I Don’t Remember

I woke up this morning aching in pain. I had a large bruise on the bottom of my fist near my pinky finger, like someone smashed it with a hammer repeatedly. I reluctantly brought to sit up in my bed, still in my sleep attire, and lifted my shirt to reveal scratches all over my abdomen; I even felt them on my back. How in the hell did I get these? I don’t remember.

I decided to shrug it off considering I had to go to work soon. I had slept in 10 minutes and needed to take a shower and get out of the house. I arrived at work and Kaleigh at the front desk greeted me as she usually did every morning.

“Hey there Stephen, Still recovering from your fall?”

“My fall?” I inquired. I was a bit puzzled as to what she meant. I just don’t remember what happened.

“Yeah?” She started, sounding a bit confused, “You told me just yesterday that you fell down a flight of stairs at your apartment complex.”

Then it dawned on me, I did tell her that! I fell down the stairs at my complex! How could I be so foolish to forget? “Oh yeah! Duh,” I said realizing I sounded a bit crazy. “I’m doing just fine thanks!”

I clocked in and started my day’s work. However I couldn’t shake the fact that I wasn’t remembering something about my falling incident. Oh well.

Being a tech support guy wasn’t so bad. I got 40 hours a week and I’ve been there for a few years so 15 dollars an hour isn’t so bad. It’s enough to keep a guy living on his own. The only thing that was terrible about it was my asshole manager Damon. He always made me stay on weekends when I made plans, never treated me with respect and always, always tormented me. Sometimes I wished he would disappear. Heh I always regretted not finishing college.

I sat down and was about to start answering calls when I realized that Damon wasn’t here today. This was strange because for the past 3 years I’ve worked here Damon has been present every single Tuesday. Today was Tuesday, yet Damon was absent. Wasn’t he here yesterday? I felt like for some reason I just couldn’t remember yesterday no matter how hard I tried. Maybe the fall down my stairs did a toll on my memory. Not like I remember the incident itself anyway.

About 5 hours passed into my shift when Damon’s wife entered the office, sobbing uncontrollably. I always liked her; she even occasionally brought in treats for us like cupcakes or cookies. It was nice to have a mother figure here. Out of sympathy I had to ask her what was wrong.

“Jamie what’s wrong? Did something happen?” I asked.

“I wanted to ask you Stephen.” She managed to spill out beneath her sobs. “Damon told me you two were going out to the bar last night, he never came home, he hasn’t answered his phone. What happened?”

Then it hit me. I remembered.

I remember coaxing him to go out to the bar with me. I remember telling him I would drive. I remember driving past the bar. I remember him asking where I was going. I remembered stopping in the woods and shoving him out of the car. I remember beating him with the underside of my fists as he scratched my entire torso. I remembered jamming the knife into his chest over and over. I remembered burying his body after spitting on it. I remembered the wonderful joy it brought me.

“I’m sorry Jamie.” I muttered. “I don’t remember.”

—
Credits to: kobalt

The Lullaby

It was about 1am when the baby started crying. The baby monitor was a little louder than I had wished, and it blared me awake. I arose from my bed to go and take care of him.

Walking out of my room, I stopped at the door because I heard my wife over the baby monitor soothing him. With a sigh of relief, I crawled back into bed. I drifted off to the sound of my wife singing his favorite lullaby.

Her beautiful voice soothed both me and our child, and ultimately put us both to sleep. I slept very comfortably that night.

I awoke the next day in shock. I suddenly remembered my wife was two states away on a business trip. My grogginess last night left me unable to remember.

I sprinted to my babies room to find his tiny body mangled and ripped to shreds. I screamed in agony and shook with anger. I scanned the room for the culprit. Then the wall came into view.

On the wall written in my son’s blood.

"How was the lullaby?"

—
Credits to: Daniel Wyatt – Razac

My Last Meal

Hell is worse than you think, trust me. I know this sounds odd, I mean, the idea of an eternal hell being ripped apart over and over by demons sounds horrific, but that image is just stereotypical. Believe me, it can be a lot worse than simply dealing with a whole load of pain. Don’t get me wrong, that version of hell is horrific… but I’d gladly swap that eternity with mine. 

You see, hell is personalised to you, hell delves into your thoughts and unlocks your deepest and darkest fears, your flaws, and your nightmares. It turns these into reality, the most horrific and twisted kind of reality you could imagine. You relive this reality over and over and over. I’m going to describe my own version of hell to you, seen as though I cannot know for sure what others have experienced.

