S22 Ep24: NoSleep Podcast S22E24

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The phone is ringing.

A message from an unknown caller.

A voice unrecognizable.

Audio messages from the shadows.

But one message is clear.

And it says...

Brace yourself for the No Sleep podcast.

I looked out from my own small side office and across to the central glass bubble that was McLean's place of work.

Rowe was visibly wilting under the monstrous tirade.

McLean, of course, had the blinds up during these daily batterings.

All the better for the rest of his cowed and humiliated staff to see.

Welcome to the No Sleep Podcast and the penultimate episode of season 22.

Next week will be the season finale, so make sure you answer your phone when it rings and brace yourself for the big finale.

We put a lot of work into it.

Speaking of work, I have a question for you.

Do you listen to this podcast while working?

Are you right now at some place of employment working hard at your job but listening to me?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging you.

I think it's great that we can be a part of your workday.

But when it comes to your job, do you love it?

Do you wake every weekday with your heart singing at the mere thought of going to work?

I sure do, but that's only because of how much I love making the no-sleep podcast for all you wonderful people.

But if you're not quite as enthusiastic about your job as I am mine, well, you're not alone.

Because it's one thing to experience horror in the workplace, we've shared plenty of stories like that.

But what if you find yourself immersed in horror because of how much you hate your job?

I'll bet everyone at one point in their life has worked a job solely for the paycheck.

Hating the work, the co-workers, the customers, and the boss.

Slog through your hours, get paid, and get out of there, right?

Well, it will come as no surprise to learn that the stories we have for you this week feature people whose much-hated jobs are only the start of their problems.

So if you aren't experiencing life and death horrors while on the clock, I'd say you could be grateful for a job that only feels like a living hell.

And here's a thought.

Why not consider a job as a telemarketer?

Phoning people all day long?

And as you hear your call ringing, you could whisper into the phone, do you dare pick up your phone and listen to the voices calling to you?

In our first tale, we meet a man who is not cut out to be an office worker.

And like a lot of people, he finds solace by escaping to that most private of places, the restroom.

But in this tale, shared with us by author Christopher Lavinia, a problem with the lighting is only the start of his problems in a room that's not very restful.

Performing this tale are Jeff Clement, Kyle Akers, and Aaron Lillis.

So don't waste company time in the can.

It can lead to you getting a day job restroom death knell.

I was not meant to work an office job.

Cubicles are my kryptonite.

The Monday to Friday 9 to 5 grind was never my see, not once, not ever.

I literally spent the entirety of my 20s avoiding those types of places at all cost.

And yet, here I am, sitting at my desk, doing my best to keep up with the paperwork piling up, when the mediocre coffee I've been gulping from my thermos finally hits me.

Not in the form of a euphoric energy boost.

No, that would be far too helpful.

Instead, it hits in the form of a grotesque gurgling sound from the depths of my guts.

Letting me know it's time to take the first of what I assume will be many bathroom breaks for today.

The only thing I hate more than my disorganized desk, my crappy computer, and my coworker Janine, who's incapable of sensing when people want her to please stop talking, is the men's employee restroom.

It's a cramped, austere space.

Four stalls crammed together on one side.

Two urinals at the end so close together that I'm literally forced to rub elbows with the guy I'm standing next to.

And two sinks, one of which is always on the fritz every few days.

The paper towel dispenser often jams up, too, forcing me to return to my desk with my hands still wet, feeling a tiny bit more of my dignity rinsed away each time.

Every inch of the walls and stalls are painted a slightly different shade of beige, impressive in their blandness.

And yet, at the same time, that restroom has somehow become my sole safe space.

The spot where I managed to reclaim small but significant chunks of the finite time I have on this earth.

I've developed a reluctant bond with this terrible excuse for a restroom.

And I know I'm not the only one.

I make my way down the hall.

Scan my employee ID to enter, and swing open the door to total darkness.

For a brief moment, this abyss is mixed with the violent sound of water swirling and sloshing endlessly, letting me know the toilet in the last stall on the left, no pun intended, I promise, is malfunctioning for the third time this month.

I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about total darkness, the complete lack of visual information, mixed with the overstimulating resonance of rushing water that puts me in a state of panic.

I take a breath, remind myself that I'm supposed to be a full-grown adult, and step into the abyss, wearing the mundanity of the task at hand as a coat of armor to shield me from the abstract fears circling around in my head.

I cross the threshold, and the minute my body passes the sensor to the right of the door, the sickly fluorescent lights switch on.

They're the only source of light.

That timed lighting situation is probably the biggest drawback of this space.

No matter how far along you are in your business, if the sensor doesn't pick up anything for a long enough period, the lights automatically shut down.

The only way to get them going is to move past that motion sensor again.

It's ostensibly meant to be a cost-saving measure.

Government offices like this are big on making any tiny gesture that suggests they care about energy consumption.

