The Hidden Webpage | CreepCast

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We're past that, yeah.

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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 Webpage.

Looks like an old classic.

Yeah, it's highly rated.

It's on like 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 webpage to sunburn uh so that's the one that of course includes the story we're talking about today and then another one called glycemia a hidden web page story so he's got uh a ton of works that deal with like technology and uh

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 um 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 him.

Do you know what to support him?

Are you supporting a cool author, but you are 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 in the world.

And apparently, Jared's one of them.

So I say, thank God.

Jared's one of them.

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But without further ado, let's get into the hidden webpage.

Also, I apologize.

I feel like I'm in this state of.

I feel like I'm off like a Coke bender.

I feel like I'm like,

I feel mentally not totally there.

I'm coming down with a bit of the 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.

Yeah, this was, we weren't even supposed to be recording today.

We recorded yesterday and it

crashed 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 a 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.

We can't keep doing this.

That becomes a big thing that we're not.

I mean, like, 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

how horrible our criticism is.

Yeah, we are talking about an act of goodwill someone did for free for others' enjoyment.

It's not that serious.

Yeah.

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

just very passionate about like, you know, storytelling and

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, and don't get me wrong,

we, 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 uh and reading these things we are also might i add two people who are just coming into these things but 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 me remind you i dared my best friend to ruin my life is one of the top-rated no-sleep stories yeah so and for some people

go on that yeah storytelling which one are 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 people 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 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 uh,

life is life is not that you know serious when it comes to this shit.

So, um, I agree, we're all just here to have fun, have fun.

Yes, so without further ado, I say we go.

Well, I wouldn't say without further ado.

So, on that note, um, I just want to be known by uh, 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 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 cut up pretty bad.

You know, my wife's cut up on her arms.

I've cut across

my face.

Like,

he was like, it looks insane.

It looks like a log got thrown through the window.

We're lucky to be alive.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, what happened?

Like, I think I sent up a prayer for him.

Like, I hope they're okay.

And then he's like, yeah, check this out.

And he sends me a picture of him completely naked in his bathroom mirror.

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, I

when you catch me, it's not even you.

It's, 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, getting 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, Roll34, 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.

Um, 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 uh, the other day, Allison just sent me one of uh I'm pregnant and you're standing behind me.

No, you're not on Roll34.

No, True, 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 angles of that.

I mean, I'm pretty much.

My point is, I need more bad things to happen to Hunter.

That's all I'm trying to cross.

So.

All right.

Well, you know, without further ado,

maybe we'll have our own hidden webpage here pretty soon and see if Jared Roberts' experience,

a little story here, makes us think of the hells that await for us.

So

I'm very excited to get into this and uh see if this is this is a

fun time.

I'm ready.

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The Hidden Web Page by 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 ol' Lycos.

What is Lysos?

Lycos?

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.

Yes, I am.

I was interested interested in naked celebrities and the paranormal back then preach i was like man this guy's cool

me too bro i just want to see i just want to see a movie star's tits and an asshole and i would just want to i want i don't want to see ghost sightings

that's a real

boy's search history was like boob boob scary yeah

that's why that's why i feel like that's why i feel like men are primarily uh 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.

They're like, oh, I have to find thoughts at 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 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 Darknet web ring where all the best quote dark websites and home pages came together pages on spellbooks goth babes the occult dark art and a gross out page or two it was through the web ring that i met angelica this guy

this guy is this guy

this guy's cool also so we're also

we're also definitely setting this up to be this is like late 90s yes is is is where i'm getting at for sure Were web rings 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 like, I thought it was before 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,

not AT ⁇ T.

It was fucking

the little yellow man.

Look, he was running.

Can't remember.

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.

I forget what that guy is.

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, I mean, like, if you think about back then, too, which is where I hope this story explores too, 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 fish nets, 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.

This guy might become my time.

Did I write this?

Was it his video?

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 that you slipped in that he looks like you.

You're like, he's the most attractive man I've ever seen.

And then you slipped out.

I did not.

Okay, for one, that's not at all.

And then you're like, you know what?

He looks.

He's a good man.

And I'm like, we have similar style.

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

okay angelica hosted a wiccan geo cities or tripod homepage that i found particularly alluring no wait it was angel fire she just made the best of some cool animated gifs 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 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 started 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 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, web rings, all 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 hole is our little secret.

