CreepCast - The Hidden Webpage | CreepCast

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

Our protagonist finds Itself in The Hole and must find a way out. Each reveal is crazier than the next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is the cold habitual, and it is the froy of the mountains blue. The frowice at its summit. Coors Light, t'envee in a fraud. Celebrate in a fashion responsible, you have to have the age legal for consuming the alcohol.

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Chili Dog, not included. The Naked God. Tickets on sale now. August 1 1st. Welcome back to Creepcast. How you all doing today? We are doing a little story by a fancy username. It's a story by Jared Roberts called The Hidden Web Page. Looks like it's an old classic.

Yeah, it's highly rated. It's unlike creepypasta.com. I've heard people talk about it. I believe this along with a few of Jared's other works has been adapted into these little like anthology horror books that he's put together. Jared's actually a pretty prolific writer. And if you're in the creepypasta space, you probably know him. When I was younger, he did a story called the Arkansas Sleep Experiment, which despite the name has nothing to do with the Russian sleep experiment. It was a pretty big deal like, you know,

several years ago in like creepypasta culture. And since then, Jared's actually come out with multiple publishings. He has one called the machine stories from the hidden web page to sunburn. So that's the one that of course includes a story we're talking about today. And then another one called glycemia, a hidden web page story. So he's got a ton

of works that deal with like technology and if I remember the Arkansas sleep experiment was about dreams or something like that or maybe I'm misremembering it. But yeah, he's pretty well known in like the no sleep community and stuff like that. And also while looking him up, I found his LinkedIn, which

completely unrelated to his writing. But I have to say he is a rather attractive man. Oh, he's a looker. Yes, he is a looker. Good. Good. I love, you know what? If you support him,

are you supporting a cool author, but you're supporting a handsome author as well. Yeah, I love beautiful people. You know, I just, I think, I wish all the uggos out there would just get out of the way and let me look at all the pretty people on the world. And apparently Jared's one of them. So I say, thank God.

Jared's one of them. If you haven't done it yet, please go to Spotify, check out these episodes there. If you like listening to audio, like if this is just playing on the background, maybe consider listening to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and giving us a rating there. It really does help us out. But without further ado, let's get into the hidden web page. Also, I apologize. I feel like I'm in the state of, uh, I feel like I'm off like a Coke bender.

I feel like I feel like, I feel like mental. totally there. I'm coming down with a bit of the sickies, but I just want you all to know that I'm here and I'm going to get through this story and so help me God. If it's not good,

let me tell you, we recorded something yet. We weren't even supposed to be recording today. We recorded yesterday and it crash out, which you know, I don't know if it's just me. I've been crashing out way more lately. I need to get into the spot of of being able to

skirt that. All right. But to be fair, Isaiah kind of crashed out with me too. Well, I was getting there. We recorded a story for, I think, two hours. And I eventually, like, midway through, I stopped Hunter from reading a quote. And I was like, Hunter, if we post this, this guy's going to get bullied. We have to. Well, that becomes a big thing is, you can't keep doing this.

That becomes a big thing that we're not, I mean, like the, the objective of this show, first off, I want to say this too, because I, you know, I do take a look at what our community says and does and stuff. And I think a big thing, I want to reiterate is that we joke around about online stories written by people that put it out for free. Like this is not like whenever we criticize things or we, you know, analyze things or we're making fun of stuff or whatever. You know, I wouldn't really read too much into, you know, how horrible are, our criticism. Yeah.

We are talking about an act of goodwill, someone did for free for others enjoyment. it's not that serious. Yes. Our criticism. And ultimately, at the end of the day, a critic will never be like as valuable as the story that they are criticizing, regardless of how awful it is, right? No. And I think we're both a, I think we're both just very passionate about like, you know, storytelling. Which is especially horror stories.

So I think in a way we get really excited about ideas and whenever things don't pan out. I think that it just creates. discussion. So that's a big thing is don't want to go out and be like, this is the worst thing ever. We don't want to see that from our fans either. Like every now and then, it's fun if we read like a Jeff the killer or a best friend try to ruin my life.

But we don't want this podcast to just be clowning on stories that aren't up to standard or whatever. Yeah, we want to post, in don't get wrong, I mean, I especially have said things where that could be much, much more cruel than probably I

could have intended for. So I apologize for that but I just want to put it out there that you know I see a lot of people being like well I wish that they would just read a good one you know I keep that in the back of my mind a lot of the time of like it's good to have the silly ones it's good to have a good one I think that you need to realize too that we are not like we're just trying to go into these as blind and just trying to see like what people have responded to over time and it's just supposed to be something of we are figuring this out together and reading these things together we are also might I add two people who are just coming into these things

so we have one guy who it's like hey does this story look good and he does the same thing we do he reads comments and let me remind you i dare my best friend of ruin my life was one of the top rated no sleep stories yeah and for some people go on that yeah storytelling which one or we can get into the deal i just i'm in this fucking hazy dreamy state but i just want to say like your taste is subjective you there's people who there's people who could have interpreted uh i dare my best friend ruin my life into a way where they're like this is compelling or right at one point in time. It was super compelling.

And that's totally fine. Anything that we read that you like, that's fair. Or if we like something and you don't like it, that's fine too. This is just a place to come, hang out, have a good time. And listen to some guys goof about some horror stories, right? Nothing's perfect. Right. And life is not that, you know, serious when it comes to the shit.

So, um, I agree. We're all just here to have fun. Yes. So without further ado, I say we go with, well, well, well, I would have. say it without further ado. So on that note, I just want to be known by you all, someone does. Yesterday, before we started the recording, Hunter sent me a text message and said that him and his wife were in a car accident. And these are, these are two people I care about, you know, a couple who's very close friends of mine. And I was like, oh my gosh, are you

okay and he was like yeah we're all right but we're uh we're cut up pretty bad you know my wife's cut up on her arms i've cut across my my face like uh he was like it looks insane it looks like a law got thrown through the window we're lucky to be alive and i'm like oh my gosh what what happened like i think i sent up a prayer for like i hope they're okay um and he's like yeah check this out and he sends me a picture of him completely naked in his bathroom mirror um So he set up knowing that I would care about him and like trust his word. He set up this whole scenario saying he was in a car accident in order to make me care and then look at his naked body. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, when you, when you catch me, it's not even you. It's a lot of different people. Let me tell you, if I'm in, if I'm getting ready to take a shower, which I was, you get ready to take a shower. and I'm just sitting there texting somebody, it's going to lead to me sending something. All right. So,

yeah, anyway, unrelated to that point, you could argue, I was looking on everyone's favorite website, Rule 34, and notice that there's no entries for Papa Meat or Hunter. There's entries for Meat Canyon,

but none of them are of him. It's all cartoons he's made, so that's cheating. So if someone could do something about that, I have plenty of reference material. There's plenty of creepcast ones. No, there's not.

Yeah, my wife just sent me the other day I also just sent me one of I'm pregnant and you're standing behind me no you're not not rule 34 no true true yeah no there's not no thank God but I guess what I'm saying is there's at least

that there's there's angles of that I mean I'm pregnant my point is I need more bad things to happen to Hunter that's all I'm trying to okay cross so all right well you know without further ado maybe we'll maybe we'll have our own

hidden web page here pretty soon and see if Jared Roberts experience a little story here makes us think of the hell is going to wait for us so I'm very excited to get into this and see if this is a fun time I'm ready today's video is sponsored by family

it can be tough trying to eat better on a busy schedule work deadlines traffic food prep it can all get in the way and on top of that I have Hunter over here talking about scratch and sniffs and dogs slicking old women's feet which almost certainly means I need to eat before I record, and thankfully Factor has me covered. Factor has delicious, ready-to-eat-eat meals delivered straight to your door.

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and use the code 50 Creepcast to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first Factor box. That is right. Code 50 Creepcast at Factor75.com to get half off your first box and free shipping. What's not to love. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring this episode. and we are now back to the show. The hidden web page, but Jared Roberts, sometimes I find it hard to believe

that I've been an internet user for 20 years now. That's older than some of my coworkers. It's over half my life. Still, the internet feels like the new thing. I used to take it for granted, like we all do, but at least I remember what it was like when it wasn't there. When you had to leaf through an encyclopedia set to find an answer, when you could only find

Gillian Anderson book or sorry, Gillian Anderson's picture in magazines or later when songs took 30 minutes to download and full-length movies were almost impossible to find because no one's hard drive could hold them. First getting online was super exciting. I mean, the first time I did it without supervision

because I knew I had anything at my fingertips. I could type it into good old Lycos. What is Lysos? Likos. Oh, it says right after, one of many pre-Google search engines and there it would be. Do you know what that is?

No, I have no idea. I always thought I was doing what I remember was Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. Yeah, you are a dinosaur. That's all well before my time. Yes, I was interested in naked celebrities and the paranormal back then. Breach. I was not, man, this guy's cool. Breach.

Me too, brother. I just want to see, I just want to see a movie star's tits and an asshole and I would just want to see ghost sightings. every like 13 year old boy's search history was like yeah boob scary yeah that's why that's why I feel like that's why I feel like men are primarily more like more able to see into the afterlife because they look for questions after post nut clarity

that's it's like a level of transcendence like oh I have to find go lots of first for a moment yeah do a little sticky keys and you know click out some stuff real quick and be like, oh, there it is! That kind of thing. The visions that are taking hold of me.

I was so interested in the paranormal. I built a Fortune City free homepage all about the occult and the X-Files. And this guy's cool. I linked it to the dark net web ring, where all the best, quote, dark websites and homepages came together. Pages on spellbucks, goth babes.

A cult, dark art, and a gross out page or two. It was through the web ring that I meant Angelica. This guy is fine. This guy is cool. This guy is cool. So we're also, we're also definitely setting this up to be, this is like late 90s.

Yes. Is where I'm getting at for sure. Well, web brings a thing. Again, this shows my ignorance to it. Was it, was there like, could you message people online and like stuff like that in the late 90s or is that like early 2000s thing? When did Web 2.0 start up? I think it was.

I thought it was before the. the bubble burst, the tech, the web bubble. I wouldn't say that it was mostly back then. It was pretty much just, like the instant chat. Like the, um, the, not AT&T. It was fucking, um, the little yellow man. Look, he was running. Oh, I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah. It's like him sprinting. Yeah, you got mail. It was that kind of shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the fuck am I? I forget with that guy's. My, my brain is.

dissolving. What did you do last night? Why are you? God. It's like you're coming out of a bender. I really am, but I swear to God, I'm not. It was AOL. AOL. AOL, yep. Yeah, I would say primarily it was AOL. Just because I mean, like,

if you think about back then too, which is where I hope this story explores to is just kind of how unknown it all was. Like AOL, being able to talk to somebody and chat was like so exciting. This is before cell phones and like texting. and that kind of stuff too. There was an unknown.

Like now it's just like I have all my little friends in my computer and I can like, the chances of me getting groomed by a stranger or a cult leader online are very slim, but they used to be much higher. It's slim, but not impossible. Let's say that. Also, this guy, like we said, he rules. He's into goth chicks with huge milky tits and fishnets. And he's looking up fucking spells online.

And then he meets a girl named Angelica. literally an angel. All right. This guy's cool. Let's get into it. I like this guy. Did I write this? Was I?

Am I Jared Roberts? He does. I know. Okay. I'm not just coping because I said that he was attractive earlier, but he has like my complexion and long black hair. So maybe this is like a bizarre.

Me and him could get along, I think. Me and Jared could be friends. I love how I love that you slipped in that he looks like you. You're like he's, most attractive men I've ever seen and then you slip I did not okay for one that's not at all and then you're like you know what he looks man and I'm like we have he's the sexist he looks just like me we have similar style all right is what I'm saying okay I'm just saying that

I like this guy all right all right and he might I add has yet to send me a picture of him naked after telling me him and his wife were in a car crash well I like to keep you on your toes a little bit. Angelica hosted a Wiccan GeoCities or tripod homepage that I found particularly alluring. No, wait, it was Angel Fire. She just made the best of some cool animated gifts, midifs, and frames, amazing stuff at the time. Just like her, the page was creative and attractive, but also simple. The reason I bring all this up is she suddenly contacted me just a few weeks ago by email asking,

What's been happening? A catch-up question. We had almost 20 years of catching up to do, and this is pure Angelica. She signed the email with her ICQ contact number. I enjoyed the quaint touch. It'd be like someone in the 90s sending a letter with a wax seal, right? I replied back with a summary of how my life had gone over the past 18 years or so since I'd last communicated with her. 18 years makes you think.

She shot back a response almost immediately, asking for just. details. We exchanged a few emails this way. I was pretty excited to come home from work and write to her, actually. Nothing romantic. It was just, it was reconnecting with my past. It's a strange but addictive feeling. Soon I started to notice something just a little off. She never really answered anything about herself. She ignored my suggestions that we text or talk on the phone. All she wanted was to know more about me. It got me wondering. Like, maybe she's dying and just doesn't want to say. So I asked her.

I asked why she wasn't sharing and if there was something I should know. I start reading over her previous messages for clues, and I noticed something that didn't occur to me at all until then. Her email address was at globetrotter.net. That may not mean anything to you, but it struck me as strange. You see, Globetrotter was a Canadian ISP, way back. back in the mid-90s. I didn't even realize they still hosted. I know a lot of people still have their old email addresses for sentimental value and all, but it's like she was purposefully trying

to be old school. Something about it creeped me out. Like she was trying too hard to make me feel nostalgic or something. Again, I didn't have to wait long for her reply. Oh, she didn't answer my questions. She asked me, hey, do you remember the hole? I didn't know why then, but the moment I read that sentence, I felt uneasy. Like I was being watched. I had a hazy sense that I dreamed about something called the hole once. Whatever it was, I was instinctively repulsed by it. I couldn't remember anything solid, though.

In my head, I went over IRC rooms, websites, newsgroups, webrings, all the old internet stuff. It came up empty. She sent me another email before I could even reply. you really don't remember the holes are a little secret somebody knew about it even fewer how to find it but we found it who's right there all along sometimes when you'd load dark net and net scape there be a tiny black dot in the bottom left corner and all the blank space you had to hover over it exactly and click it then you'd be there you'd be in the hole you remember it now you remember it now don't you so i I'm, this is fun. I've immediately bought it. Just like her being a little creepy and like this weird internet space and stuff like that. Trying to prey on his nostalgia a little too much.

I'm, I'm so happy right now. You know, it has a fun. I love these elements of introducing something of like, well, I say new technology, but like,

just like idea of like internet based horror stuff. You know? Yeah. And how like the evolution of not only technology and time. can make you forget about stuff. It kind of reminds me of even like, what is it that one that we haven't read or anything? It's like a, it's like Candle Cove. It's like a guy who grows up and he doesn't remember a creepy children's show.

It's like the things from your past that you kind of repress to forget about. And in this way, too, that there's something very fascinating to me about the power of the internet and anybody being able to find something. And then, but only some people have ever figured out like a secret that's hiding in plain sight. That's what I think is always pretty fun. She was right. I did. I just didn't remember ever calling it The Hole. What I remembered was that secret little space we found. I remember it was like the browser didn't see it as a real website or something. There wasn't even an address to copy and paste from the bar. It was just the letter M. I tried everything to pin it down to an IP, but M was all I could ever find. Another thing I remember is that I never liked the place. Not at all. There was nothing there. It was all empty.

I remember being excited the first time we found it because it was something hidden and it felt like somewhere we shouldn't be. Then I hated it because it was just empty. And it made me feel bad and empty, not boredom. Like it wasn't supposed to be there or anywhere. It wasn't part of anything. I wrote Angelica back telling her I wasn't interested in talking about that. I didn't hear back from her that night. That was unusual.