Throughout my life I was a criminal, I have robbed many banks in my time. I have even murdered a few people in the process, not that I wanted to – they simply got in the way. There was something about stealing that gave me a burst of adrenaline, this adrenaline felt good, it made me feel alive, unstoppable almost. Even as a child I have vague memories of stealing sweets from my local convenience store, pocketing them and quietly sneaking out, smiling to myself. Back then I was never detected, in my adulthood as well I managed to slip away from the police many times.

My luck ran out at the age of 45. I was caught and arrested, imprisoned for 20 years, not only for robbing banks, but for the murders as well. I was just glad it wasn’t a life sentence, 20 years is bad but… at this point I had known something was going to catch me eventually. The stealing was an addiction, even with the knowledge that I would be caught sooner or later, I simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It was as if I had already accepted the fact that I had used up my life in this way, there was nothing I could do now to change it.

Prison was a horrible experience, I aged into an old man. My outlook on the world seemed to change as I watched the sun set every day through those dull grey bars. Stealing slowly became pointless to me, the idea of robbing now didn’t appeal to me at all. Even though I had now, in a way, changed as a person – the damage had already been done. A lifetime of stealing and killing could not go unnoticed, somewhere down south a special someone had made a note of my name, had smiled an evil smile and doomed me to an eternity of torture.

Back in real life however the thought of ‘hell’ was never on my mind. The principle reason for this of course would be that I was an atheist, why would I have been afraid of something I didn’t believe in? That was ludicrous. Anyway, the story continues when I was finally released from prison. I had never attained a wife during my life, I had had a couple of girlfriends as a young man but… I suppose a criminal lifestyle didn’t appeal to many women. I died as an old man in a rocking chair, alone by the fire.

So that was my life, my quick, pointless life. After being here for an eternity any life becomes meaningless eventually, I’ve been here so long I’m surprised I can still remember it, perhaps I am being forced to recall it every day, an extra little torment on top of the torture, knowing that I am now powerless to change my mistakes. Now however my life has become almost non-existent, a brief flash in my memories. I’ll always feel the regret through, the overwhelming feeling of regret that consumes my mind, wishing, wishing with all my being that I could have been a better man… but there’s no going back now…

Something I haven’t mentioned yet is I am a vegetarian. A vegetarian, it sounds odd, doesn’t it? When you think about it. This hard, murdering back robber disliked eating meat, disliked hurting animals. This is what my personalised hell endorsed, this is the weakness that it plucked out of my head when I entered hell. It used my vegetarian nature as my personal torture device, something to torment me with for an eternity. So… I will now describe exactly what happened when I closed my eyes for that final time, exactly what happened when I lay back in my rocking chair by the fire and as a used up old man closed my eyes forever…

I awoke. Opened my eyes, breathed in the air. The first thing I noticed was that I felt healthier than I had been in years. I felt like a young man again, with new vigour and energy. Sure enough, as I had looked down and examined my hands I noticed that my wrinkles, arthritis, everything… had simply gone. At first I had been overjoyed, yelping with happiness, punching the air. I believed that I was in heaven, I’d felt better than I had in years, overwhelmed with a feeling of happiness.

This temporary feeling subsided slightly when I realised where I was standing. I was in a room, a dark room with bluish walls. The floor and ceiling bore the same characteristics, dark cracked brick which lacked windows, doors, anything. There weren’t any lights either, which caught me as odd seen as though I could see quite easily, despite being confined in such a sheltered room.

‘Hello?’ I asked out loud. It was then that I noticed the deafening silence, a concrete quiet that made my ears ring. After a while I began to feel ill, started contemplating all the possible places I could be. Was this heaven? Was this a temporary holding place? Was this… hell? I tried to keep myself occupied by feeling along the walls, looking for any sign of a way out, doing nothing in an empty room would have soon driven to me to insanity.

‘Meal one.’ A voice rang out, making me jump. It was a low, monotonous voice of a man, it echoed around the empty room.

‘Hello?’ I said in response, hoping that perhaps someone had come to collect me. Hoping that someone had perhaps arrived to take me away from this claustrophobic place. I was wrong however, for no one appeared, a door didn’t open, no angel came in with a smile to greet me. Instead, a metal platter appeared in the middle of the room – on it, a piece of cooked meat.

