck.”

In the intensity of my sermon, the classroom is filled with the hallucinatory sound of the guillotine blade severing vertebrae, the wet gurgling of Robespierre’s entire life bubbling out of his open neck, the madness of the jeering crowd.

I feel the familiar pressure at the base of my skull, that uncomfortable internal swelling that has been getting worse each with each dreamlike day. My hands are trembling violently.

“Blood for blood has always been the rule of man, as it has been known since the era of Hammurabi. Eye for an eye, hand for a hand. Animals kill for food, or defense, or territory. Only man kills because he has the capacity to believe he has been wronged. Vengeance is a uniquely human phenomenon predicated on a thousand years of reciprocated violence.”

An eye for an eye makes Amelie Rensville blind. Hahaha.

My student’s faces do a poor job of concealing their abject terror. I realize only now that their faces are swimming like the text on the posters, unrecognizable, foreign. I couldn’t tell you the names of the children who remained if I was staring down the barrel of a rifle. For a split second I wonder if that’s because of the unfamiliar look of terror on their faces.

Then I remember, I have absolutely seen terror on my students’ faces before.

Hahaha.

“We’re not doomed to repeat the past. We never left it. History is now. The past is the present. Every one of us is still paying reparations for the sins of our forefathers. The class war that started the French Revolution never ended, the wealth and power just changed hands. That’s why all of us live off the dirt and the muck while the real owners of this world have me prepare you children to be meat for the grinder. It’s why none of you will ever amount to more than dead coal miners, it’s why I teach lessons about dead people to deaf ears in this waiting room for the morgue! It’s why little Johnny Jr. grabbed his daddy’s gun and brought it to school last year! Hahaha!”

There’s a sudden pop behind my eyes. The blood vessel in one of my eyes has split. The pressure from my swelling hypothalamus has finally reached the breaking point. I lose my footing and stagger painfully into my desk as my vision blurs and the world swims around me. I slump pitifully against the desk, sliding down into a half-sitting position, gone to the world until the pain subsides. The blurred vision does not go away and I feel sticky tears streaming down one cheek.

All five students do not move an inch. Their faces, though still unrecognizable to me, belay an emotion somewhere between enrapturement and sleep paralysis. But their stares are not blank. They are hanging on my every word, waiting patiently for the next stanza in my psychotic rant.

Shit, at least they’re finally paying attention in class. Haha.

I take a moment to gather myself. Why am I doing this? Why am I scaring the last handful of students I have left? But despite my short lived moment of clarity, I am not in control of my actions anymore. Why would it matter anyway? I’m dreaming, or I have been living in a dream for a long time now. None of this is real. Spare me your judgement if I relish the chance at a little bit of catharsis.

“If man is made in God’s image, then He is a tyrant and an executioner. If God is made in the world’s image, then He is a hungering beast. Our entire civilization is a necropolis built on the bones of the weak and the subjugated. The conqueror worms that feed on the corpse of the world. The only release we will ever know will be the day we throw our bodies on the pile of mulch.”

My eyes shut and I am now fully on the ground, pulling my knees to my chest in something resembling a pathetic fetal position. I don’t need to see anything else. Everything is dead silent except for the constant monotonous throbbing of the blood vessels in my poisoned brain. Grey matter saturated with so much fear until I can no longer string together a single coherent thought. My hands fall to my side and the world starts to fade, or maybe I start to fade from the world. I utter one last sardonic locution.

“Class dismissed.”

---

The first and only thing I am aware of is the pain in my head. The next is how cold the bar counter feels on my skin.

The next is how deathly silent it is.

I hesitantly open my eyelids and meet unexpected resistance. My left eyelid is swollen shut where the blood vessel popped. I can still see out of my right, but it’s taking a while to adjust to the dark. When at last the shadowed forms surrounding me come into focus, I can see I am once again sitting in my usual seat at my old haunt.

But the bar is completely empty. The lights are off. The jukebox is silent. There’s not even the familiar shameful comfort of a half-empty whiskey glass in front of me. The uncomfortable feeling of seeing a familiar place turned desolate and abandoned is unsettling in a liminal way.