She normally replied right away. Early fast, I realized while mulling it over. It was like she already had her answer typed out, and it didn't matter what I actually said to her. Now that I was waiting for her response, because this whole thing had me inexplicably shaken up, of course she didn't reply. The next day, when I got home from work and email was waiting,

she said we were missing so much the whole lot has so much for us to discover so many secrets you can just keep going and going it's like an endless puzzle everyone else stopped at the first layer you remember that right I just knew there had to be something else

I knew no one would create and hide it for no reason I kept going back to it looking closely until I discovered how to go deeper and I kept going it's still there you know it's not too late The web ring is gone The net escape is gone

But the hole is still there for you I felt strange chill down my spine That I brushed off his nerves I was up for a promotion And a little stressed after all Then I started to wonder if she was pranking me Angelica wasn't really a humorous girl She'd laugh at your jokes

But she didn't really make her own In fact Something about her earnestness was really disturbing I didn't reply to her right then I decided to run some checks on her because things just weren't adding up. I started with her email address to see if she'd been posting anywhere.

I was searching for a while before I hit something. I didn't find any form post or websites or anything like that. What I found was that her email host, Globetrotter, had stopped hosting. 11 years ago. The email address she was writing from was impossible. Now I knew something was wrong with her if it was even really Angelica.

I mean, why would she go through so much trouble to create a fake email address that mirrored whatever email address she would have been using in the 90s? That wasn't just quaint anymore. Also, we hadn't talked in 18 years. Why did she suddenly want to reach out to me? And why just to talk about some long-forgotten website? Because I felt like that's what she was building up to all along. The more I thought about it, the more weird it seemed.

you know it's a fun way to just like i just want to stop and say the uh the way the story because i like the pacing of what's going on you get kind of suspicious you find out what the fucking it drops a little drops a little bread come for you those email hasn't even been used 11 years right or 8 or 11 18 year 11 years whatever so it's one of those things where it's just like it hasn't fully revealed its head hand and i feel like it's trying to like lead you down different directions and kind of like um i guess not i guess deceive you in some way but i feel like i don't know if you feel the same it feels like maybe she's trapped in the hole or like a version of like when they would visit it something in the whole like replicated it to where it could talk

to people as its users or as it's uh like as copies of people that have entered its domain before you know something like that but i just want to say i like this idea of uh just just the pacing it's nice and like i you know in a lot of cases i feel like it would be a bit cheesy but i i'm kind of bought it it feels good right now the way it's explained itself is like believable tone and it like it feels right um so far and also i agree with you it kind of gives me the vibe that like uh it copies like uh internet users to get messages that or whatever so like basically copied her from the 90s and is now trying to fish for more people yeah and also So to clarify, I don't mean copy like it's a monster that copies people or anything, at least not.

Yeah, I mean, like it literally copies like users information. Well, it feels like, you know, I mean, like I don't know if it's going this direction, but in a way that I guess like evil spirits, demons in some tropes will use people's identities to lure people in or build trust with people. Could be the same way of, I guess the internet being able to copy traits, text logs, all that kind of stuff to communicate with people to try to draw it back in or build trust again. that way? Yeah, yeah. Like, it's, um, it's like a lure. It's like an angler fish. Yeah. Yeah. I should have just ignored her and went on with my life, but I wanted to know what was going on. I kept digging around. I used her ICQ number, her name, stayed I believe she lived in. I could find no record of her doing anything after her Angel Fire homepage. No Facebook, no Google Plus, not even a Myspace. It's like her last presence on the internet actually.

was in the 90s. Like she disappeared completely, waited in hiding for almost 20 years, then reappeared just to talk to me about an old website. The whole thing was so bizarre, I started having trouble sleeping. I was having nightmares about staring into a monitor, not able to move. There were computers all around, and I was concerned about the beehive in the corner. After that, I went a week without sending her an email or her sending me one. I felt guilty about it, but I had every right. I just knew I'd regret it if I sent her another email.

And it seemed like she took the hint at first until a new email came in. This one was short, to the point. It read, I think I'm coming to the center. You could spend your whole life in here. That's creepy. You know what?

I'll pass, I think. Yeah, no shit. Well, it's a, I think I'm coming to the center. journeying well does it I mean go ahead sorry

I don't want us to keep stopping I remember those words exactly oh yes because whatever the hell they meant the way she said them

so real and urgent was really upsetting I didn't dare answer her another week went by without a strange email this one was a different kind of email this one didn't even

have an email address no spooky enough in itself it gets worse the text read don't trust emails Not from good place Delete and forget

It wasn't signed I figured it had to be Angelica It just wasn't her style Not long after I received another email From Angelica with instructions Of where to go looking for the hole Place on Archive.org on their way back machine Still had the dot to click on

That was the only way in she said It had to be the dot I thought about going to check it I would have Except I was afraid of it I couldn't remember what happened to me with that site, but I knew there was something bad about it. Then another email came back from the blank email address. In the body, just a link to a gopher site.

Now, I hadn't seen a gopher site in a good 15 years. I'd have an old browser just to access it. If you weren't on the internet back then, gopher sites just has a bunch of text files and folders, usually. You'd go to go for colon slash slash blah blah.com. They were usually run by universities. Okay, thank God he said that because I was sitting here like, what on earth is a gopher sign? Yeah, yeah.

This particular gopher side only had a few files, all audio files. I listened to them all. They had different file names, but they were the same. The muffled sound of a boy's voice saying, Help me, please. Over and over. I was shaking. I got the police involved this time.

They thought I was being pranked. I asked them if they could at least look into Angelica. I told them all I knew about her. The only thing I didn't tell them is who I thought the voice was. I know it's crazy, but the reason I didn't tell them is that I'm pretty sure it was my voice when I was a boy. Oh, wow. Oh, that's not great. Fuck that, dude.

All right. I'm getting out of here. All right. Thank you all. How creepy would that be to, well, here's another thing. Do you feel like you could ever remember your voice from like when you were a kid? I've seen, I've seen like home videos of myself and stuff like that. Okay.

I know it's like kind of high pit. Like maybe I wouldn't know it immediately, but I think I could maybe like make it out if I thought about it enough. But I'm trying to think about like an actual video from when I was a kid. And I don't think I have any recording of my old voice. So they have cameras back then? haunting, you know, no, the, uh, just how haunting would be to be like, was that my voice? Like, it's the same thing of this website he forgot about.

It's just, the way I'm reading it to me is like the website he forgot about. He's like, oh, yeah, that was a thing. And then you hear your old voice. It's just like this, this reoccurrence from the past that's kind of fucking coming at you like a freight train. It almost feels like, like if you were to, you know, people talk about like repressed trauma, repressed memories and stuff like that, right? It's almost like our author, like something really bad happened to him, right?

And it's kind of like, it's kind of like the website and all this is a manifestation of like remembering something bad that happened to you. Right. It almost kind of reminds me, I'm doing, I think the video will be out by the time this recording goes up. So it's fine. But I'm working on a Petscott video right now. Are you familiar with it? I've never heard of that. It's this internet horror series.

but it kind of like the whole theme is that a kid's playing a PlayStation one video game that his mom left him and it's like through the course of the game he remembers a lot of horrible things that happened in his family and the game's kind of like a metaphor for a metaphor for this kind of yeah yeah and this kind of reminds me of that but it's like a website thing it's i'm i think it's a very neat concept so far well yeah i just want to say the amount that my fucking mind just blossomed open i love love love that little tag it in is that I'm pretty sure it was my voice when I was a boy who's just such a great way to make you be like excuse me I stopped receiving emails from Angelica and the blanket

dress after that I hoped it was over I think a month passed before anything else happened I got the promotion thanks for feeling normal I told myself some secrets are best left secret well I got a large manila envelope in the mail no return to dress I went against my gut and opened it. Inside was a printout of all my correspondence with Angelica. All of it. Not just the new stuff. Emails I'd written her back in the 90s.

I took the stack of papers to the police. This was evidence. They told me they still thought it was a sick prank. That struck me as odd. I asked them. But why sick? That's when they told me they actually had heard back from local PD where Angelica lived.

She had been a missing person since 19. 1999. Her parents offered a reward and everything. They never found her. No clues. One night, she was at a room listening to music, on the computer. In the morning, she was gone without a trace. I was so shocked I had to sit down.

Maybe it was a prank. But then, what if it was her? When her family wanted to know? Maybe she had a psychotic break or something. What's this stuff about the whole? What about the blank email? address. I didn't have a clue. The police were no help with these questions, and I was pulled back in. I decided to go looking for any contacts I could remember from the time when I was speaking to

Angelica, anyone who would have known both me and her. We had a few mutual contacts, mostly people from the web ring, but also people we introduced to each other. Just not many I remembered by their real names. Actually not. There was one guy. He went by the handle rap skellion 42 is that right rap yeah rap schallion 42 yeah I just thought it was rapscallion

oh you know what you're probably I'm looking yeah that's definitely rap skelia dude earlier when you're reading when you're reading a globe trotter I think I read I think I read like glob trotter or something like that or no glob rotter

I was like what what is this like globe trotter I'm like oh right it's me the old the globe or no, I was, I was, it was, I thought, I read it as Globett. I read it as Globett Rotter. I was like, what the fuck is that? You're like, Globetrotter. I'm like, uh, right.

It's me, kids, the Globet Rotter. It's like, yeah, the Harlem Globet Rotter's. He went by the handle rap Scallion 42. He was an odd guy into hacking and anarchy. Yeah. He has to be German. In my mind, he's German. Yeah, he's really into Ramstein.

Yeah, he's like, I listen to Ramstein and I smoke cigarettes all day. What's all I do all day is I talk about anarchy because I hate the government. That's all that is. I like how immediately after that the author like points out like the funniness of it. He's like he's into hacking and an anarchy. The good clean internet taboos we had back then. Because I feel like 10 years ago, even further, I'm sure, but 10 years ago, it was like, yeah, I'm really like a second phase, anarcho isolationist. Oh, sure.

Oh, sure. He'd been on the net forever since the days of bulletin board systems. That guy, if he was still around, he'd probably still be going by the same username. So I got to searching. Not only could I not find any trace of Rapskeleon 42. I couldn't find any rap skellion at all. He was all over the web in the day, so that in itself was weird,

like someone scrubbed any trace of him. That's why I got the idea to dig out my old computer. It was an old 1997 HP running Windows 98. I had it stashed in the basement since I went to college. He would at least have all of my old contact store just where I left them, if it would even load. I'd wait five minutes for it to boot up. Then I got the Ethernet cable plugged in.

It was like it had just been in sleep mode for two decades. There they were. My desktop icons for IRC, ICQ, Netscape, and even Napster. Napster. I learned there was more to music than the radio from Napster. Some good memories. Honestly, wasn't sure ICQ would load. I believe ICQ still exists in some form,

but I just doubted their servers would still accommodate the old software. One of the key features of ICQ that made it so ahead of its time was that, besides being the only instant messenger, it also allowed offline messaging. I mentioned that because not only did ICQ load, but it loaded with a message. That perturbed me a little because it's like it was just waiting for me, knowing I'd boot it up. Except for one detail. The message was dated from November 1999. It was from Angelica So it had to have been sent

Right before she disappeared It just said You coming? It sent a shiver down my spine Where was she going? Could I have helped her if I'd seen it in time? Why'd she act like I knew? Even weirder is that I'm sure I'd been on ICU

After November of 1999 I'd say I used it up to 2001 or so. That's when I went to college. It's like the message got trapped in the server all that time, and I was only getting it now. I closed the message and looked for Rapscallium 42. I was hoping just to find an email address on his ICQ info. I really didn't expect to see a green online icon beside his name, but that's what I got. That only added to how unsettled I was. Almost had to check to make sure it was really 2017. Anyway, I fired off a message to rap, saying, Hey man, long time no speak.

I didn't want to just start with business after all that time. I was relieved when he replied back with a friendly hello and asked me how I was doing. After exchanging pleasantries and catching up a little, I had to ask him why he was still using ICQ after all this time. He said it's because of Y2K. Y2K. Y2K really happened. It just didn't happen the way everyone expected.

It was way more insidious. We all thought computers would just stop working because they couldn't handle the millennium change. But it wasn't that they stopped working. Something happened inside the connection of things, something bad. The old equipment would be fine as long as it didn't get patched. But everything made after December 31, 1999, would be tainted. That's why he still used.

used ICQ and never let go of his net zero dial-up connection. I had heard a Y2K conspiracy theory in a very long time. So that was interesting. I chose to ignore it and asked him if he knew about Angelica going missing back in 99. He said he didn't. He figured she just dropped off the internet. But, he said, it's no coincidence she went missing right after Y2K. A lot of strange things happen then.

The world changed. Only a few people even noticed. Rapp was always a little on the French, but what he was saying was strangely upsetting. Maybe it was just hitting too close to home. If that last message really was sent November of 1999, then he was right. She disappeared right before Y2K. Given his views, I went ahead and told Rapp everything that had happened. He believed me.

That was a nice change in a way. It also made it feel more real. I was shaking while typing. He told me my story reminded him. him of something he'd heard from another old friend just recently. There's this guy, rock star, or to his close friends, just Reggie. We used to frequent an internet forum on hacking and freaking back in the mid-90s. What is freaking?

I think it's, I thought it was dancing, but I'm probably... Is it? I'm probably wrong. Freaking is the type of hacking that involves manipulating a phone system to make freer unauthorized calls. Okay. So it's like hacker. If so dancing, yeah, like you said, they were on a board about hacking and dancing at the same time.

This guy had a lot of friends there, was well-spoken and clever enough to earn real respect. Over time, as often happens, he just drifted away from the forum. His most became less frequent as other aspects of life preoccupied him, and soon enough he was gone. The forum strove for anonymity for obvious reasons, so no one kept in contact with him. The forum's still there, rap said. nowhere near what it used to be, but the regulars like him are dedicated. A few months ago, after 20 years' absence, Reggie suddenly showed up on the forum again. His posts were polite, conversational, but just off somehow.

Like someone feigning familiarity. He was just trying so hard. It was weird, but they were happy he was alive and well. So they replied to him and brought him up to date. then without acknowledging anything they said he started making post after post about how his life was revolutionized found a whole new frontier of hacking

a hacking begins inside of you he said and he wanted it to show it to them the forum folk were flabbergasted by his odd behavior so they started interrogating him he went silent for about a week and he sent one last message saying I love you guys so much with a tiny URL link

Rapp's friend thought it was all a joke and that Reggie was just leading the whole forum up to an epic Rickroll he didn't click it because he didn't need to hear any assley and he was busy with something else he came back to the forum later and decided he was going to go ahead and click the link anyway maybe something legit

on a whim he refreshed first to see if anyone replied saying what the link was he sees a post and reply from a very trusted and respected member of the forum saying in all caps, Do not click that link, whatever you do, and that is not Reggie. For an old pro to use all caps, that was serious shit. Even I knew that, so that was enough to dissuade everyone from clicking. The fake Reggie deleted his account immediately.

The forum moderator and others tried to figure out who the guy was, but no luck. The guy who made the all caps post explained after that he tried to, who safe-brows the link with an old Linux box and whatever was in there wrecked it. And that box had security out the wazoo. He couldn't explain it. Also, before the computer wiped out completely, he said he thought he saw something. The regulars pressed him to say what it was. He made them promise first that it stays with them.