Nobody knew about it.

Even fewer how to find it.

But we found it.

It was right there all along.

Sometimes, when you'd load darknet and Etscape, there'd 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'm

this is fun.

I've immediately bought in.

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

so happy right now.

I'm bought in.

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, um,

and how, like, the evolution of not only technology and time can make you forget about stuff.

It kind of reminds me of uh, even like, what is that one that we haven't read or anything?

It's like a client, 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.

Um, 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.

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 a 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, an email was waiting.

She said, We were missing so much.

The whole 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 in there.

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 netscape is gone, but the hole is still there for you.

I felt a 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 forum posts 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 i like the the pacing of what's going on you get kind of suspicious you find out what the fuck and it drops a little drops a little breadcrumb for you this

email hasn't even been used in 11 years right or eight 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 it visited it, when they would visit it, something in the hole like replicated it to where it could talk to people as its users or as its

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

just the pacing.

It's nice.

And like, you know, in a lot of cases, I feel like it would be a bit cheesy but i i'm kind of bought in it feels good right now the way it's explained itself is like believable tone and it like it 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 out or whatever so it like basically copied her from the 90s and is now trying to fish for more people yeah and also to clarify i don't mean copy like it's a monster that copies people or anything at least not yet i mean like it literally copies like users' information.

Well, it feels like, I mean, like, I don't know if it's going this direction, but in a way that I guess like evil spirits, demons, and 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 in that way.

Yeah, yeah.

Like 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 state 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 till a new email came in.

This one was short and to the point.

It read,

I think I'm coming to the center.

You could spend your whole life in here.

That's crappy.

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 remembered 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.

Though 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 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.

Placeonarchive.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 side, but I knew there was something bad about it.

Then another email 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 had to download an old browser just to access it.

If you weren't on the internet back then, gopher sites just house a bunch of text files and folders, usually.

You'd go to gopher://slash/blahblah.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 site?

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 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, well, that's not great.

Fuck the game.

All right.

I'm getting out of here.

All right.

Thank you all.

How creepy would that be?

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 I was 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.

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.

Did they have cameras back then?

The haunting.

Yeah, no.

This is how haunting would be to be like, was that my voice?

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 reoccurrence from the past.

It's kind of fucking coming at you like a freight train.

It almost feels like

if you were to, you know, people talk about like repressed trauma, repressed memories and stuff like that, right?

Um,

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 Pet Scott 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 1 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.

That the game's kind of like a metaphor for a metaphor for.

Yeah,

and 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, 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 that little tag I did.

Is that I'm pretty sure it was my voice when I was a boy.

It's just such a great way to make you be like, excuse me.

I stopped receiving emails from Angelica and the blank address after that.

I hoped it was over.

I think a month passed before anything else happened.

I got the promotion.

Things were feeling normal.

I told myself some secrets are best left secret.

Well, I got a large manila envelope in the mail.

No return address.

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 1999.

Her parents offered a reward and everything.

They never found her.

No clues.

One night she was in her 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?

Wouldn't her family want to know?

Maybe she had a psychotic break or something.

What's this stuff about the hole?

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 would have known both me and her.

We had a few mutual contacts, mostly people from the web rink, 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 Rapskelion42.

Is that right?

Rap Skell.

Yeah, Rapshkelion 42.

Yeah, I just thought it was Rapscallion.

You know what?

You're probably.

I'm looking at what...

Yeah, that's definitely Rapskelion.

Dude, earlier,

when you were reading Globetrotter,

I think I read like Glob Trotter or something like that.

Or no, Glob Rotter.

I was like, what?

What is this?

Like, Globetrotter.

I'm like, oh, right.

Ah, it's me, the old

Globetrotter.

Or no, I was saying

I read it as Globbit.

I read it as Globbit Rotter.

I was like, Globbit Rotter.

I was like, what the fuck is that?

That's pretty good.

You're like, Globetrotter.

I'm like, ah, right.

It's me, kids.

The Globbit Rodder.

It's like the Harlem Globbit Rotters.

He went by the handle Rap Scallion 42.

He was an odd guy into hacking and anarchy.

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 easily.

I like how immediately after that the author points out like the funniness of it.

He's like, he's into hacking an anarchy.

The good clean internet taboos we had back then.