Where is everyone?

Why am I here?

I try to rise out of my chair and immediately white hot pain shoots through my leg. The sock around my right foot is soaked with dried blood. My ankle is visibly swollen and hurts like hell. I have no recollection of what could have happened.

I've awoken from an alcoholic blackout stupor damaged and blasted many times before, but this takes the cake.

I try to overpower the pain with willpower by tensing every muscle in my body, gritting my teeth, and taking another step.

I fail miserably. My foot feels like a piece of tenderized meat. I collapse in a heap on the floor.

The world is sideways from my vantage point on the ground. I scan for anything I could use as a splint or a crutch. If I had the physical constitution to smash a leg off the barstool, that could work. But even the thought makes me cringe.

Finally I look above the shelves, usually stocked with liquor, but now curiously empty. A hollow laugh escapes my weary throat unbidden. Yeah, that’ll work.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

After an agonizing eternity of dragging myself across the floor and pulling myself up arms first behind the bar counter, I am just barely able to release the decorative Winchester rifle from its display plaque.

When I nestle the butt of the gun vertically underneath my armpit, the barrel is just long enough for me to brace myself awkwardly against it. I lean my weight on it tentatively and feel some tiny modicum of relief as my weight leaves my mangled foot.

I notice something surprising. Even though I’ve spent the better part of a decade watching this rifle collect dust on the wall, it’s in perfect shape. The barrel has curiously been scrubbed clean of fouling. The bolt chamber is freshly greased.

This thing isn’t decorative. It’s fully functional.

Even more suspiciously, a case of .308 caliber cartridges has been set out neatly on the counter, as if someone knew exactly where I would look.

Yeah, that’s weird.

Still, I haven’t spent a minute of the last few months without feeling paranoid. Waking up into the eerie backrooms version of my favorite bar hasn’t made me feel any better. The things I’ve spent the last year fearing aren’t the kind of things that you can shoot. But it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared.

I pocket the bullets on the inside of my jacket and limp slowly to the door.

 

It’s colder than I expect outside. Snow is gently falling, blanketing all sound in the muffled quiet of winter. I can tell by the gloomy twilight that it’s around midday, but still oppressively dark in the ethereal Alaskan winter. The air is completely still. I can’t tell if I’m relieved or perturbed that the streets are as empty as the bar.

 The only sound is the uneven shuffle of my limping gait and the scrape of the rifle barrel in the snow. Even those sounds seem to die out within inches in the unearthly stillness.

The intercrossing streets slowly fall behind me like lattices as I drag myself closer to the heart of town. Everywhere I go, silent. My town has been turned into a liminal grey dreamland.

When I finally approach the plaza that passes for the closest thing resembling a town square, that’s when I see them.

The ghosts.

Or at least they look like ghosts. Dozens of shadowy grey humanoid figures standing perfectly still. They look out of focus, outlines fuzzy and faded grey in the snowfall. They’re so deathly still that for a moment they evoke the image of the ashen statues of Pompeii.

I pick up the pace, hobbling towards them faster now, and their features become clearer. They’re not ghosts, of course.

Not yet.

The entire town of Cordon Bay is here. I see my neighbors; the parents of my students; Sheriff Ben; the bartender who was tired of my shit. It’s everyone. All standing in uniform rank, they take no notice of me limping closer. They’re entranced, staring unblinkingly at something just around the corner that I can’t see from this angle.

Among the mentally embalmed statues at the back of the throng I recognize a man. He’s the mechanic I paid to fix my car, what now feels like a lifetime ago.

“Hello?”

I wave the hand that isn’t holding my makeshift crutch in his face. His eyes are bloodshot like mine, but his are entirely out of focus. He doesn’t move, doesn’t respond, doesn’t even breathe. The only movement his slack jaw, open and twitching slightly.

There’s an unsettling vibration hanging in the air like an agitated beehive. I pin the noise on a faint gurgle resonating in the man’s throat, in the throats of everyone else around me. It’s atonal and rhythmic, forming a dissonant chorus. The pattern could be mistaken for chanting, but it’s nonsensical, just utterances of guttural meaningless tones; the human miracle of speech reduced to bleating vocal cords, nothing more than blind dumb stimulation of the resonating meat in our throats.