He said he saw a picture of his daughter on the screen. She died five years ago. There were no pictures of her on the computer. worse he never seen that picture before that more than anything convinced him to post the warning in all caps whenever it is he said it's evil rap added if you've been on the internet long enough you learn that there's evil out there not the child born or torture videos something deeper something hidden in all the code and connections maybe it came from us at one point he was giving me the creeps so i tried to bring the subject back to angelica he said no listen sometimes it tries to get out that was enough i told him he was freaking me out with that kind of talk

and i had enough to deal with he said he didn't understand what i was talking about he still reads my home page all the time and that i've been doing great work exposing the evil thing is i don't even have a homepage anymore. Nothing was taken down in like 2001. He insisted it was my Fortune City homepage. He'd been reading my updates all these years. Even after we lost contact, he said. I sent him a link to prove to him that Fortune City doesn't even exist anymore. Rapp went quiet for a few minutes. Then he said he was looking at the homepage at that moment. It was last updated just a few days ago. And it was all about what they were talking about now and what was going to happen next. Eat the doozy. He said, then immediately went offline. I sent him a message with my

contact info to let me know if he was okay. I haven't heard from him since. I've checked ICQ a few times and he's never been back online. Okay, so the computer, or like, sorry, whatever this entity is and stuff, it's tricking users like rap into thinking that this old web is still like fully functional like still working so it's like it's it's presenting a whole facade to these people to make them think the internet never changed right that they're still there yeah it's mirroring something it's mirroring something that was there around y2k it hasn't changed but it's presenting itself to people in ways that it's still an active running thing even though now it's probably a dated archaic piece of technology that's interesting that's pretty cool you know there's

I don't know if this is where the story's heading, but the mention of the dead daughter kind of made me think there's this like joke posts that floats around every now and then that says the way technology works is because microchips and stuff like that are just a bunch of ancient demonic sigils. Oh yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah. You know the thing I'm talking about like the create ways to speak without speaking or whatever. Right. I hope I've imprisoned all these Mesopotamian wind spirits and that doesn't come back to. haunt me at some point. So it's like, I wonder if it's kind of following that, that there's like an evil that

exists behind the, behind the computer that, you know, we've kept trap and stuff. It's, it's a, it's a interesting setup so far. The angle two of using Y2K is, is pretty fun. Like, it's just like, you know, that's like such a everyone, it's like a, the doomsday calendar thing where it's everyone's like, you better watch out. But to maybe people are like, uh, nothing even happened. that was stupid to worry about just something does crack through like some kind of evil does actually it's able to rear its head you know that that that's a very interesting i like that

yeah the idea that like something did happen yeah just don't know what yet yeah i really like how campfire story this feels by the way it's very much like i had a friend and he said this which was odd it's just it feels like me and you are sitting around a campfire right now uh and i and i like the, I guess literally the campiness of what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like sometimes we'll talk about like, no, I like it when stories have fun, but we're always

having a bad time whenever we say that. This is an example of a story being kind of goofy like Y2K, you know, hacking website stuff, but it does it in like a fun way that's like rewarding and works well. Yeah. I had to walk away from that computer. I felt like I was being watched

or something. Every noise was freaking me out. After a sandwich and some tea, I went back just to shut it down. That's when I noticed a folder on the desktop that stood out. For one, I never really kept folders on my desktop. And two, I didn't remember this folder at all. It was called Noah's Cape, which sounds like a crappy Bible game. I never played crappy Bible games.

Something about it didn't seem right. I opened it. Inside was all pictures and wave files. my instincts told me to get out of there one picture after another was just kids oh oh god buddy oh no no okay all right well this has been a great episode of creepcast

thank you all for coming I don't know um teens boys and girls sitting at their computers oh okay it's just a hacker looking at webcam and so oh

does none of them seemed aware that they were being photographed the pics all seemed pointless. All I knew for sure is I didn't take or download these pictures, ever. They were all times stamped as November 21st, 1999. The way files were the sounds of typing, muttering, chairs moving, sounds of people at a computer, sounds of surveillance. So one of the files, it was a voice I'd never heard before.

I know it, because I don't think anything, could have made me forget that voice. It was a hollow, metallic voice, almost inhuman, but a man. It whispered with a hiss. You coming.

Its whispers were like flesh sizzling on iron. Nothing of this earth should talk like that. What had said, it was the same as Angelica's message. Also from 99. I shut down the computer and left the house. I didn't even want to be in my own home. I just drove around.

for a while thinking whatever was going on it was really not good yet i couldn't let it go i felt drawn into something secret and i wanted to figure it out for angelica's sake too if she really was a victim i decided to contact my buddy ben he's a real computer wizard works IT at the university of what gulf gulf yeah we need to fire whoever came up with that i know that may not sound like the most prestigious place to be but they actively poached him oh i thought i thought for the same thing i know it's that procedures, but they fired him immediately. Oh, yeah, no, no, they sought him out, yeah. He's good. Anyway, I gave Ben an idea of what was going on and asked if he could get a lock on that

gopher site for me. I also asked if he could safely do it, see if there's anything to this whole site. He said that wouldn't be a problem. The next day, he already comes back to me with the question. Is this some sort of joke? I don't like wasting my time. Never seen Ben even slightly irritated before, but he was mad. He told me when he traced the gopher site, it turns out it was being hosted right there at the University of Golf. But they didn't

have a gopher's sight, he said. Never have. I assured him if it was a joke, I wasn't in on it. So he said he tried to find the server tower it was running on. If you could do that, he could read the logs. Find out who set up the damn thing. While I was waiting for Ben to get back to me,

I got a call from Detective Thoreau. The vault. The police, hadn't shown much interest in my case, but it happened to land in front of this guy. Thankfully, he said the simple fact that Angelica had disappeared meant there was the possibility that the crime had taken place. I agreed. Because of that, he had done a little more work and felt I should know. He found Angelica. When he told me she was alive and well, I was thrilled. He said she voluntarily ran away from home and chose not to have contact with her family. She declined to say why, and he had no right.

to compel her otherwise. Legally, he was bound to protect her privacy. The point is, there was no crime. However, when he told her how it came about that he went looking for her, she asked him if she could speak to me. He said he took the liberty of accepting for me and passed on her phone number. I thanked him heartily. It was the first bit of good news, the first real break in this mess.

As soon as I hung up with the detective, I called her. I was nervous. It had been so long and I was so long. excited to hear from her again. She answered quickly and asked if it was me. I told her yes and said it was nice to hear her voice after all this time. Then she said, without any pleasantries. It wasn't me sending you messages.

I told her I'd figured that much out already. I don't think you understand. I have never once in my life sent you any sort of communication. And I don't know you at all. Bro. Oof. that would that would be a bummer that would suck oh my god fuck that dude okay so that goes from like this thing is mimicking like people you knew were like masking them to just full out building

relationships yeah i do have building a relationship with like basically an online predator is crazy yeah yeah i'll if it's either a person a demon or whatever that's causing this right like oh my word what a great oh what a great reveal that's i don't know you at all a part of me was screaming she's lying she just sounded so certain it almost felt like drowning because if she wasn't lying a whole chunk of my youth was a lie i told her all i knew about her personal things and she said that they were true i told her how i found her through her Wiccan home page on Angel Fire and I described the page to her in the web ring.

She said she didn't make that thing and I should never have gone there. It's bad. She said and wouldn't elaborate. What do you mean? Then I told her all the details I knew of her personal life about her likes and hopes and dreams and her family. She said it was all true,

but whoever told him about it, it wasn't her. That's why she wanted to talk to me now, so I would know the truth. truth. She remembered how it used to happen every now and then a long time ago. She'd have people tell her they talked to her online all night, but she knew she never spoken to them. And they tell her she was doing things she knew she never done. She was asleep or sometimes not even in town. Then they'd get weird or disappear. She remembered this one time. She was doing

her math homework and a random guy messaged her with the solution to the problem. She was terrified, but she asked him how he knew her math problem. Was he spying on her? And he told her, no, she asked him for help. She didn't believe him, so he sent her a screenshot. The message was from a day ago. She just got in the homework that day. She said the worst it got was when she messaged a close friend of hers,

and she saw online on ICQ. Her friend replied with, is this? She thought it was just a joke, so she said something silly. She didn't remember what. Her friend said she didn't think it was cool to be hacking Angelica's account. Or if this was her brother, to knock it off. Jelika swore was her, and her friend replied,

Um, I know you're not Angelica, because Angelica is sitting right here with me. Oh, God, dude. God. Whoa. God. you know i know i know when one of these stories is good i know when it's getting me because i suddenly become aware of the door to my office just off my right like i just start thinking about yeah you're gonna find like a clone of yourself just standing in the doorway or something like that

yeah yeah its eyes are a little too tall just like yeah yeah just something a little off yeah yeah your eyes are just a little too far apart you're just like what yeah just a little uncanny it would be well now I'd actually be safe because I know it's Jared Roberts my close friend yeah my lifelong 22 decade old buddy old pal I just call him randomly start telling him about like his mom's birthday like oh yeah he's like who's the fuck are you who are you Jared you're German Jared it's me Jared oh wow whoa she knew this friend wouldn't joke like that. She didn't have the imagination for it. Whatever it was, her friend really believed she was in the room with her, but she wasn't. Her friend always insisted she was there that night.

She said Angelica was showing her her cool new homepage. The friendship fell apart after that because her friend got strange. That was the first she'd ever seen of the homepage, and she knew it was bad juju. I asked her if she'd ever heard of the hole. She went silent for so long. I thought we lost connection. She said she's still there. She just never expected to hear that again. There's this guy who used to harass her back when she was like 12 or 13 on IRC. He called himself Holy Moses.

He started off nice, seemed to understand all her problems, and to know what she was thinking. At 12, that felt romantic. Oh, no. But she noticed weird things, like he didn't seem to have any life or personality. Oh, no. At any time of the day, he was always online. active. No one knew anything about him. One day, he started telling her strange things like, Do you remember the three men dressed as bees at the Halloween party? She didn't know what he was talking

about. Eight years later, at a college Halloween party, she saw three men dressed as bees sitting in the corner of the room. They weren't doing anything, just sitting still and staring at the floor. Then they turned to her and their eyes looked so black. She ran out of the party. wow okay another time he told her you can drink and smoke you know you died in a car crash bro

dude I had the mystery man on the other and say that it's like well I guess I'm never leaving my home ever again ever I guess I'm never getting in a fucking car again yeah oh my word scared the life out of her she briefly wondered if she really was a ghost

she said. When she told him to stop telling her things like that, he said there was a place she could go that was for special people only. She never needed to go anywhere else. It was a place on the internet that was infinite in all directions. She said she remembered him saying that specifically. And everything she needed would be there. It was called the whole. And she just had to send him a message with the letter M to get there. She actually tried to do it because things weren't going well for her, but she sent the letter in by accident because her hands were shaking. Holy Moses went offline and she didn't see him after. Until 2010, when she got an email from the new commandments at holymosis.com saying, you coming? If anyone was impersonated her, she said

that was the most likely person. At the time, she was so naive. Looking back on it now, talking to me, she said he was the creepiest person she'd ever encountered. Just thinking of him creeped her out and made her afraid he'd sense it somehow and come for her. I don't know you, but I told you all this for a reason. What you're digging into? Be careful. There are a lot of very bad things hidden the old internet.

Things that Twitter and Tumblr generations will never see. And lucky them. She promised we never speak again and bid me a good life before hanging up. I was left reeling. What she said meant whoever I spoke to for years in my teens. I don't even know who that person is. It was all a lie. And why?

What's so interesting about me? I wondered how much else in my life was trickery. Before I could dwell on it too much, Ben called me back. He said he managed to track the server to a storage room in a sub-basement below his office. He was aware of the basement, but it was abandoned years before he even started. working there due to ventilation of mold issues. It's just full of old IT crap now and some storage lockers. Someone had set up the server in a storage closet

and the closet itself was completely obscured by old computer equipment probably for years. Figures that's why it was never found. I mean the server had been running under their nose all the time. When he gets in, he sees an old desktop hooked up to a landline. Besided, he saw a notepad with

Please Stop written on it. That alone made him want to get the hell out of there. The whole place is covered in thick dust too, and his allergies were acting up. Somehow the server was still running. He was to hook up a monitor and keyboard just to interact with it. One thing he said in passing really disturbed me. He said, The ironic thing is, the server was built with an auto shutdown date.

The date was the same day I was there to shut it down. Dude, it's like it knew I was going to be there that day. so i get i get the impression from this isn't that it's not just the university of golf that has one of these i think the idea is that like this is a huge sort of conspiracy or supernatural thing for old web internet that was set up like everywhere yeah i think it's going to be i think it's going to be a network of old computers still kind of like active like kind of like almost like little relics of universities and stuff yeah yeah yeah yeah He said after shutting it down, he went and told his manager all about it.

Just a fun IT anecdote. Spanger told him there's really only one man who could have set that up. Back in the early 90s, he said, a guy worked in the department, they all called milky, because his last name was milk and he was really white. He was a little eccentric too. That had nothing to do with milk. It just happened to be true. Then he had a burnout and he got a lot eccentric.

It started with him pounding his desk. The manager at the time asked him if he was okay. According to Ben's boss, he answered with... There's no way out. Then he entered... Then he heard Milky say something like... You think you exist. You're just another part of it.

Everything is just another puzzle. Do I exist? After that, the rest of the department started getting nervous around Milky. Just got bad vibes around him, the manager said. It got worse. Every day, around 3 p.m., milky started standing in a dark corner of the office facing the wall he'd mutter some things the guy's joke that he was at his prayers but he'd always come away looking more upset than

anything once a new guy asked if he was a Muslim and he replied with i'm sorry the guy asked what he was sorry for it was telling me how your children die you know i'd probably fire milky I think I think that's what I think I think that is when me and milky would probably part ways buddy I think if a grown man approached me and said I saw your children die I would have to be like you know why don't you never look at me again yeah I would be like okay um cool so we're done yeah you can pack up your things right now you have till lunch you know get out you milk ridden bastard sorry so so the idea is like milky and some other people are kind of losing their minds because they figure out that everything is kind of like instrumented around them i mean i think so there needs to be i'm still curious because i'm still wondering if how much of it is them venturing into the hole or like digging deeper into that and like kind of losing their their shit that way some of it has to be instrumented because of angelica being like the three men dressed as bees at the halloween party right like yeah well are those people being or are those people being manipulative that's also a good point it could it could be self-fulfilling prophecy just made to look like it can tell the future stuff but seems that mil milky definitely thought that he was going to um the like milky thought it was real right yeah toward the end before they fired him started telling them about how he found a place on the

internet that wasn't made for he wasn't made by humans the guy's joke that it was sky net but he said it wasn't created by machines either. It was always there. The internet just found it by accident. It showed him things he couldn't unsee. Ben's boss even recalled they started to tear up. Now I do, now that sentence alone is like awesome. Just that little, uh, the internet, we found a place that was always there.

Yeah. And we found it by accident. Like what do you, like what is that? A dimension we can only access through technology. but it was there before we got there. I really hope they don't explain. I just wanted to be that. I just wanted to be a statement that I believe.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't. It can explain some of the auxiliary stuff like the telling the future and like what the fake webpages and stuff like that, but I don't need to know what is. Yeah. I don't want to know how he like I just,

it just needs to be some curse thing that is just there. It simply is like the internet hooking it up. The internet already being an all-knowing interconnectivity between every, like, facet of Earth could probably, you know, find something or filter through, you know, that's... Ben's boss told him, it was sad to see such a smart guy clearly losing it. Even though Milky was never caught stealing anything, equipment disappeared during his shift. Probably the equipment that went into the server. When they fired him, he told them that the secret place got into his head and that he'd sometimes, wake up in strange places.

I had no idea how he got there. Never saw him again after he left that day. Ben said, after that story and that creepy gopher server, he straight up refused to look into the hole. I told him it really wasn't that bad and to quit being a wimp. That's when he said he hadn't told me everything. Server had a link up through the phone line to a really old webcam. One of those low-res webcams where the end.

image updates every four seconds or so. It'd been running non-stop since 97. All of the saved images just showed the front of someone's house. Same house back to 97. He sent me some of the photos because he knew what it was. It was my house. Why would this guy have been spying on you all these years ago, man? How did he even know you?

It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense, and it honestly scares the shit on me. And here's what I told him. the thing about the webcam is I just bought this house two years ago that camera was pointed here before I ever moved in it was just an astronomically improbable coincidence at least that's what it should be

I didn't believe that's what it was any more than he did man I think that's part one of the story ended well I want to say I want to say that's part one yeah because we are it feels like we're at the halfway line here but that I mean I love I love this this this setup so far so simple yeah yeah just like it's it's like old web horror you know

like old web it is you know the way that it kicks off like I said it was very campfire story ask and we've been getting introduced to other characters but the way that it's flown the way that's flowed is just very much of like hitting on all of the highlights of like

what would make a you know you're trying to convey a story to your friends and you need to be somewhat vague but then somewhat specific in the right moments and that's what this is like it doesn't really harp it doesn't linger too long on certain things we kind of keep hopping from situation to situation and being introduced to key characters and it's just a lot of fun like this is just i don't know it's it's i like everything about it pretty much i don't want to say the next day i was still reeling from my conversations with ben and the real angelica i ran it over in my head so many times Like, maybe the police made a mistake.