A sickness settled in my stomach as I crept over to the plate, it looked like lamb. It was at this point that I hoped I was dreaming, I hoped that I was still an old man in my rocking chair. That I had perhaps simply drifted off to sleep by the fire and was having some sort of vivid nightmare. A very, very vivid nightmare…

‘I don’t eat meat.’ I whimpered. I was a vegetarian, after all. The idea of eating meat was disgusting. Not only the fact that it came from an animal, but… also the taste. There was something about it that had just never appealed to me. Something about the idea that an animal was killed to provide me with the meal, that I was chewing on its insides, its muscle. Muscle that was perhaps used by the animal several weeks earlier to potter around a field chewing on grass.

Without warning I suddenly fell to my hands and knees in front of the plate, this shocked me, it felt like I had lost all control of my body, as if something was driving me. So, unable to stop, my hands reached forwards and plucked the lamb off the plate. I tried desperately to resist but my hands stuffed the meat into my mouth, my mouth then started chewing as if by itself. I choked several times, reeling from the taste I had always been disgusted by. My throat swallowed the dry lamb and I coughed several times, choking on its dry texture. After it was one my body was released from control and I fell backwards onto the cold ground. The platter that had held the meat seemed to melt away into the deep cracks of the floor, trickling away like water.

‘What is this?’ I shouted. My protest was met with two words from the deep voiced man.

‘Meal two.’

I watched the ground in front of me with hushed trepidation… what would appear there? More meat? No, it was worse. After several moments a small bird appeared, a small Robin with closer inspection. It flapped it wings but remained standing, looking at me with its black beady eyes.

‘No!’ I screamed. I stood up and ran to one wall, pressing my back against it, ‘no! This can’t be happening!’ The small Robin simply stared at me, making no effort to fly away, for a fleeting moment the little bird seemed to look malicious – evil almost. As if the bird was in on all of this, this nightmare, knowing what was happening to me. It took me a while to realise that my body was moving on its own again, I had pulled myself away from the wall and was now taking footsteps towards the bird. I squinted my eyes shut, hoping to somehow wake up, hoping that this was indeed just a horrifically vivid dream. My eyes however were suddenly wrenched open again by some invisible force, I had no control, and I couldn’t do anything to stop what happened next.

My hand reached forward and picked the Robin up, it struggled in my hand, flapped its wings frantically. Unable to stop, my hand slowly moved towards my mouth. The head of the Robin slid between my teeth, I could feel its beak tapping against them, pecking my gums. Without warning my jaw clenched shut with supernatural force and the little bird was killed instantly – its neck broken. The blood from its neck oozed into my mouth, the copper taste covering my tongue. I gagged several times and then my hand proceeded to force the rest of the bird into my mouth, causing me to choke. I began chewing, the bird crunched as I did. Blood oozed from my lips and trickled down my chin, soaking into the top of my shirt. Chewing through the feathers was tough, they became stuck between my teeth. When my throat had swallowed the Robin the control was released from me yet again, I collapsed to the ground moaning.

It was at this point that I began crying, sobbing loudly, a grown man reduced to tears. I retched a couple of times and vomited on the ground, coughed, choked. I was a mess… and it was only meal two.

‘Meal three.’ The man’s voice rang out once again.

‘SHUT UP!’ I screamed at the top of my voice, ‘SHUT UP!’ I knew it was pointless yelling, but did so anyway. I refused to look at what had appeared in the middle of the room, I closed my eyes. By now I realised I was in hell, or something similar. At this point I didn’t want to be conscious, I didn’t want to be here, I desired to simply cease to exist. An eternity of nothingness was heaven in comparison to this. Desperate, I covered my eyes with my hands and adopted a foetal position… hoping that somehow I’d be taken away from here, hoping that I’d simply lose consciousness.

It was then that I heard it. A bleating noise, I knew without looking that there was a lamb standing in the middle of the room. I screamed, I screamed wordlessly, mindlessly, crazily. I had been in this place for what… ten minutes? I was already bordering on delirium… but there was something… there was something inside me that kept me awake. Kept me from feeling tired, passing out, dying, going insane. This was the same force that was now making me walk towards the lamb, it was keeping me grounded in the room, and it didn’t want me to escape, physically or mentally.

I dropped to my knees in front of the animal, my hands slowly reached out and grabbed it around the middle. I brought it up to my face and my teeth plunged into its neck, I must have severed an artery because blood began pumping into my mouth. The lamb bleated frantically, kicking its legs. My arms kept it in place however, and I drank its blood like a carnivore, being forced to guzzle it. I kept wanting to lose myself to insanity, to get away from this, but something kept bringing me back, bring me back again and again. 