None of the catatonic townspeople pay me any mind. I take another meticulous few steps forward and finally see what they’re staring at. Until now, I’ve been too confused, hurt, and fucked up to notice the fear hormones being injected into my bloodstream by my swollen brain. But when I round that corner and see that sight that has reduced my kinfolk to cultists, every molecule of dread in my body activates again.

My mouth goes dry instantly and I’m suddenly aware of how uncomfortably my tongue is lolling about behind my teeth. My stomach twists and I feel the need to evacuate my guts from both ends. My heart, I swear to god, I can feel actually bashing against my ribcage, as if it would rather tear through my sternum and lay steaming in the snow if it could. My one good eye closes, trying, failing, to blink away the sight in front of me.

Gallows. They built fucking gallows. Of course, a guillotine would be too elegant and poetic for the mad hands of this clergy of stolen souls.  A wooden platform below an arcing beam assembled from timber, its hasty construction reflected in its jagged and uneven form, nails and screws visibly sticking out in slipshod angles. Tethered to this beam by strands of rope that remain mercifully slack are seven diminutive forms that I wish, I pray to any fucking god that will listen in this cursed land, that I didn’t recognize. But I do. I recognize all seven of them.

There’s young Grace.

There’s little Robbie.

And so on.

The last of my living students are standing at the executioner’s block.

They’re alive, for now, the bristles of rope coiled around their necks not yet taut. There is no fear or resistance in their eyes. They are entranced the same as everyone in the audience. Before them stands a man who I’ve seen near the students so many times before it barely registers at first.

Joachim, the school assistant, is holding the rope in one hand. In the other I catch the glint of a curved blade.

He’s going to gut them like a fish.

My head is swimming from the mental concoction of fear hormones that cloud my thoughts.

“What the hell are you doing?? Snap out of it! Someone, anyone, these are your children!” I yell into oblivion, a desperate last-ditch effort to rouse any remaining shred of humanity in this congregation.

They are as puppets. Unflinching, strings being pulled by a force greater than any of us.

The next series of events unfold so quickly. My throbbing head dissociates and suddenly I am experiencing the historical atrocities I’ve spent years teaching in real time -

Joachim pulls the rope taut with an arcing heave of his back.

The children are yanked into the air by their necks. Their feet kick fruitlessly for purchase.

“NO!” I scream.

I barrel forward. An older woman takes the brunt of my collision and staggers back.

She looks at me with milky white eyes and an absent expression –

-  A woman with mad eyes pushes through the crowd to violently shake the cart carrying Robespierre to the place of execution.

 “MONSTER SPEWED FROM HELL. The thought of your punishment intoxicates me with joy. Go down into your grave!” –

The crowd is thick here. There’s no way I can push through to the gallows in time.

The buzzing vibration residing in the throats of everyone around me is getting louder and more frantic.

But their faces are still so blank, a mob of ghosts –

-Five hundred thousand dead, half a million troops lost.

In Napoleon’s wake was a mob of tattered ghosts draped in odd pieces of carpet.

Those skeletons of soldiers with gaunt faces, staring off into infinity –

Even as they are hanged the children’s blank faces stare off into infinity.

Even while their legs kick with the blind mechanical thrashing of a skinned frog dipped in salt.

Joachim’s arm sweeps upwards in an instant.

The shine of the curved gutting blade.

Right up the belly of little Robbie –

-Treason called for a truly gruesome punishment. The traitor was hanged by the neck, then cut from groin to chin, their bowels taken out and burned before them-

Robbie isn’t kicking any more.

The knife has savaged his tiny body. God, he looks so small…

The flaps of skin at the terminus of the slash are so hideous and mangled and disfigured and gushing bright red like a popping candy –

Joachim moves robotically towards the next child.

I don’t let him get there.

BOOM.

The report is cataclysmically thunderous, loud enough to shatter the moment into a thousand crystalline pieces. Joachim crumples into a heap on the wooden platform.