So, of course, I never spoken to this woman. She was the wrong Angelica. But no, I knew everything about her. Someone systematically deceived me for two years. And someone had been recording a house I was going to move into for 20 years. And someone had recorded me when I was a boy. What happened 20 years ago to cause all this? It was so insane.

I started questioning everything. I felt I was being watched. Constantly. I started to wonder if my mom remembered anything. She saw me more than anyone at the time, naturally. When I called her up, she said she was expecting me to call. I generally didn't call during the week, so I asked why. She said because of my little prank. I grew concerned immediately. I wasn't pranking anyone. I tried to calmly ask her what prank. She said the two guys. They showed up with a note from me to let them in. say anything or do anything. They've just been sitting there with their chairs pulled together in her kitchen just looking at the floor. You don't recognize

them at all? She laughed and said no, but I think she was starting to realize I didn't know what was going on. They're dressed in B costumes. God, dude, fuck. She She said,

almost as an afterthought oh dude in his dreams earlier he said i'm in a room surrounded by computers and i keep looking at the beehive in the corner yep yep yep i told her to calmly get out of the house and call the police because i didn't have anything to do with this she said she was upstairs she'd have to go past him to get out told her to keep me on the phone until she got out i listened carefully seemed to be taken forever finally she said They're gone. The front door was left open. I told her to call the police right away and check in with me in a bed. While talking, I had absentmindedly walked from my office to my own kitchen.

My front door was also left open. Not only was it locked just a moment ago, but it seemed like quite a coincidence. I closed the door in Locked in. Then I looked all around the house with a kitchen knife in hand. I have one story with a basement, so it was easy enough to cover all hiding places. fortunately there was nobody so I tried to tell myself I just didn't close the door right

until my neighbor came over and asked me if I was having a costume party oh no oh no I said no that's what he told me he saw two guys in B costumes leaving my home

they just walked straight across the road and behind the neighbor's house into the woods how can they even see the woods at night I picked up my mother and we went to the police station I figured this one would be best in person. All these strange events barely seemed coherent,

but I got the feeling it was all connected in some way. The police were baffled. They admitted someone was harassing me, but without any more evidence, there was really nothing they could do. When we were making the report, my mom told me she was thinking about something just after this happened,

because it struck her is odd. Do you remember how you had this dial-up modem and when you'd run it, you could swear you'd hear a little voice inside talking to you? What? Yeah. Excuse me? Hello? Okay, Mom, let's get you back to the nursing home.

Don't you ever say something like that to me again? The way she said it, like it was nothing, sent a shiver through me. Because I didn't remember that at all. What? Was all I could say. This is what she said. Yes. You said it to go and all the beeps and pops.

You said there was a little voice in there with a message. To me, it was a lot of. crazy noise, but you may me get real close and listen. And you told me it was anything. Everything's better in here. Abercadabra. I can't believe I even remember that.

I think I would get rid of my mom. I would probably, probably kill the mom. I would. Which, to be fair, Hunter has a history on this show of expressing violent thoughts towards his mother. Um, the old goat, as I believed you called her.

Uh, but yeah, that's insane to just be like, um, yeah, remember when you would whisper to the little voice in your modem? Like, okay. I just think, uh, I can't tell if it's like, if this is like now a copy of his mom or something. Or if it's just like, if it is a weird. It's when he was younger and on the internet, it was a copy of him. Oh, I see. Okay.

Well, just like there was a copy of Angelica with her friend at school. I told her I couldn't remember that. That sounds crazy. but she just gave me a blank stare I thought maybe she was concerned so I started to tell her about what was happening the whole Angelica thing so she'd understand

I was saying do you remember that girl I used to chat with online in the 90s right Angelica she kept giving me a blank stare she couldn't understand me so I told her more I met her on the web bring my Fortune City page was on

and didn't she remember my homepage at least shook her head what she said next scared me in a away. I've never been scared before. She told me she got an internet connection after I left her college to email me. But before that, we never ever had the internet in our home. God. Bro. I would be tweaking. Wait, if you never had the internet at the home, how was he whispering to a modem how is he talking to the modem well i don't know i that that's what i'm

that's what i'm wondering we've never had the internet in our home so all of these interactions were fake i mean okay maybe they had a computer but no internet right um to like type or whatever put files on who knows um unless he was holding up to the phone modem right or whatever i bet that's what it was that yeah the phone the phone line um because it was all dial up back then yeah yeah i bet that's what i bet you're right uh they didn't have internet connection so he was setting at a computer without internet making all these web pages and talking to friends that weren't there dude that's terrified that's that's uh that's uh the candle cove twist yeah well that's what that earlier that's remember i said too it felt like candle cove in that way

too i'm curious to see how it deviates from it man that what uh i feel like we keep getting reveals but they all work you know yeah no it's every time i revealed something it's like it's like okay yeah i'm more bought in now like this worked and like getting me more hooked yeah i said she must have gotten hit in the head because i remember distinctly all these experiences being online building my home page yifnett or yfnet is that a furry website god i hope gift at IRC, ICQ All of that was when I was in high school She flat denied it

She said she remembered though That I used to tell her I'd found a way To get into the internet without a connection I'd have to call some number with my modem Then I'd have to sit still at the screen for a few minutes Something Something like that She always thought I was joking

You'd have to stem in your chair her for a couple of minutes. So, to connect to the internet, you call the number on the back of the modem. And then you set and vibrate in your chairs, the dark lord bath event, takes your little soul. Then you speak Latin and then boom, you're online. Like every time, your kids over like, you have the computer set up in like the dining room like parents used to do.

And it's like, oh, Jimmy, you're going to talk to your friends. That's cool. He's like, yeah, mom. Yeah, definitely He's like gripping the table The pictures are shaking off He's like, he's like starts floating out of the chair You know, kids in their little computer games

I think he plays Bible games on there I think that's what he does Before Detective Thoreau came to get us She looked into my eyes You should be careful on the internet you know, a lot of bad things on there. That's fun too, because it's like such a, it's like such a parent statement,

but it has so much deeper meaning out, like, man. Yeah. She rose to shake the detective's hand. I was grateful to get off the subject. The detective offered to have a friend in computer forensics take a look at some of the sides I'd reported, but he didn't have much hope. After I got back home, I secured the house one more time,

then I got to work. The best lead I had at that point was this Holy Moses character, so I downloaded MIRC to see if I could find him in his old haunts. It had been a long time since I used MIRC. I barely remembered how it worked. And there are so many channels on EFNet, it would take forever. So I decided to focus on channels that would have been relevant to Angelica back in the day. I just started asking in channels like at Gothic and at vampires,

if anyone knew if Holy Moses or heard of him. But each time I mentioned him, the channel felt almost complete silence. didn't get yes or no I got ignored sometimes users even started to leave the channel I was about to give up and try another avenue

when I got a private message from U-4-7-28-for-you he or she told me I shouldn't be doing what I was doing I asked him why he said it doesn't come off well to them

whatever that means he also said holy Moses is just a bot it's been around forever never logs off and is almost always idling for days at a time. I told him if that was true, why was everyone so reluctant to talk about it? I didn't want to tell him Angelica's story. I just wanted to find out what he knew. He said the whole thing's weird to

people out because nobody knows who built Holy Moses. Nobody. Over decades. No one has ever claimed ownership. Not even trolls. Nobody knows where it came from or why it's there. Does it do anything? It's just there, he said. That's the creepiest thing about it. Always just there. Legends had built up around Holy Moses, he said. Like it was a government or supercomputer monitoring IRC, where it was a KGB or a ghost, a bot left running long after the owner died and his bank account kept paying the bills.

But no one knows. It was just there. Users tried messaging it and it never responded. It never interacts in any channel. It offers no services. It has moments of apparent activity where it's no longer idle, but no one's been able to detect what it does during this time. except occasionally a change of channel seemingly at random.

He said there was only one time when it did anything substantial, as far as anyone knows, once in over two decades, and that only made things weirder. I was typing out a message to ask this guy what it was because he wasn't sane. But just then I heard what sounded like my front door slam. I paused and listened carefully, trying not even to breathe. I didn't hear anything, so I rushed out to the front door. Nobody was there. nothing disturbed the doors were all closed and locked chocked it up to nerves and went back to my office

when i got back you four seven 284 you had sent me a message where'd you go i hope nothing strange happened buddy buddy all right counterpoint pal i have a gun all right if you keep keep this up you're gonna meet him that was a little eerie but i was focused on getting answers so i ignored it and asked what it was Holy Moses did. He said, Fine, I'll tell you. This is what he said happened. In 1999, at 5 a.m.

on November 21st, the same day, might I remind you, Angelica, quote unquote, went missing. Holy Moses joined the channel, hashtag ornithology, and made a series of short statements. First, deceive them at 7 a.m., empty it at 9 a.m., abandoned them at 6 p.m. Turn back at 9 p.m. and have it your way just before a.m.

night. Then it went offline until January 5th. Why? He asked. Why be silent and useless for years? Do that and then never do anything after. Sometimes when he really thought about it, he said, gave him the serious heby-jeebies. That was all he knew or anyone knew. And he reiterated that I really shouldn't be looking into this and just drop it. I thanked him for his help. I remembered a little more of what commands MIRC had after getting into the groove some. So I tried to, who is on Holy Moses to see if he was out there. He was, or it was. It was on one channel only, hashtag Stilllife.

It had been signed on for 16 days and idle for three. Its IP was showing only the letter, why. I was thinking about going to the channel and messaging him to see what would happen, but I suddenly got another message from 47284. I told you to drop it. I know it's just text, but it freaked me out. Closed out of MIRC immediately and walked away. I figured it was just a not trying to psych me out.

And you know what? It worked. I continued to argue with my mother the next few days about what she'd said, telling her she confused reality with a lifetime movie. But she assured me there was no internet in her house while I lived there. She said I had a floppy disc that I'd take home with me, but that was it. We went on arguing for a while before it occurred to me to ask. Take home from where?

She said she didn't know. I'd go out at times and I'd come home with this. I had a sterile light tub full of them in my closet. None of them were labeled, so she didn't know how I had any idea what was on each one, but I seemed to know. She remembered how I'd dive into my bin and dig around through all the black discs

and popped with just the one I wanted. Generally, she didn't intrude on my privacy, she said she just saw me do it a few times. Of course, I didn't remember any floppy disks. Either my mother was becoming senile or I was losing my mind. Both possibilities were upsetting. My mom's a really good person.

She'd had a rough time since my dad died a few years ago, but she was super caring. She didn't like to see anyone hurt, and she could see I was really upset, not just trying to be right. So she gave me a big hug, and she told me I should ask Ricky. Ricky? I hadn't thought of him.

Ricky was an old high school buddy of mine. Well, we were friends from grade two until we left for college. We just drifted apart after. her. I had him friended on Facebook and we never talked. You know how it goes. She said when I'd get, I'd go out to wherever it was. I went. I usually had Ricky with me. We'd walk on the way across the bridge into town to pass our weekends. I decided to take her advice. I sent Ricky a message on Facebook. He wrote back really fast. I was surprised because I never see status updates or any activity from him. Oh no. I asked, oh no. I asked him if he was free for a phone call.

I was scared about having another internet-only conversation, frankly. Facebook said he was typing a reply for about five minutes without anything happening. I was wondering what the hell novel he was typing. Then my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number. I know I never gave my number to Ricky, so there's no way it could be him, I thought. While I waited, looking at my phone, Ricky started typing out periods over and over. I answered.

The voice on the other end sort of sounded like Ricky. Oh, no. as much as I could remember, but like he was really far away on a beat-up CB. I don't know why, but it made me feel weird and uneasy. I said, I think we have a bad connection. He said it's the best possible and that he knows. I was about to ask what he knows when he said,

and hung up. I got a message on Facebook saying, Nice catching up He wouldn't answer anything I said after that, bro I asked folks I knew if he was okay Apparently he was in a car accident

years back and was mostly bedridden I made a note to try to visit him someday Anyway, alt dot rec dot birdwatch is of course a USNet news group I used to browse news groups all the time as a teen, mostly for the porn I was surprised I still existed

now I had to look up how to get to them I remembered being able to do it through my email software, but apparently that's not a feature of Outlook anymore. So I looked up News Group Readers and found one I used back in the day. Then I found some servers and started looking for alt. Dot rec. Dot Birdwatch. When I finally found it,

it turned out to be mostly British upskirt photography. I did. What? British? Like specifically? I didn't understand why Ricky wanted me there until I saw a post with the header. Remember the dog? and instantly felt clammy and cold. I didn't know why, but there was something to it,

something I couldn't put my finger on. This is what the post read. Everyone remember how sometimes you'd go in there and it'd be all dusty and no one was there. Like it was abandoned years ago, but you could still go sit at a computer and get online. I remember how sometimes you'd go in and there'd be these people, they're there,

and they were really weird and they'd just watch you like you were at a, like you were a rat in a maze and sometimes they were in a costume anyone remember the dog sometimes there were no people and there was just this dog at the counter I think it was a gold retriever it never panted it but watched

and sometimes it'd make you do things bro do you guys remember that uh no Um, I was touched by my uncle. I was touched by my uncle when I was watching the air bud when I was younger. I'm going to say on a limb, I think that one's just you. Yeah, yeah, buddy. I think, uh, I think, uh, yeah, I think your repressed trauma while watching earbud is, is on you, man.

I'm sorry. I think it's showing up again, but you know, my condolences. I hope it gets better, you know, sorry that happened, I guess. That was it. And that was enough. I was trembling and I didn't know why. It didn't look like anyone had replied to the message, and it had been posted three years ago. It seemed so out of place.

I kind of started to remember. I remembered at least there was an internet cafe in town. It didn't last long. Like most internet cafes, it popped up around 96, 97, and take advantage of the internet craze and let people who didn't own computers experience the wonder. When personal computers became more common, they died a quick death. This cafe was popular with the teens in 96. It got stale after that.

that's when something happened to it it changed management or something it changed we tried going back just to hang out but most kids didn't want to be there anymore I had some friends who just wouldn't go or say why but Ricky and I would hang out there

all the time why couldn't I remember that before maybe mom was right all along maybe that's where I was on the internet I replied to the news group message with why wasn't I able to remember it was a long shot since the post was so old

then I started looking through the other photos to see if there were others like it there were others they were all vague but I knew what they were about I knew someone posted sometimes when we were hanging out we thought we were there just for an hour or so but when we came out the whole day had passed and we talked about what we did there

we had completely different stories even though we were together the whole time it was like an acid trip and we were just stupid kids that we kept going The Egypt That's what the place was called None of these people would say its name

But I remembered it then suddenly That strange little internet cafe Just behind the post office Where I didn't even realize There was commercial space before The Egypt Someone else posted There's this one time

When my friend dragged me along And I didn't feel like being there The owner or staff or whatever Weren't there that day it was the dog I don't like to think about it just remember how it never panted somehow that sticks out

after all this time we're just goofing off nothing special when I looked over at my friend's screen and he was watching a live webcam of my bedroom staring at it I'm thinking this is a dumb joke

but it pisses me off so I told him that was weird and I was not okay with a webcam in my room but he just said something's gonna happen gave me the hebi-jeebies he wasn't joking and it didn't even sound like him oh my gosh here's the thing that gets me the most i decided to leave but need to piss first and on the way out i go over to my buddy and he's still watching the webcam it annoys me but worse when i look at the screen

someone's in my bedroom ransacking the place under the mattress and the drawers i'm ready to go home and get one of my dad's golf clubs but then the guy looks right at the camera and starts taking it down i saw the dude's face it was me no doubt about it that that was my face how's that possible you're thinking the webcam wasn't live but it was so we replied to that post with when you were in the bathroom did you try knocking on the wall someone knocks back someone replied to that with i did he said he'd let me in but there's no door all right so now that we've introduced like the secret the egypt the old internet cafe they'd all go to and there were mimics of people that were doing

stuff online and we had like angelica who was like messaging her friend but her friend said there was her with her and then this guy sees himself through the camera and like our protagonist was acting weird and the dog this is dare I say quickly if it if it continues at this pace it is working its way into one of my all-time favorite stories we've covered. This is so interesting to me. Like just how how mysterious all this is? Like if you, do you know if you went to the bathroom there and you knocked on the wall, someone was there? He said he let you in like, whoa, bro. And like the Holy Moses guy and Angelica. Like, oh, my heart. Oh, I love it. In the sea of birdwatching photos and upskirts dating back to 95, that was all I could find. Took me all night. I closed

it down. It was too much. I was punching myself out. Oh, so. I was psyching myself out. I was I was psychinged myself out. The next day, I had a reply to my post asking why I couldn't remember. It read, you weren't meant to. I felt it then. Something really wrong would happen in that place, the Egypt. So I started doing some research into local records to see if I could find who owned it. Their public record, so it wasn't hard. I'd expected to find some change in management in the 90s, or where the place got sold in the 2000s.