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 Rapskelion42, I couldn't find any Rapskelion 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.

It would at least have all of my old contacts stored just where I left them.

If it would even load.

I had to 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 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 ICQ 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 Rapscallion42.

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.

I 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 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 31st, 1999 would be tainted.

That's why he still used ICQ and never let go of his net zero dial-up connection.

I hadn't 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 happened then.

The world changed.

Only a few people even noticed.

Rap was always a little on the fringe, 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 Rap 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 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 uh i think it's

i thought it was uh dancing but i'm probably

is it

freaking freaking is a type of hacking that involves manipulating a phone system to make freak or unauthorized calls.

Okay.

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 posts 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 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.

He found a whole new frontier of hacking.

The hacking begins inside of you,

he said, and he wanted 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.

Then he sent one last message saying,

I love you guys so much.

With a tiny URL link.

Rap's friend thought it was all a joke and that Reggie was just leading the whole forum up to an epic rick roll.

He didn't click it because he didn't need to hear any Astley 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 safe browse 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'd never seen that picture before.

That, more than anything, convinced him to post the warning in all caps.

Whatever 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 porn 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 homepage all the time and that I've been doing great work exposing the evil.

Thing is, I don't even have a homepage anymore.

That thing 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.

Rap 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 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 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 is presenting itself to people in ways that it's still an active running thing even though now it's probably an a dated archaic piece of technology

That's interesting.

That's pretty cool.

You know, there's a, 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 post 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.

Yeah, 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 trapping stuff it's it's a it's a interesting setup so far the angle to of using y2k is is pretty fun like it's just like no 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 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 is that, like, something did happen.

You 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.

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 WAV files.

My instincts told me to get out of there.

One picture after another was just kids.

Uh-oh.

Oh, gosh, buddy.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Alright, well, this has been a a great episode of Creepcast.

Thank you all for coming.

I can't.

Teens, boys, and girls sitting at their computers.

Oh, okay.

She's just a hacker looking at webcams.

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 time-stamped as November 21st, 1999.

The WAV 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 never heard before.

I know it, because I don't think anything could have made me forget that voice.

It was a hollow, italic voice, almost inhuman, but a man.

It whispered with a hiss.

Its whispers were like flesh sizzling on iron.

Nothing of this earth should talk like that.

What it 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?

Golf?

Guelph?

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 a second.

I know it's not that prestigious, but they fired him immediately.

Oh, yeah, no, 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 Gulf.

But they didn't have a gopher site, he said.

Never have.

I assured him if it was a joke, I wasn't in on it.

So he said he'd try to find the server tower it was running on.

If he 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.

Thoreau.

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 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

That that that 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 or like masking them to just full out building relationships.

Yeah, the idea of 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, uh,

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 homepage 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.

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'd tell her she was doing things she knew she'd 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 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, Who 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.

Jellica swore it was her, and her friend replied, Um, I know you're not Angelica because Angelica is sitting right here with me.

God, dude.

God.

Whoa.

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 to my right.

Like, I just start thinking about it.

Yeah, you're going to find like a clone of yourself just standing in the doorway or something like that.

Yeah, its eyes are a little too tall.

Just like, yeah, yeah.

Just a little, 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 decades.

Old buddy, old pal.

I just call him randomly and start telling him about like his mom's birthday.

He's like, who the fuck are you?

Who are you?

Jared, you're German?

Jared, it's me, Jared.

Come on.

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 was 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.

Any time of the day, he was always online and active, but 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.

And they turned to her and their eyes looked so black.

She ran out of the party.

Whoa, 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 end saying that.

It's like, well, I guess I'm never leaving my home ever again, ever.

Yeah, I guess I'm never getting in a fucking car again.

Yeah, oh my word.

It 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'd never need 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 hole.

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 N 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 newcomandments at holymoses.com saying, you coming?

If anyone was impersonating 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.

There are a lot of very bad things hidden in the old internet.

Things the Twitter and Tumblr generations will never see.

And lucky them.

She promised we'd 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 and 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.

Beside it, 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.

Whoa.

So I get the impression from this isn't that it's not just the University of Gulf 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.

Like a lot of networks of universities and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He said after shutting it down, he went and told his manager all about it.

Just a fun I.T.

anecdote.

His manager 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?

But 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.