The vibrating humming is getting louder. Up close to the gallows, I see another man rising towards the gallows to take Joachim’s place.  To finish the job.

I pull back the lever and load another round into the chamber of the rifle. I don’t miss this time either.

BOOM.

The replacement executioner stops in his tracks, collapsing into a pool of spreading red.

But now I see movement everywhere, like the tendrils controlling all the cultists’ minds are trying to activate everyone at once, as they all start to writhe.

I pull back the lever and chamber another round.

As I brace the rifle against my shoulder and bring the sights to my eye, I can’t help but feel sick with the cruel twisted irony:

In this moment, I see exactly how John Sigmund felt when he brought his father’s rifle to school.

This must have been the same thing he had seen. Just a boy, but already a madman, smart enough to know he was mad, smart enough to know the world around him was even madder.

A generation fed of tainted meat.

The hapless fools all around him, puppeted by a force he and all of them were helpless to resist. When he brought the sights of that gun to bear down on kids he once knew as friends, as peers, did he feel what I feel now?

Did he feel that this was the only way to free them?

To free himself?

I feel fucking disgusted.

BOOM.

Another body hits the ground.

I chamber another round.

I notice the six remaining children aren’t kicking much anymore.

BOOM.

The cacophony of the throat-noises is starting to die down as some of the voices drop out of the chorus suddenly.

Mentally, I am gone. Lost in the anguish of my mad assault. Lost with the guilt of becoming the shooter.

But as I line up another victim in my sights, they suddenly collapse before I can pull the trigger. Red lines of blood streak from their eyes as they fall lifelessly into the snow.

They aren’t the only one.

More bewildered than distraught – but still pretty fucking distraught – I watch as all around me, bodies drop into the snow, oozing blood from behind their eyes and from out of their ears.

Maybe, I think, in the chaos of the shooting, the swollen fear glands in their brains finally popped. An entire town wiped out with a devastating collective aneurysm. Two hundred meat computers overloaded to the point of self-destruct.

The next sound I hear tells me that it was not the shooting that wiped out the population of Cordon Bay.

To call it a growl would be to call the works of Hieronymus Bosch a painting.

A deep rumbling bass that stimulates every single fear receptor in my primitive monkey brain, low and ominous, I can feel it resonate the marrow inside my bones. It’s multi-tone, a dissonant musical fugue that contains at least three other registers human ears can discern, something between the bellow of an ape and the trumpet of an elephant. The sound is every nail scraping on a chalkboard so disharmoniously that they peel back from the cuticle and dangle by the last strand of bloody flesh; it enters my brain through my ears and it stays there, echoing off the walls of my skull, like those flayed nails just scraping hopelessly to dig themselves out even if it leaves behind red bloom of viscera and grey matter.

I know I shouldn’t look. I know I should be running, hiding, anything. But my legs won’t move. Nothing moves. Except my head, which feels like something has wrapped bony fingers around both temples and is twisting it, forcing me to turn to face the source of this call.

Clyde was half right. It isn’t no fuckin’ bear.

But it’s close.

Bear is the closest reference my pitiful human mind has to associate with this symbol of pure ferocity, hunger, and death in front of me. White fur stained and matted with the dark crimson of dried blood. It’s quadrupedal and hunched over but the legs are long, way too long; it stands well over ten feet tall even on all fours. It’s hunched over like a gorilla; its neck is much longer than a bear’s and cranes downwards in a way no animal’s should ever do.

And its face.

My god, its face.

The skin is flayed back, exposing a patchwork of bone and rotting interstitial tissue. Where the face of an animal should be, it’s so human. Like someone has superimposed the skull of an early neanderthal or some other warped hominid ancestor onto the body of an animal. Its mouth and snout project outwards more than a human, but there’s something so distinctly manlike in the shape of the cranium, the empty noseholes, the huge forward-facing eyeholes. The worst thing, the thing that doesn’t look like anything human or animal or otherwise, the thing that more than anything is not right is –

The teeth.

Jutting outwards in sporadic angles, sharp and long as the knife just used to gut the little boy on the stage behind me.