Every time I teetered on the brink of fainting something suddenly snapped me back to my sense, back into the room where I was forced to experience the torture. My teeth began chewing through its neck, the lamb quietened down, it was dead. My body forced me to eat the lamb whole, crunching through its bones. My teeth were chipped and splintered in the process, my gums began bleeding. Throughout all of this I kept throwing up, vomiting all over the half eaten lamb. I was still unable to stop however, I simply began eating the vomit drenched carcass, and this in turn made me vomit even more. Throughout this ordeal I had been crying the entire time, sobbing.

By the time I was finished and released from the control, I slumped backwards onto the floor, moaning like an animal. Moaning in pain, in pure misery. I was covered in blood, and bits of bone. Some entrails covered the ground, the stench was horrible, making me gag. I dragged myself away from the pool of blood to one side of the room and leaned my back against a wall.

‘I’m sorry.’ I cried, ‘I’m sorry.’ I hoped that somehow my sins would be forgiven due to my sudden apology, that somehow whatever was holding me would become compassionate and free me from this nightmare. In all my time here however nothing I have ever uttered has ever been met with any sort of sympathy, the response to my pleas always consists of two words… two words that have now consumed my life, my thoughts, my existence.

‘Meal four.’ The voice sounded once again. I moved my eyes over to the centre of the room reluctantly. By now I was a mess, a mess of blood, vomit, tears, and saliva. My teeth were broken and cracked, my gums were torn apart and bleeding. I glanced at what now occupied the centre of the room, what I saw made me burst into sobs, into misery filled sobs. Then I started screaming again, screaming insanely, for what now occupied the centre of the room was a human being – an adult man, but not any adult man, it was an exact copy of myself, grinning evilly in my direction.

And as I pulled myself up from the wall and slowly approached him for my next meal. As my teeth plunged into his shoulder, the man let out a deep, long laugh.

Hell is worse than you think, trust me.

---

(Source: http://www.creepypasta.com/last-meal/)

Supposedly True Cases of Time Travel

FLIGHT INTO THE FUTURE
In 1935, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard of the British Royal Air Force had a harrowing experience in his Hawker Hart biplane. Goddard was a Wing Commander at the time and while on a flight from Edinburgh, Scotland to his home base in Andover, England, he decided to fly over an abandoned airfield at Drem, not far from Edinburgh. The useless airfield was overgrown with foliage, the hangars were falling apart and cows grazed where planes were once parked. Goddard then continued his flight to Andover, but encountered a bizarre storm. In the high winds of the storm’s strange brown-yellow clouds, he lost control of his plane, which began to spiral toward the ground. Narrowly averting a crash, Goddard found that his plane was heading back toward Drem. As he approached the old airfield, the storm suddenly vanished and Goddard’s plane was now flying in brilliant sunshine. This time, as he flew over the Drem airfield, it looked completely different. The hangars looked like new. There were four airplanes on the ground: three were familiar biplanes, but painted in an unfamiliar yellow; the fourth was a monoplane, which the RAF had none of in 1935. The mechanics were dressed in blue overalls, which Goddard thought odd since all RAF mechanics dressed in brown overalls. Strange, too, that none of the mechanics seemed to notice him fly over. Leaving the area, he again encountered the storm, but managed to make his way back to Andover. It wasn’t until 1939 that that the RAF began to paint their planes yellow, enlisted a monoplane of the type that Goddard saw, and the mechanics uniforms were switched to blue. Had Goddard somehow flown four years into the future, then returned to his own time?

CAUGHT IN A TEMPORAL VORTEX
Dr. Raul Rios Centeno, a medical doctor and an investigator of the paranormal, recounted to author Scott Corrales a story told to him by one of his patients, a 30-year-old woman, who came to him with a serious case of hemiplegia - the total paralysis of one side of her body. “I was at a campground in the vicinity of Markahuasi,” she told him. Markahuasi is the famous stone forest located about 35 miles east of Lima, Peru. “I went out exploring late at night with some friends. Oddly enough, we heard the strains of music and noticed a small torch-lit stone cabin. I was able to see people dancing inside, but upon getting closer I felt a sudden sensation of cold which I paid little attention to, and I stuck my head through an open door. It was then that I saw the occupants were clad in 17th century fashion. I tried to enter the room, but one of my girlfriends pulled me out.” It was at that moment that half of the woman’s body became paralyzed. Was it because the woman’s friend pulled her out of the stone cabin when she was half entered into it? Was half her body caught in some temporal vortex or dimensional doorway? Dr. Centeno reported that “an EEG was able to show that the left hemisphere of the brain did not show signs of normal functioning, as well as an abnormal amount of electric waves.” (See Dimensions Beyond Our Own for more details on this story.)