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 guys joked 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 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, yo, whoa, why don't you never look at me again?

Yeah, I would be like, okay,

cool.

So we're done.

Yep, you can pack up your things right now.

You have till lunch.

You know, get out.

You milk-ridden bastard.

Sorry.

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 then like kind of losing 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 orked?

Are those people being manipulated 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 it seems that 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 he started telling them about how he found a place on the internet that wasn't made for hu wasn't made by humans the guys joked that it was skynet 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 vin's boss even recalled they started to tear up now i do now that sentence alone

is like awesome just that little uh

the 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 like that i really hope they don't explain i just want it to be that i just want it to be a statement that i believe

you know what i mean yeah i don't i it can explain some of the auxiliary stuff like the telling the future and like what the fake web page is and stuff like that but i don't need to know what it is yeah i don't want to know how he like i 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

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 and 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.

The server had a link up through the phone line to a really old webcam.

One of those low-res webcams where the image updates every four seconds or so.

It been running non-stop since 97.

All of the saved images just show 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.

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.

And I didn't believe that's what it was anymore than he did.

Man, I think that's part one of the story ended.

What up?

I want to say that's part one.

Yeah, because we are...

It feels like we're at the halfway line here.

But I mean,

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 it the way that it kicks off like i said it was very campfire story-esque and we've been getting introduced to other characters but the way that it's flown the 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, I like everything about it, pretty much what I want to say.

The next day, I was still reeling from my conversations with Finn 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.

They don't say anything or do anything.

They've just been sitting there with their chairs pulled together 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 bee costumes.

God dude, fuck.

Fuck.

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.

It seemed to be taking 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 bit.

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 and locked in.

Then I looked all around the house with a kitchen knife in hand.

I have a 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.

Bruh.

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 as 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, uh, exquise me.

Hello?

Okay, mom, let's get you back to the nursing home.

Don't you ever say something 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 ago, and in 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 made 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 the show of expressing violent thoughts towards his mother.

The old goat, as I believed you called her.

But yeah, that's insane to just be like...

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,

I think it's when he was younger and on the internet, it was a copy of him.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

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, like she couldn't understand me.

So I told her more.

I met her on the web ring.

My Fortune City page was on.

And didn't she remember my homepage at least?

She shook her head.

What she said next scared me in a way I've never been scared before.

She told me she got an internet connection after I left for 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 is he whispering to a modem?

How is he talking to the modem?

Well, I don't know.

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?

To like type or whatever, put files on.

Who knows?

Unless he was holding up to the phone modem, right?

Or whatever.

I bet that's what it was.

Yeah, the phone, the phone line.

Because it was all dial-up back then.

Yeah, yeah, I bet that's what, I bet you're right.

So they didn't have internet connection.

So he was sitting at a computer without internet, making all these web pages and talking to friends that weren't there.

Dude, that's terrifying.

That's the candle cove twist.

Yeah, well, that's what 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

I feel like we keep getting reveals, but they all work, you know?

Yeah, no, it's like, every time I reveal 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 homepage, Yifnet, or YIFNET, is that a furry website?

God, I hope.

YifNet, 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 like that.

She always thought I was joking.

You'd have to stem in your chair for a couple minutes.

You'd have to.

So, what?

To connect to the internet, you call the number on the back of the modem, and then you sit and vibrate in your chair as the dark lord bath of that takes your

little soul.

And 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 gonna talk to your friends that's cool.

He's like yeah mom yeah definitely

gripping the table like

the pictures are shaking off the wall

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.

Yeah

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 sites 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 of Holy Moses or heard of him.

But each time I mentioned him, the channel fell to almost complete silence.

I 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 U47284U.

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 weirds 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 It doesn't 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.

Or 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 chalked it up to nerves and went back to my office when i got back u47284u had sent me a message where'd you go i hope nothing strange happened

what the buddy buddy all right

counterpoint pal i have a gun all right if you keep keep this up you're gonna 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.

Abandon them at 6 p.m.

Turn back 9 p.m.

and have it your way just before midnight.

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 heebie-jeebies.

That was all he knew, or anyone knew.

And he reiterated that I really shouldn't be looking into this and I just dropped it.

I thanked him for his help.

I remembered a little more of what commands MIRC had after getting into the groove sum.

So I tried a whois on Holy Moses to see if he was out there.