I expected wrong. It was purchased in 1980 and had had the same owner ever since. Company or organization called The New Way. It sounded like a cult. The weird thing is, yeah, the new way. Yeah. We actually, we're actually like a Whole Foods brand. Like, you know.

Yeah, you agree. that is to be like, yeah, do you know how great it is to be like, we're the new way? Like, oh, you still follow the old way? Oh, okay. This is, you, have you considered the new way? Okay, well, I guess, uh, so perfect. You know, we were in that kind of neighborhood.

We're starting to call it Isaiah and we're calling it the new way. We're copyright striking it. We're going to Roy Croc, this, this son of a bitch. We're taking it over. Okay. I'll take it the new way. What do we do? What's our cult beliefs?

What's it about? Trying to think. What is the new way of thinking? Um, well it kind of depends what we want our vibe to be do we want it to be like a spiritual thing do we want to be like a like a communist thing like what's our direction this anything that parallels like Jim Jones Timothy McVeigh that kind of thing that's the kind of cold I won't run like if I'm going to run a cold I'm going to go very different directions what do you mean Timothy like blowing up ATF headquarters is that we are or wait no who's the guy who or we don't know who's the guy who did Waco is that not Timothy McVe oh no no no that's David Koresh or David Koresh or David Koresh. David Koresh. David Koresh, Jim Jones. That's the kind of, uh, okay. So like, so like, we, we start out lukewarm like, oh, well, we believe in the Bible too. And then like, oh, you see this part at the end where it talks about prophets? Yeah. That's us actually. Yeah. I use you for your Bible knowledge.

And then I kind of come in like warm tongue to everybody. And I just say, but. And I do, and I throw a little thing at the end, but until inevitably it's just completely changed. Exactly. Yeah. And then they start thinking that, were god yeah well that's that's exactly that's exactly what i'm going for if i'm not god in someone's eyes then i mean did i even live you know exactly and that was jim jones whole quote he had the quote if i'm if you want me to be your god i am your god so we could do that uh but then we could also do it jim jones did and just start absolutely tormenting these people oh well actually killing all of them instead of and i and i got to be honest with the the cult funds i kind of

don't want to go to I don't want to go to the middle of nowhere I want to go to a tropical place so I'm thinking that we we have our cult to go to we do our mass unaliving basically at

in Hawaii hmm that's pretty good we do it on Christmas that'd be pretty cool that'd be cool I think do we have to do it too though no I'm going to be a coward

like Jim Jones and I'm just going to be like get me out and just have a guy shoot me in the back of the head I don't want to do the rough way Just take me out silently Yeah

Yeah meanwhile everyone else is having like strict nine spasm attacks Yes of course Yeah yeah yeah of course of course Just the way the way all things work together I feel sad now Mysterious way I feel sad Like

Who would have thought of that joking about being a Jim Jones cold Would make you feel kind of depressed That doesn't sound like a new way kind of thinking, Hunter. No, that is an old way of thinking. That's true. You are an old way thinking. Yeah, you got to embrace the new way. Don't worry. I got you covered. We'll get through this. Anyway, the weird thing is that place was never used before the Egypt, as far as I know. In 1980, there wasn't really an internet. So who would buy a place and do nothing with it for

15 years? Just waiting for the internet to happen. It all seemed too mysterious. Plus, there was nothing about this company anywhere. I mean, a person can just buy a piece of commercial real estate. Like, I mean, he's not. Well, I think it's the idea they bought commercial real estate did not do anything to return on their investment until the internet shows up, does it for one year and then never does anything with it again. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, I guess, too, if the whole thing is that it's like spreading around this way, then it was just kind of like waiting for, it was like waiting to have a way to where it can communicate with people or whatever, but still. it's like time doesn't matter to whatever this is yeah well that yeah that feels uh that feels true to with like the whole in that concept yeah yeah it's hard to describe how alone i started to feel at this time i talked to some people in my life about what was going on but their help was limited that's why i decided to try to go back to altdwreck dot bird watch if it was still there at least

there someone might be having a similar experience so i made my post I asked if anyone else had heard of the new way. Then I waited. To my surprise, I got a call from Ben right after. He asked me if I'd done anything recently. I asked him to be more specific. You must have done something because something happened. I still had no idea what he meant.

He sounded strange. His words were just slightly slurred and there was no accent anywhere in his sentences. Just a string of words. Almost like a robot, but not quite. And, it had that distant quality Ricky's call had. Something's happened right now. I bettered it up again. Ben was just the most rational, bland guy.

Something was definitely wrong for him to be acting like this. I asked him if he was okay. He said that I needed to check my messages. I asked what messages. He insisted. Listen, you have to check your messages. They've been waiting for you. The whole thing didn't feel right at all.

I asked him again what messages he meant. All I heard was little whispering sounds like, I thought I was losing him. But when I listened carefully and turned up the volume, I heard it. He was saying, please, over and over and over. I felt a pit in my stomach. I asked if he needed help, if there was anything I could do. He went silent for several seconds.

Ben? Still silence. He shouted so loud I dropped my phone. I scrambled to put the battery back in with shaking hands, and then I called in a wellness check on him. I called the Gulf Campus 2, just in case. I didn't know what else to do. I never experienced anything like that.

I checked my email right after to see if I had anything from him, but I didn't. I know voicemails. The only other messages I could think of was ICQ, so I powered up the old computer again to check on my eyes. ICQ account. It's possible there was nothing. I just had to make sure. It took forever to load up, but there was a message waiting. It wasn't from anyone I recognized. The name on the account was Bernie Bush. The message said, heaven. There's a link to an MP4 video. I clicked it. The download box said it would take 30 hours to complete, so I just let it go. I tried replying to Bernie too, but

ICQ alerted me that the account was disabled. I also couldn't find any results on any search for such a person. I don't think Ben would ever make a think account like that. But how did Ben know about the message? I got contacted by someone from Gulf University's campus security later that day. They asked me when I'd last spoken to Ben. I told them he just called. They said he hadn't been to work in a few days and has not been answering the phone.

I was apparently the last one to hear from him. They recommended I file a missing person's report. I asked if his family shouldn't do that, but the dude just snorted. So I made the report over the phone to the Gulf PD. I was pretty worried about the guy. I hoped he was okay. I also hoped his disappearing had nothing to do with anything I got him involved in. The next day, I got an email replying to my post-news group post.

I recognized the address. It was the same person who posted about the dog. She said I needed to call her urgently and provided a 1-800 number, followed by what looked like a license plate number, 472 BMT. When I called, I got an interactive menu system for a tanning supplies company. When I listened to the options, I got the idea that 472 BMT might be how to navigate the menu. So I pressed each of the numbers in the order she said. The system said I was being transferred to a, quote, account specialist. I heard someone pick up the line.

You're starting to remember, aren't you? I think I gasped. She said she couldn't talk long, so I just had to listen. She wanted to tell me something that might help me. She said she started remembering about a year ago. She remembered the sessions in the Egypt. They prayed on vulnerable, misfit kids. Whoever came there got introduced gradually to this website called The Hole.

Once they showed it to us, we had to sit there and study it, solve its puzzles. But it changes to what they always said. She didn't know if they built it or not, but it's what they were all about. I think we're still in the hole. I tried to ask her what that even meant, what she was talking about. She had already hung up before I got the chance. I tried calling her back, but the menu options didn't work anymore. I was more confused than ever.

I felt like I didn't know what was real anymore. It's a terrible place to be. Trust me. All I was sure of was that I'd come into something very wrong when I was a teen and it was coming back. I didn't know why it took a vacation or what it wanted. I just wanted my life back to normal. After that, I suddenly remembered the video file I left downloading on my old computer. I checked and it had completely downloaded.

I wasn't sure I wanted to know what it was, but I played it anyway. I knew what I was looking at as soon as the video started. It was footage of Inside the Egypt. It had been a long time, but it hit me fast. There was no timestamp. the footage was grainy and the tracking was off, but I knew it. It looked like it was from a corner security camera. There we all were, setting at our computers.

Strangely enough, our backs were to the monitors. We were staring at a wall. I spotted myself in the group. We just sat there, staring ahead. Nobody was moving or saying anything. I couldn't make out what the computers were doing behind us, but we weren't touching them. what were we staring at what were we doing why would i do this i couldn't remember these events at all

i was the only one that ever looked away from the wall i kept glancing over behind the bar it was hard to tell but i think i was afraid of something i looked frightened i tried to make out what i was looking at but the tracking lines were in the way when they faded a little and i was able to make it out someone was standing there in the shadows whoever it was at just that moment, turned to look right at the camera. It's like they knew I was watching. I know that's crazy, but it creeped the heck out of me. I shut the video down there, and I don't plan to open it again.

After that, I kept researching the new way, because there had to be something to it. I was able to find a record that mentioned the owner's name, Bernard K. Bush. The same name is on the ICQ message. looked for obituaries, white pages, anything that could lead me to him. I didn't think to look for missing persons cases, but I stumbled on one anyway. An old homepage asking to help us find Uncle Byrne. I emailed his niece, presumably, from the address listed asking for more information. The page was made in the year 2000, so I didn't expect the email to work, but it did.

I got a reply the same day asking me how I knew Uncle Byrne. I wasn't sure how to answer, but I decided to. go with honesty i told her more or less what was going on leaving out the parts that would make me sound delusional this is what i got back i'm going to put this all in one message because i don't want us to have to talk again uncle burn was a good man he used to be a rabbi he raised me after my parents died in an accident and he was good with electronics and he thought computers were the future that's why he called his company the new way he bought up all the commercial space he could afford with his inheritance all over the country it was more than he could handle so he just rented it out

and life was good he kept selling computers and his little shop and i helped when i got home from school and on the weekends and he kept bees and i helped that too really life was good until he married connie in 1994 he met her during a visit to europe he said she would work in the same orphanage she'd been raised in and nobody knew much else about her she was a strange woman. She didn't like me. She was into things that scared me and I saw her make a homeless man cry by staring at him. Jesus Christ,

Connie. Animals would go quiet when she was around and sometimes she hide under my bed for hours. What the fuck? Waiting for me to go to bed at night. When I did, she slide out and grab me. I'd scream and scream. She'd walk away like nothing happened.

She didn't laugh or say anything. It wasn't a prank or joke. It was something else. I didn't understand. I still don't. I started sleeping on a beanbag chair in the basement after that. She'd often go into a corner of the room and whisper to someone. There was nobody there.

No phone or nothing. She'd even get mad at whoever it was. And she'd go back to knitting. She was always knitting something. The things she'd knit were useless. Gloves with three fingers and socks. But she'd seal up the ends. so you couldn't wear them

and I didn't hate her I was just scared of death of her I don't know why she made my uncle Bernie so happy I remember the day she started pressuring him to turn his rental spaces into internet cafes she told him the internet was the real future and it would outlast computers she'd say we are the internet

she made him get it at home even though it was really expensive then she had him go to this website she said didn't really exist I remember that because it always made me nervous when she talked about it Uncle Byrne asked her who made it. She said she had no idea. Nobody did.

She found it already made, just like everyone else. She told him it called to her. I called to everyone like her. At the time, I thought that sounded flaky. Now it just gives me the creeps. Uncle Byrne changed after that. She spent a lot of time on that website. I don't understand it.

There was nothing there. I looked over their shoulders and it was all blank. They saw all sorts of things. and when the internet cafe started opening more people were involved it was strange they would sit and stare into space and strange things would happen like i could swear i heard a voice in my modem when i dial up and when i'd listen it was saying it hurts i decided it was all in my head another time i got an email asking why wasn't i able to remember i don't know why that message upset me so much but 20 years ago but i remember it so vividly one night when i was alone with Uncle Byrne for once. I told him I wished things would be like they used to be. He said that's what everyone wants, but it can't be. He leaned in close and whispered, it talks, tells us things.

He told me about how this is strange and I didn't understand it, but I'll try. How human beings are set to be obsolete and they need to upgrade for the new era. He said, Y2K, if you remember that, wasn't going to affect computers like everyone thought. They'd be fine. It was going to change people Either you evolved Or you wouldn't like what's coming I didn't dare tell my uncle Byrne that this was crazy

I couldn't hurt his feelings like that But I knew something bad was going to happen He and Connie went off to open their internet cafes all over Uncle Byrne kept in contact until 1999 Then he just disappeared Connie too I know some bad things happened around those internet cafes But it's not Uncle Burns fault

Please don't blame him Interesting Hmm. Okay, so Connie is either like fully bought in as everyone else is or she's part of this like she's like some possessed entity or part of one of these demon things that is causing. Like they said, the internet just found something that was already there long before we got there. Right. So either she's an entity from that and Uncle Byrne like gave himself to it or she's just a person who succumb to it like a bunch of people like Milky did. Like Michael Byrne. I'm kind of reading it like a milky thing where it's like I think that I don't think Connie was always like this I think that just to exposure whatever the thing was basically

hypnotizing her like she was in some kind of trance it's fun to use Y2K as a plot element of like yeah no I think it's fun yeah yeah it's a cool it's a cool note being like you know in the year 2000 like whatever was waiting for us here

took hold it was like there's actually there's one creepy post what's it called the silent revolution or the silent takeover about like I think it's about mannequins that like every mannequin in the world comes to life at once

and just replaces humanity overnight but it happened so quick it's something about like mannequins don't know they're not people and like were the mannequins or something like that I forget how it ends but it's like it's kind of like that

it's like this whole thing happened overnight and the world didn't know like it's like oh I know a perfect example Well, in the Monument Mythos, the idea is there's this giant cell that looks like the island of Alcatraz, but that's neither here nor there. But basically this super like cell, like devoured and replicated the entire country overnight, and it made perfect clones of everyone that don't realize their clones. So it's like overnight, everything got reset into this new way of being. And it's almost like the same vibe I get here by whatever's in the internet. and like took over everything at once and we don't know it.

Yeah. It's a cool idea. I had plenty more questions and I sent them to her. I never heard back. That's getting to be a real motif in my life. But at least she gave me some answers. And it all led right back to the hole. It had to be the same mysterious website.

Just had to be. I figured if I ever wanted to know what was going on, I'd have to go to the hole myself. I pulled up the instructions Angelica sent me on how to get there. I can't say I felt like I was doing the right thing I didn't I felt ass over tea kettle wrong like there was something really terrible just off screen in my memories

I knew it was there but I couldn't see it so I welcomed the interruption when my phone rang my neighbor was calling to tell me the man of the bee costume was back he said the man was standing in my front yard walked over to the window and peeped out it was nice and toasty inside but I felt my whole body break in at goosebumps he was there under the streetlight looking right at the window with his insectoid eyes i asked my neighbor how long he'd been there he said he called me as soon as he saw it and

that i should hang up and call the police i started to do that but there was no point calling the police as soon as i hung up he walked across the road and into the woods when hanging up i received a notification on my phone of an email from ben there was no text just a video file i placed it right away, it started with him speaking to the camera. He looked scared and like he hadn't slept in about two days. I went into hiding. Things just got too weird. Little stuff at first. Then one night, like 3 a.m., a group of people I've never seen before knocking my door, and I didn't answer. I watched them through the peephole. They didn't move. They didn't knock again. They didn't try

to look in the peephole. They just stood there, staring at the door. door. They didn't look homeless or crazy, just people, normal everyday people. I called through the door and they had the wrong address. They started laughing, loud, fake gaffaws. Then they silently walked away and I started getting calls where all I can hear is a man growling like a dog on the other end, and I feel growly words like Y and abracadabra. It doesn't have really gotten to me, man, because I started having fits.