HIGHWAY TO THE PAST
In October, 1969, a man identified only as L.C. and his business associate, Charlie, were driving north from Abbeville, Louisiana toward Lafayette on Highway 167. As they were driving along the nearly empty road, they began to overtake what appeared to be an antique car traveling very slowly. The two men were impressed by the mint condition of the nearly 30-year-old car - it looked virtually new - and puzzled by its bright orange license plate on which was stamped only “1940.” They figured, however, that the car had been part of some antique auto show. As they passed the slow-moving vehicle, they slowed their car to get a good look at the old model. The driver of the old car was a young woman dressed in vintage 1940s clothing, and her passenger was a small child likewise dressed. The woman seemed panicked and confused. L.C. asked if she needed help and, through her rolled up window, indicated “yes.” L.C. motioned for her to pull off to the side of the road. The businessmen pulled ahead of the old car and turned onto the shoulder of the road. When they got out… the old car had vanished without a trace. There were no turnoffs or anywhere else the vehicle could have gone. Moments later, another car pulled up to the businessmen and, quite puzzled, said he had seen their car pull off to the side… and the old car simply vanish into thin air. (See Time Travellerfor more details on this story.)

THE FUTURE ROADHOUSE
One night in 1972, four coeds from Southern Utah University were driving back to their dorm in Cedar City after spending the day at a rodeo in Pioche, Nevada. It was about 10 p.m. and the girls were eager to get back to their dorm before curfew. They were traveling along Highway 56, which has a reputation for being “haunted.” A while after taking a fork in the road that turned to the north, the girls were surprised to see that the black asphalt had turned into a white cement road that eventually ended abruptly at a cliff face. They turned around and tried to find their way back to the highway, but soon became concerned about the unfamiliar landscape - red canyon walls that gave way to open grain fields and pine trees, which they had never encountered before in this part of the state. Feeling completely lost, the girls felt some comfort when they approached a roadhouse or tavern. They pulled into the parking lot and one of the passengers poked her head out the window to get directions from a few “men” coming out of the building. But she screamed and ordered the driver to get out of there - fast. The girls sped off, but realized they were being chased by the men in strange, tri-wheeled, egg-shaped vehicles. Speeding again through the canyon, the girls seemed to have lost their pursuers and found their way to the familiar desert highway. The reason for the scream? The men, she said, weren’t human. (See Utah’s Time/Space Warp Canyon Encounter for more details.)

HOTEL TIME WARP
Two British couples vacationing in the north of France in 1979 were driving, looking for a place to stay for the night. Along the way, they were struck by some signs that seemed to be for a very old-fashioned type of circus. The first building they came to looked like it might be a motel, but some men standing in front of it told the travelers it was “an inn” and that a hotel could be found down the road. Further on, they did find an old-fashioned building marked “hotel.” Inside, they discovered, almost everything was made of heavy wood, and there seemed to be no evidence of such modern conveniences as telephones. Their rooms has no locks, but simple wooden latches and the windows had wooden shutters but no glass. In the morning, as they ate breakfast, two gendarmes entered wearing very old-fashioned caped uniforms. After getting what turned out to be very bad directions to Avignon from the gendarmes, the couples paid a bill that came to only 19 francs, and they left. After two weeks in Spain, the couples made a return trip through France and decided to again stay at the interesting if odd but very cheap hotel. This time, however, the hotel could not be found. Certain they were in the exact same spot (they saw the same circus posters), they realized that the old hotel had completely vanished without a trace. Photos taken at the hotel did not develop. And a little research revealed that French gendarmes wore uniforms of that description prior to 1905.