He was, or it was.

It was on one channel only, hashtag still life.

It had been signed on for 16 days and idle for three.

Its IP was showing only the letter Y.

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.

I closed out of MIRC immediately and walked away.

I figured it was just a nut 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 discs.

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 pop 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 discs.

Either my mother was becoming senile or I was losing my mind.

Both possibilities were upsetting.

My mom's 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.

I had him friended on Facebook and we never talked.

You know how it goes.

She said when 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.

No shit.

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 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 Ricky 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.rec.birdwatch is of course a Usenet newsgroup.

I used to browse newsgroups all the time as a teen, mostly for the porn.

I was surprised they 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 newsgroup readers and found one I used back in the day.

Then I found some servers and started looking for alt.rec.birdwatch.

When I finally found it, it turned out to be mostly British upskirt photography.

I didn't.

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 there

and they were really weird and they'd just watch you 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, but it 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 Airbud when I was younger.

I'm going to say on a limb, I think that one's just you.

Yeah, yeah.

Hey, buddy.

Yeah, I think your repressed trauma while watching Airbud 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 to 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 sale 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 newsgroup 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, so 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, 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 were 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 going to happen.

Gave me the heebie-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 was my face.

How is that possible?

You're thinking the webcam wasn't live, but it was...

Someone 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.

Alright, 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 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'd let you in Like, whoa, bro.

And, like, the holy Moses guy and Angelica, like, oh, oh, my heart.

Oh, I love it.

In the sea of bird watching 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, sorry.

I was psyching 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.

They're public records, 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.

A company or organization called the New Way.

It sounded like a cult.

Yeah, really, yeah.

The weird thing is.

Yeah, the new way.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

We actually, we're actually like a Whole Foods brand.

Like, you know, like, you know how great 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.

Have you considered the new way?

Okay, well, I guess.

Didn't know we were in that kind of neighborhood.

We're starting a cold Isaiah.

We're calling it the new way we're copyright striking it we're gonna 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 it to be like a like a communist thing like what's our direction with this anything that parallels like jim jones timothy mcveigh

that kind of thing that's the the kind of cult I want to 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 what you're saying?

Or wait, no, who's the guy who, or wait, no, no.

Who's the guy who did Waco?

Is that not Timothy McVay?

Oh, no, no, no.

That's David Koresh.

Or David Koresh.

David Koresh, Jim Jones.

That's the kind of

thing.

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 yes i kind of come in like worm 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 we're 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 what Jim Jones did and just start

absolutely tormenting these people.

Oh, actually, killing all of them instead of, and I, and I got to be honest with the cult funds, I kind of don't want to go to like, 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, we have our cult to go to.

We do our mass unaliving basically at uh in Hawaii.

That's what you go.

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 strychnine spasm attacks.

Yes, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course, of course.

Just the way all things work together.

I feel sad now.

Mysterious ways.

I feel sad.

Who would have thought of that?

Joking about being a Jim Jones colt would make you feel kind of depressed.

That doesn't sound like a new way of kind of thinking, honey.

No,

that is an old way of thinking.

That's true.

You are an old way of 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.

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 and that feels uh that feels true too with like the whole and that concept yeah so 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.

So I decided to try to go back to alt.rec.birdwatch 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 had done anything recently.

I asked him to be more specific.

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 better 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 psps.

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.

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 too, 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 had no voicemails.

The only other messages I could think of was ICQ, so I powered up the old computer again to check on my 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 fake 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 newsgroup 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, 472BMT.

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 preyed 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.

It's what they always said.

She didn't know if they built it or not, but it's what they were all about.

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 time stamp.

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, sitting 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 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 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 as 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 Byrne 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 this 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 with 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'd hide under my bed for hours.

What the fuck?

Waiting for me to go to bed at night.

When I did, she'd 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 phoner, nothing.

She'd even get mad at whoever it was, and she'd go back to knitting, and

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 to 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.

It 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.

He 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.

But 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'd 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 wish things would be like they used 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 Byrne's 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 succumbed to it like a bunch of people like Milky did.

I kind of

like it.

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 or like she was in some kind of trance

it's fun to use y2k as a plot element of like uh 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 uh took took hold it was like the there's actually um there's one creepy possible what's it called the silent revolution or the silent takeover about like uh 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.

Oh, I see.