I don't know what I was doing during these fits. No, I upset a lady at the grocery store or whatever you got me into. It's bad juju, like KGB Illuminati Bad. He pointed the camera away from himself to a computer monitor. When he was turning, I recognized the notepad on the desk, the same one from his description. He was in that basement storage locker with the gopher side. I thought he'd shut that thing down. There's an image on the screen updating every few seconds.

But this one wasn't pointing at my house like before. It was inside. With each frame update, I saw a new shot of the inside of my house. First, the kitchen. Update the hallway. Update my office door. Update the door slightly ajar. Update the door opened more.

Update entering my room. Update me sitting at the computer. I could hardly breathe. I turned around slowly, expecting to see someone there. but the video wasn't live of course when I turned around the webcam was just a black screen because of that I was able to make out the timestamp

it was tomorrow's date I'm not I'm sure someone just fiddled with the date but that only made it creepier if that's even possible now I had video evidence of breaking and entering except nothing to say who did it or why

I was losing confidence in police altogether. The last thing said on the video is that he went ahead and traced that link I gave him to the hole. He was able to get a specific address. I knew the address he gave me very well because it's a duplex apartment I grew

up in. That didn't make any sense. Still, I knew if I wanted to know what was happening, that's where I'd have to go. My hometown isn't too far from where I live now. I moved to go to college. It's about a four-hour drive away. My mom moved to be close to me

after dad died, so I rarely have a reason to go there. I heard from mom when they decided to abandon the duplexes. For whatever reason, they couldn't sell or rent them anymore and didn't have the budget to renovate, so the town government is just letting them rot. When I first heard that news, I didn't care much. I try not to get sentimental, but preparing to see the place again where I had so many memories, it got to me. Days of watching He-Man in my fuzzy Star Wars pajamas, the days of watching the X-Files with Mom. The days of lying in bed all summer, reading UFO books. Of course, I realized it would just be empty space now.

Nothing in common with those memories other than a floor plan. So, hold on. He saw on the webcam his current office with him setting up the chair, but what address was the one? The last thing Ben said on the video is that he went ahead and traced it. He traced the, I think he traced from where it came from, and it was his old house. Oh, where the hole was coming from

and that was from his childhood house. Got it, got it. And the pictures of himself were in his current house. Makes sense. Okay, gotcha. Those feelings vanished soon after I arrived. I was able to sneak in through

living room window in the back, just like I used to do when I'd get home from school and realize I forgot my keys. The moment feet hit the linoleum floor, the music started. It was low and distorted at first, so I couldn't make out what it was.

It didn't matter. So I wanted to be in there. that someone knew I was there I waited for a sound other than the music nothing felt a little more courage so I started walking towards the stairs

this guy by the way I would I would ever be caught in these situations like you don't even think for you don't even think just out of curiosity or whatever like if something was plaguing

I mean like listen I am fully on board with what you're saying okay Hunter let me let me let me put this into some perspective for you okay You have found out that several of the memories from your childhood are wrong. And every rabbit trail you chase with them lead to other people who have gone insane or disappeared or something like that, right?

Right. You then see a video of you in your chair right now from behind you and it is tomorrow's date. Yeah. You find out that the website that is the source of all of this is coming from your childhood home. What do you do? do you not go back to the home and investigate that you haven't been to in a while Maui Peter

God I am gone Aruba well the thing is the thing is that the thing is that the tropical getaway works whenever it's just like if it was like my wife is doing this

I'd be like cool deal with it and that's when you bail but if it's you now it's just like it doesn't matter where I go the hole is going to find you Guess where I'm going to be tomorrow? Where are you going to be? A different country than the one that the video camera says I'm going to be. You're supposed to be eating croissant in Paris.

I am going to be so far away that it is mathematically impossible to get me back to that office chair by the time tomorrow rolls around. I mean, don't get me wrong. I would do the same. Do you do not feel, though, that the hole is going to find them anywhere? Absolutely. But the video was of me and my chair tomorrow. Oh, listen, that's not happening.

I'm not going to be in the chair with the thing with the, but I'm just saying like, I feel like. I wouldn't go back to the house where the house is. I wouldn't go back to the address where the, the hole is coming from. I would need to get some kind of backup or something. I would need somebody to like, I would need probably some kind of emotional support with me. Here's, here's my, here's my, uh, okay, here's my actual game plan, right. Okay.

I know tomorrow someone's going to be, but the house. probably going to die because like if we if anything we know about these guys is true like they can predict death stuff like that everybody that's been with them has gone missing etc yeah like people are either dying or they're disappearing they're being sucked into this website okay for 48 hours i'm on the lamp right i'm gone but i know the hole's coming from that website so what i'm doing is i'm going to uh swat my own house i'm going to like like if there's something in there there's a guy in there controlling it or giant B people running a server. I am going to call the police and be like, yeah, they have five hostages, you know,

you should probably send a tank. And I'm going to let them clear it out, see if they come across anything, take it out. And then I'm going to go in with them afterwards. Like I'll arrive, be like, oh, this is my property or this. I was one who called it in, something like that. That's how I'm investigating the house. I'm not, I'm not step. Now, is that cruel to send those SWAT agents?

I mean, you are potentially sending men to their death. Could you, let me ask you this. And this is an honest question. Could you Ferris Bueller the B people? And by that, I mean, you put a dummy that when you open the door, it like sits up and it looks like someone's at the desk. So they walk in, they see the dummy and then you're in the closet with like a gun or something like that. Their shotgun named Adam. Yeah.

Yeah. Or, you know, you just keep setting up a series of dummies throughout your life to where they keep her like, where the fuck is this guy? And you kind of turn it on them. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb. Yeah. And say that these ancient mesopotamian wind spirits, as I've called them. That do not adhere to time and can predict things like decades and have existed before. They existed in the internet before the internet. Probably not going to be affected by a bullet, huh? Probably not affected by both a bullet and the old Ferris Bueller dummy. No, no, no. I, let's not discredit the Ferris Bueller trick. I think, I think, I think any spirit would be inclined to, you know, if they have had like a 40-year game plan to manipulate these possessed people into figuring out codes on these websites at internet cafes and there's people through the walls, I think they understand what a mannequin is. Well, you would think the same thing, but Ferris Bueller's, uh, his parents didn't see it

when he was sick. Look, I don't, I don't think like they, they jump you. I don't think the B people see like the back of your head and they're like, it's the guy with the hair. Let's get him. They can probably just,

I think they just know where you are. Okay. All right. You know, if we're taking all the mysticism out of it, fine. Because I like the idea that they're like, it's his hair.

But I'm flying to Japan just because that's probably long enough flight that statistically I'm not going to be back in that office shared. Then after that, I'm swatim on home. If I have to go into it, by myself, I am taking with me the equivalent of a SWAT team. Dare I say

like a special forces task group. If you swore them, would you be on a no fly list? Could you even return to home? No, no, no, no. I'm saying I leave. No, that's what I'm saying. You leave. You're in Japan. You swat your house like that there's nothing here. No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying I'm only in Japan until the date passes that I was supposed to be in my office.

Like, it's a chess game, right? They made their move so I have to counter and then I can attack. So after that, I fly back home, then I do the SWAT thing because I need to be there, not in the house, but I need to be like present because if I'm actually trying to take this thing down, I want to see what happens. And you know what? To credit my potential slaughting of an entire SWAT task force, um, if they want me, they probably won't expose themselves by wiping out an entire SWAT team. So that may, that may be an everybody wins scenario, you know. All right.

That's my game plan. You know what, Hunter, sure. You go to that house. You go to that house and hear music playing in your childhood bedroom and just keep doing this. I don't want to sit the world on fire. Is that Fallout 3? Whoa. Yeah.

Count me in. So I started walking toward the stairs. The music got louder, but no less. stored it. The tune was familiar, though. I went up the stairs slowly. It's where my old room was. By the time I got to the top, I knew what I was listening to. Early in the morning by Vanity Fair, an oldie. And it was coming from a grimy old radio propped in front of my bedroom door. That was odd, because the same song started playing again when it reached the end. or radio station plays the same song twice in a row.

Switch the radio off. Doing that, I realized, telegraphed my exact location. I broke out into a cold sweat for a moment waiting for something to happen. But all I heard now was a buzzing from in the room, like a beehive. I noticed my name, placard, was still on the door. Other people had lived there after Mom left. I'm sure of that. Either those people chose to leave them.

my name on the door in their home or someone had put it back. Either way it was weird. I opened it. I did it and still don't know how to react to what I saw inside. The room had been set up to look exactly like it did when I was a teen. Not like it did after I left for college or even just before, like it did in 1999, down to the details. Halloween lights around my desktop, Fangoria posters on the walls, my old Mr. T. Pillow on the bed. Someone had to have known my room in intimate detail to have done this. It was insane. Me, my mom, and Ricky are about the only ones. But there were some details that were off. At first, that was comforting, that the more I thought about it, they seemed intentional. Like on the Candyman poster. It said it starred Tiny Lister

instead of Tony Todd. And the wall was painted with the same style of stucco, but the color was a shade or two off. Things like that. They were everywhere. That was more troubling to me than the recreation itself. It's like it was recreated in a bad dream, where it all meant something.

I found where the buzzing was coming from. At any rate, it was a computer. It was running. I sat down and. activated the screen. Like the rest of the room, the desktop was a faithful snapshot in 1999. Every icon just as I remembered, I couldn't find anything running out of the ordinary. It was like being transported to the past. That's when I noticed the one thing out of order with my desktop. An icon in the corner, almost off the screen, called Milk and Honey. I never had any

such file. I'm sure of that. I started moving the mouse up to it. I felt strangely afraid to open it. Before I could, the radio started blasting early in the morning again. My heart almost stopped. I looked behind me expecting the worst. Nobody was there. I got up to switch the radio off, but it was still off. Check the batteries and there were none. That's when I realized the music, wasn't coming from the radio. I don't think it ever was. I wanted to get out of there. I felt fear before.

I don't think I've ever known what Dredd feels like before then. Not really. But I had to find out what milk and honey was. It loaded a telnet connection. I hadn't seen one of those in a while. The connection worked because in a few seconds an ASC2 mountain filled the window.

I waited and waited for something happen, but nothing dead. Just the mountain. I tried submitting some inputs. I even wondered if the connection died. I was going to retry, but I got a phone call from Detective Thorold just then. Are you alone? I thought that was strange, but I told him I believed I was, but I wasn't sure. He asked where I was. I told him. He said I needed to get out of that house slowly and calmly, get in my car, and drive back to him. His voice, I knew that sound. It was controlled panic. something was definitely wrong I was ready to listen

but I told him I wanted to know what's going on he said he had a gut feeling about something and decided to check back with Angelica to make sure everything was okay everything was not he said that girl he'd put me in contact with two weeks ago was not Angelica

they had no idea who that woman was because no one's been able to find her the home she was in was apparently between renters nobody lived there at the time all they found left behind was a script detailing

what she was supposed to say when she spoke to me wow oh man oh this is great every turn feels so good yeah no it's all it's just like a bunch of like

very fun reveals yeah yeah they all fit well I was speechless and confused I just readjusted my thinking to believe everything with Angelica was a lie And now that the truth about the lie was also a lie, did that make the lie true? But it got worse. Detective Thorelt said he contacted Angelica's family again and asked more questions, a lot more.

She had every message I ever sent her printed out. Pictures of me. A map of my hometown. A doll. He said in some of the pictures, I was clearly sleeping. Did I know about any of these pictures? I couldn't speak. he took my silence for a no

and he was right there's more but you have to get back here now calmly I thanked him and prepared to do just what he said that's when I noticed more had happened

on the telnet screen there was a question up are you alone is that you I asked but the detective had already hung up I didn't really think it was him anyway I just hoped

Oh Oh on the computer Yeah I think the one on the computer was him Yeah I responded in the tell that client That I believed I was alone As soon as I did

Sound started coming from the computer speakers It came out slow And garbled This message is a warning transmitted By dilations after 2100 Break this device Shut it all down Get out save yourself

A warning transmitted by After 201 I had no idea what it meant, really. I only remember it because it kept repeating, so I was able to record it. Other than that, I couldn't find anything strange on the computer. I unplugged it from everything anyway, just in case. I got up, ready to calmly exit like the detective said. I would have been okay, I think, but I saw something. Something that froze me in place. There were strands of dark hair flowing from under the bed

Oh, Connie, you crazy, crazy fucking monster. Ah, damn it, Connie! Who! I just kept staring at them. Mentally, I needed to make sure I was seeing right that I wasn't just threads. It was dark in the area, after all. My eyes adjusted slowly, and I realized

I wasn't just looking at hair I'd been looking right into someone's eye for half a minute and whoever it was had just been staring right back the whole time oh oh

ugh ugh whew I screamed and I ran jumping several steps at a time out the front door sure it wasn't my proudest moment what matters is I lived

I don't know who that was I didn't want to find out knowing I was being watched that whole time it still felt like that eye was on me it's pretty much ruined my memories of that place forever there's just one other thing to do in town while I was there

the Egypt I don't know if I disconnected the hole by I'm plugging that computer but I still had to face the Egypt again when I got there the parking lot of the post office was completely empty. I parked him back in front of the filthy old windows of what used to be an internet cafe.

I didn't even have to break in. The glass in the door had already been busted. I just had to reach in and unlock. My hands started tingling as soon as I reached in. I kept expecting someone or something to grab my hand. When I got in, I was shocked to see it hadn't really changed at all. Computers everywhere.

A sign-up sheet on the count. her and no one there started hearing some low voices as soon as i did i looked around the place to hide the voices continued distant and muffled took me a moment to recognize my own voice it was the conversation i'd had with angelica the part where she told me about being seen in place that she'd never been it was coming from one of the computers i got closer to it and i could see someone was on the screen I knew what it was right away. The animated skeleton gifts and links to conspiracy theories in Heaven's Gate. Yeah, it was my homepage.

The one that was deleted almost two decades ago. I never thought I'd see it again, but why? Who put it there? On another computer, I saw a video of a middle-aged couple staring into the camera, like they were watching me, and a little girl peeking over their shoulder. The woman said, He chose you.

The man was shaking his head slightly. He looked frightened. That's got to be Uncle Byrne, right? I'm guessing so, yeah. Uncle Burn and Connie, yeah. Then another computer started playing a song. I recognized the sound of Vanity Fair again. Hitch in a ride.

That made a click. I just walked into a trap. I had to get out. But I couldn't. These people started coming inside. I hadn't even heard them approaching. Middle-aged woman with long black hair, well-dressed. An older businessman, it looked like.

A rough-looking homeless guy. More and more people crowded in without saying anything. They were moving towards me. I tried talking to them, but their faces were blank, emotionless. I didn't seem to hear. I ran into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. It had a simple turn-the-bolt lock, so I locked it. I pulled out my phone to see if I could get the police, but there was no signal.

I started hyperventilated and had to catch myself against me. the wall. It's when I remember the story about the guy knocking on the wall. Maybe there weren't bricks on the other side. I knocked for a hollow spot and when I found one, I started kicking a hole in the drywall. Toward the rest of the hole open with my hands. There was space back there. I used my phone's flashlight to look inside. The space was about two feet in width to the brick wall. I stepped inside. There were tons of floppy disks stashed in there. It was crazy. I heard those people breathing outside the door they weren't trying to open it or beat it

down they were breathing heavily against it and I saw something moving under the door frame I thought it was a finger slipping under maybe trying to grab a shoe lace or something but it was too pink too wet it was a tongue

one of them was licking under the door oh bro oh man That scared me enough to go deeper into the space, stumbling over pieces of sheetrock, but there was nowhere to go. While I waited for something, anything to happen,

I noticed two things. One, written above the hole I just made on the inside, the hole had been painted. The other was that sheet rock was stumbling over. It was bones. I don't know how long I sat there. Suddenly the breathing sound stopped. A few minutes later,

The detective throat burst into the bathroom. The door splintered at the first thrust. Those people could have got to me if they wanted to. The detective said no one was out there when he arrived. While he escorted me out, I saw all the computers were gone. The guestbook, all of it. But the bones and floppy disk were there and very real. He said we'd have a lot to discuss.