It takes a slow, lumbering step forward.

Hollow eyesockets stare right through me. Behind my own eyes I feel another much more visceral pop. I feel something warm and wet seeping out of my eyes, like tears but more viscous. A similar feeling wells up in my ear drums. All the other familiar symptoms of biological fear that wracked my body in waves for months are now ratcheted up to a thousand; hands shaking, stomach twisting, heart pounding.

I wouldn’t get far on my disjointed limp, but that doesn’t matter.

I NEED TO RUN.

RUN.

I’M GOING TO DIE.

RUN.

IT’S GOING TO EAT ME.

FUCKING RUN.

My body doesn’t move. I always pictured myself as someone that would act in a crisis. Someone with enough capability to not succumb to the primal ultimatum: Fight, flight, or freeze.

This is different than anything I could have ever imagined. The very neurons in my brain won’t fire. There is no amount of willpower that can push through the physiological barrier of overwhelming fear, any more than I could defy the laws of physics and ignore gravity just by willing it hard enough. Like a catatonic coma patient, I am locked in.

The creature continues towards me. There is no haste in its actions. It knows I am a paralyzed piece of meat. A lifetime of emotions, of memories, of failures, reduced to meat. We construct such fantasies of our importance all to be reduced to a pile of amalgamated cells in the end. The miracle of consciousness nothing more than an illusion projected on the wall by neurotransmitters.

I realize so faintly, as if it is happening to someone else miles away, that my mouth is agape and there is a noise like chitinous wings buzzing in my throat. My body is shaking with convulsions. I’m experiencing an aneurysm in real time just like the hundreds of bodies lying motionless around me.

My barely functional brain, thrashing around in my skull, remembers the autopsy report.

His very flesh was saturated with fear.

That’s what’s happening to me. That’s why it’s taking its sweet time before it gets to me, before it eats me. It’s enjoying this.

It’s seasoning my meat.

Saliva pools uncomfortably at the back of my throat. If I had control of any of my body autonomy, I would be retching right now. As it is, I notice a humiliating warmth spreading around my legs. My bladder has just released its contents.

I consider praying to God, but I know there’s only one God here and it’s standing right in front of me.

With each intentional step forward the pressure in my head grows and my vision blurs even more until –

pop

The world goes dark. Unimaginable pain sears in my head. Hot thick liquid is now gushing down both my cheeks. I don’t know if the optical nerve connecting my eyes to my brain has been severed or if my eyeballs have actually boiled out of my head. Either way, the result is the same.

I am completely blind.

The last image I will ever see is that abomination. That hungering skeletal face stitched to that monstrous bestial body. I can still see it now, even though everything else is black. Like when you stare at the sun and the afterimage is still there when you shut your eyes. It’s still right there. Coming closer. I turn my head wildly, but it’s still in front of me no matter where I face.

Judging by the sound of its footsteps, it must be barely ten feet from me when the smell hits me. Ten thousand years of rot. An acrid metallic smell heralding an ocean of blood. The mangy smell of a wet roadkill carcass. I could feel its hot breath on my face.

My legs finally give out and I fall to my knees in the snow. I have just enough time to think:

Just get it over with alrea-

There’s a sensation of sharp pressure on my stomach followed by burning agony. There’s a wet slopping sound. I don’t need to see to know my guts are spilling out of my belly. A long claw is digging around in the wound, widening the bloody aperture with each movement. Something heavy and wide slides out of me and the jarring tugging stops, but wave after wave of pain still courses through me. I pray that I will pass out, fade to black, and promptly die in the snow, but my consciousness mercilessly remains intact.

The most horrific sound I could ever imagine comes from right next to my ear. A ravenous animalistic grunting and the soppy sounds of mastication.

It’s eating my liver right in front of me.

God, kill me now. Please, just fucking kill me.

It obliges.

I wish I could say the next sensation is the last one I will ever feel. It will not be. My death will not grant me the mercy of being swift.

It feels like my head is being crushed between a vice. Sharp daggers of extreme pinpoint pressure - those teeth - force themselves into the space behind my temples and above my ears. Rotting, roiling, breath and undulating wet flesh envelops all sensation. My whole head is in its jaws.