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.

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 replicate, it like devoured and replicated the entire country overnight, and it made perfect clones of everyone that don't realize they're 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.

It 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 in the bee costume was back.

He said the man was standing in my front yard.

I 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 played 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

Then one night, like 3 a.m., a group of people I've never seen before knock on 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.

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 guffaws 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 a few growly words like why and abracadabra

those have really gotten to me man because i started having fits I don't know what I was doing with the with during these fits.

I know I upset a lady at the grocery store and 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, but the gopher sight.

I thought he'd shut that thing down.

There's an image on the screen updated every few seconds, but this one wasn't pointing at my house like before.

It was inside.

Watch.

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.

Oh, God.

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 Ben 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 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 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 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 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.

Didn't matter.

Someone had to be in there.

And that someone knew I was there.

I waited for a sound other than the music.

Nothing.

I felt a little more courage, so I started walking towards the stairs.

This guy, by the way, I would- I would never 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 leads 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I am

Joe Megan.

Well,

the thing is, 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, if it's you, now it's just like, it doesn't matter where I go.

The hole is going to fuck you.

Guess where I'm going to be tomorrow?

Where are you going to be?

A different country

than the one that the Power

camera says.

You will see me eating croissants in Power.

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 not feel, though, that the hole is going to find him anywhere?

Absolutely.

But the video was of me in my chair tomorrow.

Sure.

Oh, listen.

I'm not going to be in the chair with the thing.

I'm just saying, like, I feel.

I wouldn't go back to the house where the house is.

I wouldn't go back to the address where

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 a way to go.

Here's, here, here's my, here, here's my, uh,

okay, here's my actual game plan, right?

Okay, I know tomorrow someone's going to be at the house.

I'm 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, et cetera.

Yeah.

Like, people are either dying or they're disappearing.

They're being sucked into this website.

Okay.

Yeah.

For 48 hours, I'm on the layup, right?

I'm gone.

But I know the hole is coming from that website.

So what I'm doing is I'm going to SWAT my own house.

I'm going to like, like, if there's something in there, if 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 I was the one who called it in, something like that.

That's how I'm investigating the house.

I'm not, I'm not step down.

Now, is that cruel to send those SWOT agents?

I mean,

you are potentially sending men to their desk.

Could you, well, 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.

A shotgun aimed at him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or, you know, you just keep setting up a series of dummies throughout your life to where they keep her like, we're like, where the fuck is this guy?

And you can kind of turn on him.

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, are not going to.

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 dunno trick.

No, no, no.

Let's not discredit the Ferris Bueller trick.

I think any spirit would be inclined to be.

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.

I don't think.

You would think the same thing, but Ferris Bueller's, his parents didn't see it when he was sick.

Look, I don't think

they jump you.

I don't think the B people see 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.

Just know where you are.

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 a long enough flight that statistically i'm not uh gonna be back in that office share then after that i'm swatting my own home if i have to go into it by myself i am taking with me the equivalent of a swat team dare i say uh like a special forces task group if you swatted then would you be on a no fly list could you even return home

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 slaughtering of an entire SWAT task task force,

if they want me, they probably won't expose themselves by wiping out an entire SWAT team.

So

that may be an everybody-wins scenario, you know.

All right.

That's my game plan.

All right.

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 game.

I don't want to set the word

on fire.

Is that Fallout 3?

Whoa.

Count me in.

So I started walking toward the stairs.

The music got louder, but no less distorted.

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.

door.

That was odd, because the same song started playing again when it reached the end.

A radio station plays the same song twice in a row.

Switched 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 people had lived there after mom left.

Sure of that.

Either those people chose to leave my name on the door in their home, or someone had put it back.

Either way was weird.

I opened it.

I didn't 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.

Then 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, 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.

Checked 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 dread 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 to happen, but nothing did.

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 Therault just then.

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

a bunch of 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 Therault said he contacted Angelica's family again and asked more questions.

A lot more.

She had every message I ever sent her printed out.

Picture.

Oh,

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, 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 2100.

Interesting.

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,

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 had been looking right into someone's eye for half a minute.

God.

God.

And whoever it was had just been staring right back the whole time.

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 was just one other thing to do in town while I was there.

The Egypt.

I don't know if I disconnected the hole by unplugging 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 in 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 counter, and no one there.