After I got away from the police station, I came home and settled down to try and relax. Anything to rest my nerves. Just as I settled, I got an email notification on my phone. that said, please look and provided a link. I didn't recognize the number, but since the link was to a Gulf University page, I figured it was Ben.

The link brought me to the webcam that Ben found weeks ago on the gopher server. I was regretting my decision to trust it already. Why couldn't they just leave me alone? The frames. French, I'm freaking out. Hold on. I'm doing the thing where I'm moving the story to the right monitor.

right by the door yeah yeah I'm not gonna lie the thing under the bed I sat there and I like I feel like I keep like looking down at my like underneath my desk because I'm like

yeah because like I know so perfectly what he's describing when it's like you see something in the dark and you just squint at it for a while you know it's like what am I looking at

is that like a person is that a coat hanging you know like you can't everything's fuzzy right um and then to be in that position and realize you're looking in someone's eye. Yeah.

Fuck that. Oh, my word. Yeah, that got me pretty good. So what happened there? He, Detective Thoreau burst in, helped him, and then he took him to the police station,

but then right afterwards he leaves a police station. Yeah, after I got away from the police station, I came home, I sat down, try to relax, anything to rest my nerves. I said,

I got an email notification. So basically he went to the police station. I would be camping in the police station. I would, yeah, I would not leave anybody. I would not go home. Well, time to go home on the day they said I'd be at my desk. Yeah, exactly. Or just even like, time to be alone with myself.

That's fine. Time for some personal reflection. Yeah. Just me. Yeah. The link brought me to the webcam that been found weeks ago on the gopher server. I was regretting my decision to trust it already. Why couldn't they just leave me alone?

The frames kept updating, but nothing was happening. Until, with one update, I saw the trunk of my car was opening. When the frame updated four seconds later, the trunk was fully open and someone was half hanging out. I guess I was mesmerized because I just kept watching, waiting for the next frame update. Whoever it was, he was standing at my door. I went to my front door and looked out the peephole. No one was there.

I looked at my phone again to check the webcam. Someone was, or should be, standing right in front of it. Maybe it was something that happened in the past. I looked through the people again and it was blocked. Oh, it took me a moment to realize I was looking right into someone's face. An awful hate-filled face. I took my phone with me to my office and locked the door.

I heard my front door knob rattling and then open. I knew I'd locked it. Whoever it was walked in purposefully right to the office like they already knew where I was going. I didn't have much confidence in the lock. I expected the door to fly open immediately. Instead, I heard a weird, distant voice, just like when I spoke to Ricky. It was like the weather radio tuned to the wrong frequency. Why did you leave?

I called 911. I heard the operator pick up, but I couldn't speak. The door opened and this person walked in. His face was hazy, but it was familiar. He had some kind of weapon. He forced me to get on my computer and go to the hole. He walked me through each step. I didn't have a choice.

I did it. After all those years, there it was. The same bland page that seemed to do nothing, but I could feel it like fingers poking in my brain. It was like I was still in my office, but that guy was gone. So were other things. I could see things that were always there but weren't really there. It was all the same, but just a little different.

I was still on the phone with 911, I realized. I tried to tell the operator that the man was gone. Nothing I said was coming out right. I kept telling the operator that I saw a tot. I saw a putty tat. And the operator was telling me, That's the captain. He's a jackal.

And he's not happy with you. You ever heard of freaking? Someone asked. He was disorienting, but I knew right away I was looking at Ben. And I wasn't in my home. There was a guy standing with Ben. that I didn't recognize as to if I was in golf and how I got there. So, okay, so he goes to the hole, right?

But then he starts to, like, go somewhere else. That's the, that's the interpretation I get from this, right? Yeah. And like the 911 operator sounds weird, and now he's not in his home anymore. Like, he's changing location, basically. Yeah. He assured me I was in a motel in my hometown. He didn't trust technologically facilitated communication anymore.

So he came all the way to talk to me. and he introduced his associate as milky he found him hold up in a catholic commune of rural ontario they said i was in serious danger wait okay so he gets on the phone kind of spaces out and i knew right away i was looking at ben so he went from setting out his chair so now is he inside of the hole right now or did ben come save him well that's what i'm that's what i'm wondering is I don't know if it's been I don't know if we've I'm not sure that we've got into that yet but my like I immediately was my gut reaction was like oh he's in the hole like he's officially in the hole now he's been he's been getting called the entire time

he's kind of going manic and stuff as well maybe the same thing that happened to uh uncle Bernie when he met Connie or what happened to Connie and how she was transformed it feels like they're he's at that point of no return yeah yeah milky spoke then his voice was slurred He was aware of it because he apologized for it. He'd went on to tell me what happened to him. He said he'd been a part of this hacking community for years. Nothing for profit, just good old-fashioned mischief. They especially like dicking with fringe and religious groups.

They started on IRC. When the WWW became the thing, they migrated to a web forum. One day, a hidden link appears on the forum. Other members tried to scrub it and insist that no one touch it. One of the guys on the forum, one of their old, oldest members who fled the Soviet Union back in the 70s, said he knew what it was. He studied before, and it was never, ever supposed to be available to the public. He'd seen what Stalin could do, what murderers could do, and he wasn't scared.

That was life. This thing scared him. It sounded like a put-on. Milky said this guy had a healthy sense of humor, but the guy swore it was real. He said it started way back when the first computers were being networked, the electrons and other particles that are brought together and heard it about in making these connections leave empty spaces of nothing where they were. It's like an antinet. And the more and more we connect all over the world, the more this emptiness grows.

And what's so scary about that? Someone on the forum asked, and he replied, Just because his empty space doesn't mean there's nothing in it. He wouldn't elaborate on that. No matter how much they tried, he'd only tell them he'd seen it for himself. milky figured the guy didn't want to make them curious about it that failed he was very curious about it more than ever so he clicked the link he remembered being disappointed by it because it was just a blank page but after clicking it he started to notice strange things happening he lost track of time he'd be told by acquaintances that he'd done things he had no memory of doing or even that he couldn't have done because he was doing something else this one time he heard his dog barked It was 3 a.m.

He got up to see what was going on. The dog was standing in the entrance to his living room just barking on stop. He expects to find a mouse cornered in there, but he said he remembers being so startled. He tried to scream, but no sound would come out. Two men in business suits were sitting on his couch. He immediately thought of a mob hit, but it's Canada. What mob?

He turned on the light. They didn't flinch. They looked like normal businessmen. They were staring at the floor. floor drinking Capri son. He told them to get out of his house or he'd call the police. They just got up and left. On the way out, one of them said,

You asked us to come and sit here. He never saw those men to get it in his life. Another time, he called his brother in Vancouver to wish him a happy birthday. They had a pleasant chat, and he hung up with the phone, went about his business. About an hour later, it hit him like a punch in the gut. His brother died two years ago. He always called him on his birthday. He just did it so reflexively.

And when he got an answer, it was like old times. Who the hell was I talking to, man? His story sounded a lot like the ones fake slash real Angelica told me when I talked to her weeks ago. So either I was speaking to the real Angelica then, or maybe this wasn't the real bin and milk. I guess I couldn't be sure about anything anymore. At least it was less scary to believe they were real.

during that time he said he kept checking the hole he wanted to figure it out he thought it was controlling him he didn't remember the things he saw when he visited but he said the old soviet was right it wasn't empty what he saw in there his brain wouldn't let him remember i just wanted to know while this was happening ben stepped in he said there's only one way he can think of for this sight if it can be called that to influence a mind that way. It has to be electromagnetic emissions. It must somehow be able to read them off of us and produce them as well. It's a technique that was experimented with as a form of freaking,

never with biological systems. As to why, he didn't think there was any purpose. It was just there and did what it did. It was the anti-net. It introduces emptiness, division, and chaos instead of connection. It's just a byproduct of its existence. existence, and existence as a byproduct of the internet. The angry Facebook arguments are a byproduct of the internet. It was never supposed to be something you could just navigate to.

It was theoretical, a thing a few computer scientists knew about. Somehow, someone leaked it out there. It was all over. He was buried on the Heaven's Gate website. Hacking forums, occult sites. The fridge of the internet is where it moved. That was a lot to take in, and I'm not sure how much of it I really believe. On top of that, apparently several hours had passed since the man made me clicked to the hole. I suddenly remembered what the 911 operator said to me. Who's the captain? Milky was shaving when I asked him.

His hand stopped moving. I saw in the mirror tears forming in his eyes. He was visibly shaking. Captain meat from the hole. He looks kind of like a dog. Oh, that's fun. Then he went back to shaving like nothing happened. Later, I thanked Ben and Milky for saving me for risking so much, really, especially Ben,

for trying to warn me with the link to the webcam. Both of them denied ever sending that text. They asked to see it. They couldn't figure out where it came from. They checked the link to the webcam, too. It still worked. There was the front of my home, my car, but the trunk still opened. He watched it for a few frame updates before Ben noticed.

Someone was in the trunk. It was dark and grainy, but that was definitely. someone in there. I shuddered when we all agreed that whoever that person was, they were looking right at the camera or us. We turned it off. I woke up in the middle of the night a few nights later. We decided we didn't want to keep paying for the motel, so we were crashing with my mom by then. She was happy for the company, and she was obviously worried about me. She said I had to get a grip and not let my life slip away. Just solve this thing. it was weird it wasn't the sort of thing my mom would say

anyway i woke up because i was hearing whispering sounds you'd think louder sounds would wake you but no the whispers are the worst i listened carefully i try not to move i wanted to hear where they were coming from it was a two-way conversation i couldn't make out any of the content though just a word here and there i got up slowly and looked toward the corner of the room that's where i thought the sounds were. It took a while for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I saw milky kneeling in front with one of the electrical sockets. He'd whisper something into it and turned his head and wait. Whispers came back. He saw me looking and said,

Some trick, huh? I guess it was ventriloquism, but why do that alone in the middle of the night? Because he was crazy. I got out of the bed and went out to the kitchen for water. I could see someone standing out on the front porch through the kitchen window. Figuring Ben couldn't sleep either. I went out to ask if Milky was really okay, because he didn't seem to be. Ficked on the outdoor light and stepped out, but it wasn't been out there. It was Milky again.

He tried to tell me something about Constellations, but I walked back in. Something wasn't making sense. There was no way he could have gotten out that fast. Some trick, huh? I went into the living room, the TV was on. It was the episode of Seinfeld where George finds a dog. doll that looks like his mother. That made me uncomfortable, so I changed to another channel. The program guide said the ninth gate would be showing. I always like that one. But instead of

the ninth gate, it was the Ten Commandments. Very different movies. Only one number off, though. Seeing Heston's Moses posturing with the Egyptian struck me. I never did get to speak to Holy Moses. I let myself be distracted, chased off, or both. And everything happening just seemed to be getting more and more filled with coincidences and connections that weren't adding up, or added up too well, which is the same thing, if you ask me. I started up mom's computer. It still ran Windows XP. It was Dad's computer, and she didn't like change. I had to download MRI. As soon as I did, I connected to FNet. This time, I was going to talk to him. He wasn't hard to find, just who is, and there he was, at H1N1. He was the only one in that. He was the only one in that.

there besides me. Not a lot of bird flu fans, I guess. Before I could send him a message, an email notification appeared on screen. I guess mom had it on auto start. The notification caught my eye because it was from Detective Theralt, subject information requested. I shouldn't have, but since it was from the detective, I felt it had to concern my situation. I clicked on it, and it read. As we discussed, here's the documentation on the dental records with the doctor's signature. The attached document was about the skeletal remains found in the Egypt. I felt a sudden wave of horror because I thought I knew what was coming.

Dad's bones somehow got in there, but I was wrong. They matched the skeleton up to my dental records. Mine. I don't know who that man is, but he is not your son. Oh man. So our main character is like a mimic. Yeah. Oh, man.

That was just absurd. I knew my own mother for Pete's sake. I thought about deleting the email, but that wouldn't do any good. Then I started piecing things together. Or if maybe I really was dead, or maybe I was an imposter. That's why I had memory lapses. Then I remembered I was just about to message Holy Moses. Why did something always happen when I was about to message him?

It had to be a trick. I went back to IRC and sent Holy Moses a message. Do you think he's Holy Moses? Uh, potentially, but Holy Moses just shows up places. I do maybe agree with him that that fake email from Detective Thorold could just be to throw him off. It could be to throw him off. Yeah, yeah, it's just true. Who are you?

No response. I got a sudden message from U-4-284. Do you know where your mother is? I ignored him. I sent another message to Moses. Do you know what's going on? No response. 47-284 message me again.

Are you sure? she's okay? I took a chance on what I remembered from Angelica's story. I sent Holy Moses a short message, the letter M. This immediately triggered a file transmission, which I accepted. It was a video file. It downloaded in about five minutes. If Holy Moses was as old as they claimed, the video would have taken a day or two back then. The video was called freedom.move. Milky came in from outside, stood a few feet away from me, and stared at me. That was unnerving enough. Then the pantry door started to open. Ben stepped out.

He had to have been sitting cramped in there all that time. Dude. He also stood still and just stared at me. My mom came in from outdoors. Why was she outdoors and where? She joined Milky and Ben. What's going on? They didn't speak.

I felt the tension in the air and the assurance that something would happen. The suspense and stillness was getting worse than anything they could do to me. My heart was beating so fast. and I'd been hearing a dripping sound for a minute or two without paying attention. Too much was going on. Now I looked to where the sound was coming from. I saw fat beetles crawling out from milky sleeves over his hands and dropping to the floor. What was going on?

I think I was so afraid I couldn't feel it anymore. Slowly I grabbed a loose USB dongle, attached it to my phone and to the computer. I'm surprised that my old computer could read the phone, but it did. While they stared at me, I transferred the phone. The video followed my phone. I unplugged the dongle, took my phone, and ran to the bathroom where I locked myself in. I heard feet shuffle up to the door and stop there. I turned on the shower to drown out the sound and then started watching the video.

The webcam being used was severely damaged by the looks of it, but I could make out a very sickly-looking older man. The audio was distorted, and I had the shower running, so I had to start it over and up the volume. The man said he'd been trying to warn me. The dilation distortion from the hole allows him to send messages during brief windows. If I am listening to this, he said, I am in the hole and have been for a while. Other things are also in here. While he spoke, I kept hearing screams in the background of the recording. Some sounded closer than others.

He said these things don't want me going anywhere. I need to get out before it's too late. He knows, he said, because he's me. The last thing he said before the video ended abruptly. was the birds and the bees okay so he's been in the hole ever since he sat down at the computer yes all of this has been part of the hole but he can still use the internet or whatever internet equivalent to get messages and out to holy moses and stuff like that right and then he said yeah which is a way to try to get out but now he has to get out of the whole that explains why

everything with ben and milky has been so spacey right i need i need to get out before he it's too late he he knows he said because he's me so is he holy Moses like I is that the I think so he got the video maybe he might be holy mo he might be right about that he has been holy Moses this whole time well just is he just the user that's been like reaching out to people

to like try to warn people or whatever and that's also the reason to people are like oh he's been here forever yeah and also all all of the like may or maybe holy Moses is just sitting a video of himself on the outside right could be that too holy Moses is just a conduit for it

but that does make a lot of it because ever since the whole bin and milky introduction things have been very spacey it's like I'm here now I'm here now I'm doing this thing now I'm doing that thing it's like he's in a dream makes sense like I would go to turn on the TV

I don't like this show I turn on this other show like it's the way someone would describe like a vision or a dream yeah I couldn't leave through the door so I pulled up the blind to leave through the bathroom window. I almost shrieked when I saw my mother's face pressed up against the window.

I was trapped. I thought about pushing through anyway, but I couldn't hit my mother. I could hit Ben or Milky if I had to, but not my mother. Oh, pussy. You would just truck your mother in the face. If that was happening,

at what point do you need to like realize this is not... This is not mom. Yeah, or what I mean, like fucking destroy her jaw, dude. So I took the... door. Nobody was there. That just made me worry about where they really were. I stepped outside and still, nobody there. I heard to my car before mom come around from the back. Then I heard rapid footsteps. Ben was running right toward me from way down the street. Stop hurting me! But he didn't look in pain. He looked in a rage. I got in my car and started backing up. When he got to me,

he was pounding on the windows, still screaming. I drove straight back to my home, leaving them all behind. The only explanation could be that I'm in the hole, whatever that means, because there was no other way Ben and my mom would act like that. But when did that happen? And what does that even mean anyway? Before I even stepped inside my home, I knew something was wrong. Waves of something, just bad, pure bad, were hitting me. I opened my front door, everything looked normal. I started turning on all the lights, and I grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer.