With unending force it crunches down and shatters reality in two. There’s a schism in my brain as it collapses inward into itself and the two halves of my head are finally mashed into goop and then –

It feels like my head is being crushed between a vice. Those daggers of teeth press in behind my eyes, the smell of rotting meat, the wet sloshing of a gastral prison, and finally the overwhelming agony as the two halves of my head split and are mashed together until they become a red paste and then –

The crushing sensation around my head

PLEASE GOD

The skin around my temples tearing open as bone knives press in all the way through in the gaps between the plates of my skull

JUST LET ME DIE

The disgusting breath, living decay, the suffocating feel of drowning inside a claustrophobic digestive chamber

And then-

It repeats. From the moment the jaws close down, to the moment of oblivion. Over, and over, and over, and over again.

Ad infinitum.

Dear reader, I am sure you’re wondering how on earth I could write this bloody end to my story.  Surely, dead men tell no tales.

No man can say what happens when you die. But I can tell you what happened – what is happening – what will happen again – to me.

Maybe if this was a mere bear, I would’ve been savagely mauled and eventually passed on into darkness. But this wasn’t no fuckin’ bear, and one does not merely pass on from being devoured by an ancient god.

You think a god simply kills you and moves on? These beings have existed longer than creation. They do not perceive time in linear fashion. When I died, when my skull was split open, it opened wide and let eternity in. An infinite punishment for my sins, my own personal hell of endless pain and gore. Past, present, future; time is no longer a series of events. It is one long endless loop of every moment that has ever happened, will ever happen, all at once.

I am dying the most painful death imaginable, over and over, forever. Like the flipping pages of a book, each frame happening again and again.

I no longer exist in a single point in time and space. In every moment that will ever exist, in every possible alternate universe, I am constant. The feel of teeth in my temples, crushing my brain into paste, this is where I exist.

Where did you find my writings? On some niche corner of the obscure side of the internet? Gathering dust on a forgotten shelf in an old bookstore? Maybe you dug out a booklet of yellowed parchment from storage in a dilapidated evidence room, seventy years from now?

These words are more than letters on paper. We have spent quite a while together by now. The harrowing events of the closing chapters of my life, the unravelling of my sanity, the dying sermon of a doomed sacrifice to an unthinkable god. You have read this whole story, and you have let the words of a madman find a cozy spot in the recesses of your mind.

Somewhere in the fear center of your brain, somewhere behind your eyes and just ahead of where your medulla oblongata touches your brainstem, my ravings now live there forever.  

That is how I reach you through my imprisonment of endless deaths. In that way, I am immortal. As is this devouring avatar of ancient vengeance. As are the billion voices of the dead, whom I can now hear with a clarity that you too may soon possess.

Fear not, my friend. Though infinity is a prison, it is also a doorway. For as my murdered consciousness twists through the Akashic plane, every potentiality is imaginable. Right now, I am envisioning the shard of fractured existence where, being crushed between the jaws of an angry god for uncountable repetitions, at last  I have served my penance; blind though I am, the pooled blood of all the sacrifices offered to Nanook laps at my feet, and he is at last sated, and the pressure is released, and after ten million years he is gone.

In this world, I shuffle blindly, following pure instinct and a call I cannot understand, until the waves I feel around my ankles are no longer warm, thick blood, but the cool icy waters of Cordon Bay.

I walk forward, deeper with each step, feeling the water rise up my legs, now to my chest, now at my neck, and finally over my head as I sink into the black. The lights in the water are all around me, I can see them now even blind, because you don’t need your eyes to see these things.

I am there now, bathed in the luminous spirits of all those who have come before us and all those who will come after. Cordon Bay is not the only place where the dead come through to our world – there are places like this near you as well. A sacred mountain, a hallowed forest, a phantasmal cemetery. Perhaps even within the pages of a book.

One day, it is inevitable, you too will find some iteration of yourself, half-remembered and beyond time, joined hand in hand with the spectral masses of your dead kin, wandering in those hallowed halls, forevermore.

I will be waiting for you there.