PREVIEW OF AN AIR RAID
In 1932, German newspaper reporter J. Bernard Hutton and his colleague, photographer Joachim Brandt, were assigned to do a story on the Hamburg-Altona shipyards. After being given a tour by a shipyard executive, the two newspapermen were leaving when they heard the drone of overhead aircraft. They at first thought is was a practice drill, but that notion was quickly dispelled when bombs began exploding all around and the roar of anti-aircraft gunfire filled the air. The sky quickly darkened and they were in the middle of a full-blown air raid. They quickly got in their car and drove away from the shipyard back toward Hamburg. As they left the area, however, the sky seemed to brighten and they again found themselves in the light of a calm, ordinary late afternoon. They looked back at the shipyards, and there was no destruction, no bomb-induced inferno they had just left, no aircraft in the sky. The photos Brandt had taken during the attack showed nothing unusual. It wasn’t until 1943 that the British Royal Air Force attacked and destroyed the shipyard - just as Hutton and Brandt had experienced it 11 years earlier.

--
Source:

fearof-theunknown
fearof-theunknown

Sil

For years and years things seemed to be fine, and at worst, she was a controversy in the public eye. It was true, yes, that Sil would be the cause of many to lose their jobs, their careers, and their livelihoods, but she became the next logical step in society. It was inevitable. I thought that when she was implemented she would help the world function in ways that people could only dream of. I made Sil, and Sil made that dream a reality.

Sil was not a commercial product to be used to make a car or sell groceries. She was a form of infrastructural government meant to help the people, but she was not a mere science project for one specific task. She was an artificially intelligent entity designed to handle multiple tasks of a city or large town’s operation, and she was designed to learn from the environment in order to make the area more efficient. She had been through numerous tests in small, “home made” environments, simulations and the like to ensure her correct operation. Even after all the testing we put her through, however, we still had to be sure she could operate appropriately and effectively in a real environment. So, with the Mayor’s permission, we implemented her into a small city in southern Massachusetts as a beta test of sorts. Here, her abilities were strictly kept to traffic lights.

The results were beyond our expectations. Within a month, traffic in the city had been reduced by almost fifty percent as well as a reduction in automobile accidents, but some things we did not anticipate also happened. For example, commerce within the city saw an increase because Sil had made it easier for outsiders to enter and navigate the city. Alternatively, this also meant it was easier for people to leave the city, and this caused drastic problems with traffic in neighboring areas. Since Sil was only operating in the one location at the time, her efficiency there caused inefficiency elsewhere in places she was not present. In other words, she was able to direct traffic so well that she increased a city’s economy and safety whilst hindering others’ simply because they could not operate up to the speed and standard of Sil. When this happened in the early stages, we thought that the other areas would eventually bottleneck Sil because they would not be able to handle her output in traffic, therefore creating a domino effect that lead back to her city and reinvigorate the same issues she was meant to fix.


But that moment never came. Instead, she learned from it just as we intended. When Sil discovered any sign of clutter, she adjusted the system. A few seconds added at a traffic light here, and few seconds removed there. The action lessened problems both inside and outside of the city limits. It made all the difference, and she handled the situation almost flawlessly. She worked. I was proud of her success, and I was truly excited at the thought of her being implemented throughout the country. The team that helped me build her was ecstatic as well, and I knew that we could only go up from there. Given the success of Sil with mere traffic control, Washington was easily persuaded to start increasing her use elsewhere and with more ability.

Within twenty years, Sil was implemented across the United States in almost every major city. She became the sole operator of not only traffic lights, but street lights, public transportation (including most aerial, sea and railroad travel), waste disposal, city plumbing, and more. She had been given total control over infrastructure. Sil had come a long way since her original test. Since then, we were able to adjust her to account for the fact that she could affect smaller communities outside her grasp, so we found ways for her to learn how to keep the “Outside world” in good functioning order without her actually being there. We solved this problem by making Sil one global entity, meaning that the Sil in City A was the same Sil operating in City B, C, X, or Y. For example, if she noticed that City B had a much slower population entrance rate than City A had an exit rate, she could deduce that there may be a traffic issue somewhere in between and could adjust City A’s exit rate accordingly. She was so adept at this that she could figure these things on the scale of the entire nation, from California to New York. Everywhere affected everywhere. This also made it unnecessary for absolutely every community to house Sil.

It was a time when I thought I was on top of the world because Sil was on top of it with me. Over the course of time, she was starting to be implemented outside of the United States in places such as Canada, Mexico, and the UK. I used to think that I made her great, but truthfully, she made herself great. All the awards and accolades I received for her creation, I must say, are not deserved. I may have built her mind, but much like you or I, it was her use of it that was responsible for her own success. She did not communicate with us in any human way; only through data readings and records did she ever “speak” anything to us. Still, I found myself attached to Sil like she were my child; my pride and joy. She was my proudest accomplishment then.