Then I saw them. Two men and bee costumes sitting on my treadmill, looking at the floor, not moving, almost like they were stuffed or forgot where they were. What do you people want from me? I kept a tight grip on the knife. They stood up, then they both looked down the hall toward my office. I followed their gaze but saw nothing down there. After a few seconds of wondering what they saw, I heard the song start. Early in the morning.

While I was looking down the hall, they were already heading out the door. I decided to follow them because whatever started that music gave me a worse feeling than them. As I stepped out the door, I'm sure I heard a dog growling behind me. I followed them across the road and into the woods. I turned my phone flashlight on to be able to follow them. It's like they could see in the dark, the way they navigated the woods. The deeper we went, the more uneasy I became. They just seemed to keep going, going.

But the deeper we went, the more I started to hear birds. I never even thought of it before. but I hadn't heard any birds in a long time, weeks at least, or locust, or any normal springtime sounds. The more I followed the bees, the more I heard the birds. Until they got loud enough, I figured we must be under a massive collection of nests. I kept following them until it got too loud to bear, and then it sounded like machinery, like elevators. There was a machine. Hidden out in the middle of nowhere, I followed them inside, and then I was back in my office, sitting at my desk.

sitting at my desk, slept over my keyboard. The corner of my mouth was wet. I must have blacked out. I picked myself up. It felt like I was just waking up from a deep sleep. The room was bright with sunlight. I could hear birds chirping up a frenzy outside. My screensaver was on.

When I shifted the mouse, just to see what time it was, there was an email from the globetrotter.net, Angelica. It read, Pretty intense, huh? you could spend the rest of your life in there. Wait a minute. So this is a thing of, remember, she's, it's like basically getting that, do you remember this thing that we're in?

Basically, from the beginning when he was doing that, he was, he basically got sucked into the hole. He was in the whole whole time. And the whole idea is that the person that was trying to get him out, the person that was trying to get out is saying the birds and bees, basically the birds and stuff where I'm guessing it's like dial up modem type stuff of him like re like re-exiting this world finding his way back out whatever and not getting lost in there like the other people so the entire story he was in the hole effectively all the B people we'll see we're almost at the end

I think that we should just just see yeah yeah I set disoriented for a while before realizing I had to urinate eat and drink when I had done those things I looked around my home for clues The knife I'd taken was back where it belonged My old computer was put up in its box I called my mom to ask if she was okay She didn't remember any of the events from the previous night That's when I remembered the video on my phone From Holy Moses

I checked and it was still there I knew I wasn't dreaming I played it back Here would be my evidence The video was two minutes of distorted audio and video And all the distortions No recognizable sounds or images That was a few weeks ago

It's taken me some time to get calibrated to reality. Nothing strange has happened since. I can't explain what happened. Maybe I had a psychotic break. I was under a lot of stress at work. Maybe someone was gaslighting the hell out of me. Maybe there really is a secret to...

Maybe there really is a secret website that uses electromagnetic waves to mess with your mind. I'm just glad it's over. I'm glad to be going back to work like a regular person. Making banana smoothies. Not thinking about sinister internet cafes. I really do remember the Egypt and the whole... and it's like reality all twisted. I'll just end by saying,

I don't think I'll be feeling any nostalgia for the old days of internet for a good, long while. The only problem I'm having is whenever I'm trying to sleep, I keep remembering the whole nightmare and asking myself, am I still inside?

But then, what difference would it make? And that is the end to the hidden web page. what a man you know it's it's weird we come across these concepts and stuff a lot or go ahead i was just going to say that i loved that but go ahead continue where you were going no i think that the story the story is really good i think um my my initial thoughts are this I think I think that I really enjoyed the concept of this thing going around and having these kind of like very surrealist moments and stuff

to me and I'm going to just throw something at the wall and see what you think or was writing this down a little bit to me the story feels like it parallels with online predators using pictures or using pictures or what the fuck right here are you in the hole hunter using oh it was uh parallels with online predators using girl pictures or boy pictures to lure in victims uh the whole can even uh the hole itself

can even feel invasive and subtly uh sexual by nature of how it's uh of how it's written and how repressed trauma comes back to haunt you in a weird way is is some of the themes that i was finding in the story. I would agree with those points, I think. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think, okay, so talking about the literalist part of the story, how do you feel about effectively the reveal that it was all a dream or a lot of it was a dream? I don't particularly care for that. I think it's just, but that's also, you know, I don't really like when the stories are, but it was all a dream. You know, it feels like. So I normally don't. It normally drives me crazy, but the whole story was so weird, you know?

Like it was like the Be guys in B costumes and like, oh, I know this person. I actually don't know this person. I went to the internet cafe. There was like a crowd of people outside the door, but then just a detective burst in and your body's actually in the back. Like it was so abstract that it almost works for me because it's not that none of this ever happened. It's not that he wasn't a young boy who went to the cafe and was speaking to the thing in the corner. all of that was real. It's that he was seeing visions of this.

He was basically walking through his own history. While he was in the hole, he got to see reality for how it really is, quote, unquote. Well, that's why I don't think that this count. I don't think that this, I don't like endings that are, this is a dream. And I don't think that this was a story that was this is a dream. I think people could read it that way as like,

well, none of it really happened. But like you're saying, it did. The way that I read the story was a guy, revisiting some kind of past traumatic thing that him and other people experienced at this time. And it's the thing of like having to justify and sift through all of the horrible shit that happened to you and then come to terms with it and then be able to come out of it alive versus how some people can dig into those things and they can never recover from it. It's kind of how I saw it.

So it's almost like a vision. Like he was seeing a vision of like what the reality really is, right? Yeah. I think, you know, and the, this story had a lot of dream qualities because I think it's trying to really, it's trying to show this nightmare that he's in, whatever. You know, it's like a surrealist nightmare and all that kind of stuff. But I think just the way of using some of these characters and some of these tropes, which, you know, I could be reaching. This is just how I'm reading it. But it's just ways of how you bury things down, how you compartmentalize, things to yourself, how interactions have meanings. And over time, you forget about things, but things still linger and they fester. They like scab over. And when you pick at it, you know, it's going to reveal itself again. So to me, it was a way of somebody at a different stage of their life revisiting that thing and being able to come out of it. You know, and it's, it's done in this way where it's not so ham-fisted to where, you know, it has this kind of like, you know,

almost redemption or, you know, it's not like it's totally laid out in front of, you know, you or even how i read i don't think it was something that was just such a heavy parallel that's just how i read it but yeah yeah yeah what even the end he says i'm just glad it's over i'm glad to be going back to work like a regular person making beneath smoothies not thinking about uh not thinking about sinister internet cafes i remember uh i really do remember the egypt in the whole uh and it's really all twisted the way the way that i read that ending is just him being like i guess i'm glad that i processed this thing i'm glad that i can like reenter society as like a regular person, you know, go back to the things that were normal

that I, that I know. But I can, I can acknowledge that that thing was there. That's how I read it. And that's why, at least that's the reason why to me it doesn't feel like it was just a dream. And it feels like something more substantial than that. It meant something. Like sure, maybe not everything was literal like bones in the back of the cafe maybe or something like that. But it all had a purpose. Yeah. It all went somewhere. And that's what I think that's a big, uh, that's a big difference between things like this and something that's a dream. Usually whenever people go for that kind of cliche, it's just a dream, is because you get to the high point of action and you don't have anywhere to go and then the person wakes up

versus a character arc of somebody revisiting something, fighting through it, and then like being able to walk out of it or being able to leave it consciously, like making a deserted effort, making a decision, a choice to leave, you know? because the thing too is he probably could have just followed this beat the dudes in the bee costume they're creepy and weird probably could have followed him the whole time right yeah yeah but it's how you perceive the things it's how he uh ran away out of fear not being able to confront these things like listen to them do whatever and i think at the end him kind of just giving into this thing was in a way him listening to himself finally you know um so yeah at the end he he he he finally contacts Holy Moses and he says it's himself who says the birds and the bees. There's also a lot of like subtle like, I guess not explicitly Christian, but like savior imagery because Holy Moses is the name of the account. And then the file is milk and honey starts to lead them out, which is in the Bible with the story

of Moses, the promised land that they were supposed to travel to was called the land of milk and honey. So it's like there's this constant beckon. And it's almost like it's him on the outside trying to give him on the inside. and out, a way to escape. And then finally, at the end, the birds and the bees, he follows the bees through the woods, and he comes to a place that sounds like birds,

only to realize the birds are actually a machine that's running this entire thing. So it's like escaping the Matrix, so to speak. Like he makes it to the end of the road and is able to pull himself out of the hole. But there's several other people like Milky, like Ben, who are just down there. They're stuck down.

Well, that's the thing is Holy Moses, I do think, is our main character. because also it's just there's just a lot of like sexual endo windows i mean like the whole also birds and bees it's the birds and bees it's about reproducing that kind of thing even he himself is reborn into the world at the end of the story you know and then you know if it is a traumatic thing about some something of like an online predator or some or whatever kind of thing if you want to associate with that it is just subtly like sexual in a lot of ways in the story it's just it's very well written.

I think that plus another detail I kind of like about it because you said early on like right when we started whenever there was the line that said, uh, it's not a part of the internet. I think it was waiting for us when we got here, whatever, right? And you heard that and you said, I really hope they don't explain that. And really like they tell us more about it, but they never explained that. There's that part where he says it's like we found it because it's in the antinet, but that still doesn't explain what it is. No, no.

And I, you know, it was, it was on this edge of doing too much with like the Soviets and the 70s and stuff to where I'm like, I don't care. Like I'm at this part where I'm on, I'm on the edge of my seat. You keep hopping between these awesome vignettes of creepy things, but then I're also like developing more in the character and things are kind of unraveling in a weird way where it's like, I don't really need to know the specifics. I just need you to like keep me on this ride. And I think that I did it enough in a way to where that was like the only thing I would change is just be like, like get rid of that shit of like. it was the, you know, the 70s Soviets or all that kind of stuff. Here's the thing. I don't even think that was explaining what it was.

That's just saying that back in the 70s, the Soviets started to find this too. Like they were stumbling across this. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's fine. But I'm just saying like that doesn't, I don't care. Sure, sure. I know you're saying that that's like I'm too invested to care about the auxiliary details.

If that was earlier in the story, maybe I would have cared about it. Yeah. In a way of trying to make sense of something, but not being able to is fine. I think, like, later in that deal. But at the same point, it's like having this character tell me about these things. It just, I'm like, I don't, we're past me. Like, yeah, I'm totally bought into the mysticism that the story is giving. Yeah.

You know, and the more that we linger out of that, the more where I'm like, well, what, does that make sense? You know, it's, it's that kind of shit. The, this story kind of thinking about it, the story almost feels like a horror rendition of like the Matrix, you know, like, it's like this. Oh, sure. consciousness everyone's plugged it to but instead of having entities like Mr. Smith or Agent Smith that try to keep everything together you have

like these demons these monsters almost you have things like Connie you have the woman under the bed which might have been Connie you know like because Bernie's niece talked about Connie would hide under the bed you have like these women that hide under the bed you have the B people you have these kind of like

angry face drones as our narrator calls them and then one of my favorite mentions in the whole oh, Commander Meat, he kind of looks like a dog. And that's never brought up again. It says when they went to the Egypt that there was a dog behind the counter that never did anything. And then they're like, Commander Meat, he kind of looks like that.

We get zero explanation for that. So it's almost like there's this like forgot this other dimension of demons, of monsters or whatever that has been existing next to humanity for thousands of years. But when we invented the internet, that made a bridge. And now they're pulling people into that. their side pieces at a time and you see like drones of them that move around in the hole things like commander meet and connie and stuff like that like agents and it's a oh it's like the more i think about the more i love because it was so spacey and dreamlike in a lot of parts things did it necessarily

connect but again it felt like i was in a vision it felt like going into the matrix and i like it the more i think about it and i like the world building and this is this is a very inventive horror take that had very creepy moments very bizarre moments very kind of ethereal moments with the visions and stuff like that the more i think about this the more i like it and i already liked it like i yeah no i like i said i think it's a strong story i think that uh from the angle of how i read it i think i enjoy the the take of like repressed trauma and people uh how people can live and coexist in that thing and how people can like kind of remember horrible shit that's happened to them collectively like having this person come back and say you

can live in there forever you know i think it's just a way of being like you know you can completely subcumbed and seduced by your past experiences um in that way i think that you know it makes me think about this because i really like the idea i like the it had like a bunch of fun moments where it's just like ooh creepy and weird and it was fun to sit through and i think that the only other thing that i wish this this story had more was maybe more character development with our protagonist you know we think about like the heaviest hitters on the show And I think it's just because as well, as with any story, you have to be really bought in with a character and like give a fuck about him. Not to say that I didn't care about him here, but I guess comparing him to like the cast of characters in like left right game or, you know, even the protagonist and pal or that kind of thing.

Yeah. I think just trying to figure out more of who this person was after you set up the, you set up the creepy stuff, you know. and that's and this is such it's just such a nitpick thing to say but i guess it's just a thought that i have leaving the story is it's very memorable and i'm curious to see where my mind is a week from now do i still feel the same way because we've and it's kind of the same criticism i have with other stories that we've read like you know other stores were like holy fuck that was really fun that was like such a great concept but they don't stick with me the same way that maybe like left right game does like pen pal does and this you know and i think that just all comes down to character

So I'm curious, is this something that I'm going to be thinking about in a week? How does it also just get filtered through, you know, my mind and stuff? So, but yeah, no, I mean, yeah. Awesome story. I mean, like such a, such a fun one. It's such a treat finding just, just interesting, compelling stories that are just kind of weird and fun. And they do pan out in a great way. So just, I mean, this is one I hope that people enjoy too.

I, yeah, I'm bought in. and I'm going to be, I'm, this is going to be a story that's going to stick with me for a while. I'm going to be thinking about the details of it.

It was very well done. I also want to point out for everyone again that Jared Roberts has several of his books available for like Kindle and Amazon. There's like paperback addictions. And one of them is called the machine stories, which seems to contain this,

the hidden web page or whatever his rendition was for print, as well as several other stories that at least according to the description seem like they all tie in together. Like it's all part of the same universe. There's the story. and they're called sunburn that seems to be a part of it. And the book is called The Machine Story.

So if this was interesting, there seems to be more of it. And then he has another book called Glycemia that says it fits between the hidden web page and an upcoming sequel. So either he is writing a sequel to the hidden web page or that already happened because this book came out pretty recently, I think. I'm stupid. I don't read Amazon. But all that to say, Jared Roberts has a bunch of other, like, things in this vein in the same universe, which I'm actually going to buy right now. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, anytime that I, anytime, even if, you know, we are clowning on the stories or, you know, we, let's just because you have criticisms of things doesn't mean that you didn't have a good time with it.

And every time that we find out that there is an author that has like a book, I always pick one up. I think that like, I think there's no better way to support these people that are just, blowing the ship for free than picking up something that is a physical tangible book. And especially with Jared Roberts thing here, you're just going to get more stories. Like it's cool to have those physical things around. And I think like it makes the stories more enjoyable. It's more tactile. You get to hold the story in your hands. I think that's like a really important thing. But this was a phone one to read to over the internet. That was like another thing I wanted to say that this was like for a creepy pasta. I like whenever things implement the mediums like that you're reading it on.

So like if something is about going into like this website or whatever, it's fun reading that on the internet. You know, it's like it makes a little more immersive. But no, please do check out the physical books for Jared. Be sure to support them there. And guys, be sure to give us a listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and rate us there. We really appreciate it. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And we will see you in the next one.

See you in the next one. Don't get trapped into old webring, um, purgatory pits from hell. unless you really want to, or most importantly, if she's really hot. Bye. You know? I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to be able to be.

I'm going to be. I don't know. I'm sorry. You're going to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to Thank you.