I started hearing some low voices.

As soon as I did, I looked around the place to hide.

The voices continued, distant and muffled.

It 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 places 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,

We chose you.

The man was shaking his head slightly.

He looked frightened.

That's gotta be

Uncle Byrne, right?

I'm guessing so, yeah.

Uncle Byrne and uh Connie, yeah.

Then another computer started playing a song.

I recognized the sound of Vanity Fair again.

Hitchin' a ride.

That made it 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.

They 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 up my phone to see if I could get the police, but there was no signal.

I started hyperventilating and had to catch myself against the wall.

It's when I remembered 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.

I tore 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 dashed 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.

Then I saw something moving under the door frame.

I thought it was a finger slipping under, maybe trying to grab a shoelace or something, but it was too pink, too wet.

It was a tongue.

One of them was licking under the door.

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 wasn't sheetrock I was stumbling over.

It was bones.

I don't know how long I sat there.

Suddenly the breathing sound stopped.

A few minutes later, Detective Thoreau 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 guest book, all of it.

But the bones of 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 Golf 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.

The fringe.

I'm freaking out.

Hold on.

I'm doing the thing where I move the story to the right monitor, okay?

Yeah, right by the door.

Yeah, yeah, that's all I got.

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

some idea.

Cause, 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, dude.

Fuck that.

Oh, my word.

Yeah, that that

got me pretty good.

Uh, so what happened there?

Detective Throw burst in, helped him, and then he took him to the police station.

But then, right afterwards, he leaves the police station.

Yeah, after I got away from the police station, I came home, settled down, try to relax, anything to rest my nerves.

I settled in.

I got an email notification.

So, basically, he went to the police station.

I would probably remain in the police station.

Yeah, I would not leave anybody.

I would not go home.

Well, time to go home on the day they said I was on the desk.

Yeah, exactly.

Or just even like trying 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 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 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 doorknob 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.

It 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.

I asked if I was in Gulf 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 holed up in a Catholic commune in 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 wondering.

I don't know if we've...

I'm not sure that we've gotten to that yet, but

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 getting called the entire time.

He's kind of going manic and stuff as well.

Maybe the same thing that happened to 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 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 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 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 herded 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.

He replied, Just because it's empty space doesn't mean there's nothing 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 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 barking.

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 non-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, drinking Capri Sun.

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 again 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.

His story sounded a lot like the ones the 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 Ben and Ma 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 why all this was happening.

Ben stepped in.

He said there's only one way he can think of for this site, 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, but 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 and chaos instead of connection.

It's just a byproduct of its existence, and its existence is a byproduct of the internet.

Like angry Facebook arguments are a byproduct of the internet.

It was ever 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.

It was buried on the Heaven's Gate website.

Hacking forums, occult sites.

The fringe 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 click 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 open.

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.

And 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 tried 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 of one of the electrical sockets.

He'd whisper something into it, then turned his head and wait.

The 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 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.

I flicked on the outdoor light and stepped out, but it wasn't Ben 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 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 liked 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 Egyptians 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 mirc 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 uh who is and there he was in

uh at h1n1

He was the only one in 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 Therault.

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 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.

Wondered if maybe I was really was dead.

Or maybe I was an imposter and 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 Thurault could just be to throw him off.

It could be to throw him him off.

Yeah, yeah, it's just true.

Who are you?

No response.

I got a sudden message from U4284.

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.

47284 messaged 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 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.mov.

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's 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 video file to 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 in 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 hole that explains why everything with ben and milky has been so spacey right

i need i need to get out before it's too late he

he knows he said because he's me so the is he holy moses like i is that the i think so he got the video maybe he might be holy you might be right about that he has been holy Moses this whole time.

Well, I'm 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, too, people are like, oh, he's been here forever.

Yeah.

And no one knows about it.

Also, all of the like,

or maybe Holy Moses is just sending a video of himself on the outside.

Right.

Could be that too.

Like, Holy Moses is just a call into it for it.

But that does make a lot of sense because ever since the whole Ben 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, 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.

So I took the door.

You would just

happening.

Well,

at what point do you need to like realize this is not this is not mom.

Yeah.

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 my car before mom come around from the back.

And I heard rapid footsteps.

Ben was running 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 in B costume 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.

It just seemed to keep going and going.

But the deeper that we went, the more I started to hear birds.