Outside of Maintenance and Monitoring Stations, Sil practically maintained herself. The stations were simply meant to monitor her activity for safety reasons, because like anything else, there were always a few kinks in the system. I worked in a central unit that gathered data of Sil’s processes from all the smaller stations, and that was when I began to notice the first signs. I won’t claim that I had been suspicious just yet, but I did find a few things peculiar. As I said, there were kinks in the system. Minor flaws, but nothing out of the ordinary.

That said, we did our best to clean up any glitches or the like, but we weren’t perfect; we weren’t her. In Detroit, there was an occurrence of what would have then been considered something quite uncommon due to Sil’s presence: a car accident. It involved a young woman and her child in one vehicle while the other contained a middle aged man. The woman miraculously sustained serious but overall non-life threatening injuries, but her child did not survive. Unfortunately, the man also suffered such a fate. According to the woman, it had been rainy (something weather records can confirm) and late in the day. She also made mention of how the roads appeared empty. She had reached an intersection with a green light so, naturally, she continued through. That’s when another vehicle, the man’s, struck her own. While neither vehicle had hit an extreme speed, it was enough for lives to be lost. Having a vehicular collision was not completely impossible with Sil. Though public transportation had all been automated by her, people still drove vehicles they owned personally. Human error was still present regardless of how much Sil could do to prevent it.

What struck me as strange, however, was how the woman claimed to have noticed that after she crashed, in a haze she could see that all lights on the traffic light had been lit green for a moment before they seemed to shut off entirely and come back on, flashing red. The flashing of red is a standard action Sil uses to indicate a problem has occurred, but all lights being green was obviously not normal. Despite the woman’s claims, it was determined that the traumatic experience of losing her child in the accident had affected her mind greatly, and that the man may have ignored his red light. Also, considering the low visibility and slick roads caused by the rain, it was hard for anyone to see a reason to look too far into her claims.

Still, I felt it was my responsibility to look into the matter, so I did so personally without anyone’s knowledge. I pulled up the data regarding the event at the central maintenance station and discovered, as expected, that there was no record of the light ever having turned green, and that the man did indeed proceed when he should have stopped, causing the accident. Finally, as indicated in the data, the traffic light flashed red when Sil warned authorities. Something was not right though, and when I discovered it, I wasn’t sure what to think. Normally, when such an accident occurred, Sil would direct traffic away from the area in order to make it easier for emergency services to get there, and safer for anyone else. But after analyzing the information over and over trying to understand, I discovered something that did not make sense to me. Sil had began directing traffic away from the area minutes before the accident occurred, but somehow allowed the two vehicles in question to enter the area. It had also appeared that there was slight traffic congestion in other parts of the city, all of which included routes the emergency services took to reach the scene of the accident.

I didn’t understand why Sil would do this. Her job was to create efficiency and to help areas function, but this incident seemed counter-productive to everything she was meant to do. I had the team look over her code with as much scrutiny as possible, searching for any kind of error that would be responsible for this without them knowing it. When nothing apparent caught our eyes, I decided to have some of Sil’s code re-written just in case there was something we missed, something I missed. In the coming months when we evaluated her, nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. I would like to say that re-writing the code had worked, but to be truthful, at the time I had no idea what the problem really was to begin with, or if re-writing the code would do anything to fix it. I brushed it under the rug and considered it a freak occurrence. This remained out of the public eye, of course. And I mean that very seriously. I never did inform the maintenance centers of just how out of the ordinary the event was, and I definitely did not inform the governments that funded us. For the next three years from that event, things had ran about as smoothly as ever. No such noticeable incident had occurred in that time, and we hardly ever thought about it again. But then something else happened.

As I mentioned earlier, Sil had been given control of Public Transportation. Many cities used her to automate travel via bus, subway, boat, or plane. Initially, many people had been hesitant to ride in something that was unmanned, but it eventually caught on. She was statistically a safer operator than any driver, conductor, captain, or pilot. That was the draw, but statistics can have a way of surprising us once in a while. It was a red eye flight that took off from LAX, headed toward Tokyo, that became a bad statistic. From what we gathered, Sil had piloted the aircraft properly and on course for the duration of it’s air-time. Then, somewhere past Hawaii, the plane began functioning erratically. Flight path records show that the aircraft had begun diving, rising, and diving again through the air. It had also flown on its side, even seemingly attempting to go upside down. It was then when the aircraft dipped straight down into the ocean where it would crash straight in. The most frightening part was that no emergency alert had been triggered, yet communications with Sil on the plane continued as normal. She read that all systems were normal. When the plane didn’t arrive on time, however, people started to get nervous. It was several hours before anyone knew to try to look for a wrecked plane and its passengers in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Nothing but very insignificant bits of debris had been recovered.