I'd never even thought of it before, but I hadn't heard any birds in a long time.

Weeks at least.

Or locusts 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...

And then I was back in my office, 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 theglobetrotter.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 the beginning when he was doing that, he was he basically got sucked into the hole.

He was in the hole the entire time.

And the whole idea is that the person that was trying to get him out, the person that was trying to get him out is saying the birds and bees.

Basically, the birds and stuff were, 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 bee people.

Well,

we'll see.

we're almost at the end i think that we should just

just to see yeah yeah yeah i sat 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 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 end.

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 uh

man you know it's it's weird but we come across these concepts and stuff a lot or go ahead i was just gonna say that

i

loved that

But go ahead, continue where you were going.

No, I think that the story, the story is is really good.

I think

my initial thoughts are this.

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.

I was writing this down a little bit.

To me, the story feels like it parallels with online predators using pictures or

uh

using pictures or uh what the fuck did i write here

are you in the hole hunter are you using oh 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 whole itself can even feel invasive and uh 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 um i don't particularly care for that i think it's just but that's also you know i don't really like when stories are but it was all a dream you know

so I normally don't.

It normally drives me crazy, but the whole story was so weird.

You know, like it was like the 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 the corner.

All of that was real.

It's that he was seeing visions of this.

He was basically walking through his own history.

Like 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 a 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 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 or 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 uh 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 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 in 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 it.

I don't think it was something that was just such a heavy parallel.

that's just how I read it but even the end 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 banana smoothies not thinking about uh

not thinking about sinister internet cafes I remember uh I really do remember the Egypt and the whole uh it's really all twisted the way the way that I read the ending is just him being like

I guess I'm glad that I processed this thing.

I'm glad that I can like re-enter 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.

Well, 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 that kind of cliche it's just a dream is because you get to the high point of action and you don't have any really really anywhere to go and then the person wakes up versus a character arc of somebody uh 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 distorted 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.

And he always could have got out.

Yeah.

Yeah, but it's how you perceive the things.

It's how he 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?

Well, yeah, at the end, 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 that 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 an 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 there.

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 induendos.

I mean, like the whole, also birds and bees.

It's the birds and bees.

It's about reproducing

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 something of like an online predator

or whatever kind of thing, if you want to associate it 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,

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 explain that.

There's that part where he says, it's like, we found it because it's in the anti-net, 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 in 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 they'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 it 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 this, you know, the 70s Soviets or all that kind of stuff.

That'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 cycling 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 what you're saying.

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.

But

in a way of trying to, 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 me.

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.

This story kind of, thinking about it, this story almost feels like a horror rendition of like the Matrix.

You know, like, it's like the

consciousness everyone's plugged into.

But instead of having entities like Mr.

Smith or Agent Smith that try to keep everything together, you have like these, 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 bee 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 like dog.

We get zero explanation for that.

So it's almost like there's this like forgotten, 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 their side, pieces at a time.

And you see like drones of them that move around in the hole, things like Commander Mead and Connie and stuff like that, like agents.

And it's, oh, it's like, the more I think about it, the more I love, because it was so spacey and dreamlike in a lot of parts.

Things didn't 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.

Yeah.

No, like I said, I think it's a strong story.

I think that from the angle of how I read it, I think I enjoy the take of like repressed trauma and people,

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 be completely succumbed and seduced by your past experiences.

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 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 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 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 protagonists and Sherman Powell 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 look feel the same way?

Because we've, we've, and it's kind of the same criticism I have with other stories that we've read.

Like, you know, other stories 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, pinpoint.

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, awesome story.

I mean, like, such a, such a fun one.

It's, it's such a treat

finding 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 mental, 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 scription, seem like they all tie in together, like it's all part of the same universe.

There's the story in there 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.

All that to say, Jared Roberts has a bunch of other 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 we are clowning on the stories or, you know, we, like, you know, 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, I think there's no better way to support these people that are just uploading the shit 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 just, it's cool to have those physical things

around.

And I think like it, 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 fun one to read too over the internet.

That was like another thing I wanted to say.

That this was like for a creepypasta.

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 it a little more immersive.

But no, please do check out the physical books for Jared.

Be sure to support him 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 Webering

purgatory pits from hell unless you really want to, or most importantly, if she's really hot.

Bye.