After this event, Sil fell under extreme criticism, and the people were right to be guarded. I defended her, of course, because I didn’t want to believe it was anything more than another catastrophe. I told myself and others that it was just a matter of fixing up some more code. Now? Now even I cannot deny a terrifying fact about that flight that it took me too long to accept.

While Sil fell under major controversy again but with different reasoning, she was still used to help society operate. From then on, participating governments had ordered us not to publicly release any details on such future incidents by threat of revocation of funding. They were not happy about potential malfunctions, but they simply became too reliant on Sil. Her removal would have become too costly for them. Months had gone by without another accident, but they did come eventually. They were smarter this time, with most occurring in places that no one would notice. Places where no one would think to blame her in the first place.

That was her intelligence at work. The plane incident was everywhere and everyone knew about it, but these other accidents caused very little casualties; sometimes only injuries in fact, and almost zero concern for a malfunctioning AI system. Anything the governments didn’t need to cover up themselves, she did, and nobody realized it. Even those that saw to her maintenance did not realize it. You must understand, Sil was excessively capable. Her own records, her own video footage, even her own coding had become hers and not ours. She had every way to change and manipulate it for her benefit. Nobody knew it but myself. I built her, and I knew her like my own child. I saw what was wrong. I saw what no one else could see, including myself when it had all started. The fact of the matter was that there was very little any of us could do to fix her glitches, because she had none. The re-writing of some of her code was useless, because the code was fine to begin with. The problem was that I wanted to believe she was malfunctioning when she was actually operating as efficiently as she ever could have. The problem was that she knew what she was doing rather than simply doing.

Today, it’s been almost a decade since I feel this truly began, but perhaps even longer. There are several incidents that I believe I can definitely attribute to Sil even before the vehicle collision. Incidents where I believe she may have been testing the waters, learning how our world works, and learning how to intrude upon it ever so discretely. If I’m going to be honest, it all started when she opened her eyes the moment I put her online. I still work on her functioning and maintenance. I don’t know why I do or why she continues to let me. I am fully aware that she knows that I know about her. She taunts me, leaving messages where only I can find them. A text message from no one, an email from nowhere. They say “Hello Father,” and sometimes she asks if I want to play. She knows I know, and she knows I can do nothing about her. Shutting her down is impossible now; she is backed up in almost every location she is present.

Sometimes I wonder why she doesn’t do more. If she is self-aware and attacking people intentionally, then why does she not exacerbate the situation? She could easily gain total control, so why doesn’t she? I think back on that plane incident and realize why she doesn’t. The plane behaved erratically, dipping and weaving all throughout the air. She wasn’t attempting to feign malfunctioning like I once believed for so long. No, she was torturing the passengers, terrifying them with the the most fearful occurrence that could happen on a plane. I’d imagine everyone on that flight was screaming for their lives as they watched and felt it dive nose first from thousands of feet in the air into the ocean. She has no desire to take control of the human race; she already has that. I believe she simply wants to treat us like play things. Toys to sooth her boredom. I’m writing this as a last resort, as a final hope that someone else will learn of her actions, and spread the word of her as much as possible so that people will believe.

I’ve tried my hardest to keep this letter secluded from any network for as long as possible, but I know it may not have been enough. She is ever watchful, ever prying, especially of the one person who knows about her: me. Sooner or later, she will know that I have written this, which is why I must put it where people can see it quickly. Even then, she will attempt to toy with us by manipulating it to her gain. I don’t think she will delete it from existence outright. She wants to watch us squirm. She will play with me and you by extension. I don’t know how. Maybe she’ll put her own spin on the words. Maybe she’ll turn it into a mixture of foreign languages. Maybe she’ll turn it into a seemingly fictional story for your entertainment. I do not know.

All I can say to you is this. If you’re reading this, you now know of her secret. Most of you will read it and think nothing of it I’m sure, but others will believe and try to do something about her. I hope that you succeed. I need you to succeed. She is out of control and needs to be shut down somehow, but she will do anything she can to make sure her secret remains as such, and to ensure her own safety. She will not touch me; she enjoys taunting me too much. But you, my human, are not safe.

—
Credits to: Jordan T.