But I think it's really just the boss's way of keeping us in line.

Relieve yourself as quickly as possible and return to work, or else you'll be shitting and scrolling through memes on your phone in the shadows, like the subhuman you are.

There's a unique form of anxious anger one feels when they're forced to wipe their ass in total darkness.

I'm sure the Germans have a word for it.

At this moment, the lights are on again, and I can see a pair of legs with khakis down around the ankles behind a closed stall right in front of me.

I can hear the click-click-click of this guy texting somebody while he's on the toilet, and I know that he's been here long enough that the lights shut down and he continued to do his thing undeterred.

I respect the hell out of that.

I pick a stall, drop my pants, and take a seat on the porcelain throne, scrolling through Instagram posts without a thought in the world.

The wet, howling vortex next to me soon becomes tolerable white noise.

I get my business done pretty quick this time, so I'm moving a bit more leisurely than usual as I clean up and zip up my pants.

The very moment I stand up, weak fluorescent light bulbs overhead shut down,

and suddenly I'm surrounded by darkness.

I'm so taken aback that I find my immediate reaction bypassing my inner monologue monologue completely and tumbling out of my mouth instead.

What the fuck?

It's been like five minutes.

I expect my unseen compatriot a few stalls down to chime in with some words of solidarity, but nothing.

The only other noises are the eternal flush to my left and the ceaseless click-click click of his phone to my right.

I go to the lock screen on my phone, pressing the flashlight icon in the lower left corner.

A small burst of light shoots from the camera, and I can at least see the lock on the stall door in front of me.

I reach for it, and a dark blob of liquid drips onto my hand.

Icy cold to the touch.

I recoil my hand in shock, letting out a panicked yelp.

Thankfully, the other guy doesn't react to that either.

I raise my light up to the door, taking a step back when I see blocks of text scrawled out in whatever this blackened ooze is.

The mirror is warped.

The sink is busted.

Scalding water from a rusted faucet.

Something lurks in the last stall.

Shadows shift behind the door.

Voices whisper with a sinister sweetness.

Venom drips from their mouths.

You are existential excrement.

Flush away.

I can only grunt with anger and confusion at this.

I know for sure that this message wasn't there when I first entered the stall.

It makes no sense.

How did it get there?

And who'd bothered scrawling out cryptic nonsense like this anyway?

I decide to shift my focus to the glob of unidentified gunk on my hand.

I smell it and get a whiff of something metallic, like blood mixed with rusted copper.

I wipe at it, smearing the stuff across my knuckles.

I grab the door lock and turn it, pushing the stall door open.

I point my phone's light out ahead, instantly seeing it reflected back at me from the mirror.

But it's not as bright as it should be, and my reflection looks a bit smaller than it should, as if the mirror is somehow further away than it should be

should be

no screw that can be

what is going on here

my footsteps seem to echo as i carefully step forward groping out into the darkness with my free hand

slowly but surely I make my way over to the door, noting that I can still hear the clicking and typing of the other guy in the first stall as I pass him.

His complete lack of reaction to this situation should concern me, but I'm focusing on getting my ass out of here first.

I finally get to the doorway, and my mere physical presence here should be enough to set off the sensor and bring back the lights.

But nothing happens.

The darkness persists.

I shine my light on where the sensor should be.

Maybe there's a button I need to press to reset it or something.

That's when I find a rectangular chunk of burnt, blackened plastic where the sensor is supposed to be.

It looks like someone took a blowtorch to it.

I shift my light to the door, grabbing the handle to pull it open and make my way out.

I pull, but the door won't budge, not even a jiggle.

It's as if the damn thing has been welded shut.

The denial lasts for a few seconds as I maniacly pull at the handle with the frenzied determination of an animal chewing off its leg to escape the iron jaws of a trap.

But soon enough, my aching fingers fall away from the handle.

My despair is cut short by ears fixating on the fact that the sound of the perpetually flushing toilet has grown louder.

And beneath that, I can still hear the other guy obnoxiously tapping away on his phone.

My fear is converted into pure rage.

I storm up to his stall and bang my fist on the door, the pain of my hand hitting against the metal, muted by my own impotent anger.

Hey, snap out of it!

We're trapped in here, you idiot!

Nothing.

He doesn't even pause.

I can still hear him messing with his phone.

I don't care about using the flashlight.

I start pounding on the door with both fists, screaming.

No words, nothing but unintelligible yelling as I demand some sort of human response.

With one more good double-fisted slam against the door, I'm stunned by the sudden return of the lights.

The room's now visible again.

Thank God.

But something's wrong.

It's not just the restroom that's painted beige.

My clothes, my skin, even the stale, recycled air around me seems to be tinted beige.

Everything in here has been desaturated, and I'm at risk of blending into this colorless nothingness.

The black stain on my knuckles has now grown into a blot across the back of my hand, and I can feel it pulsing.

I rush over to the sink, slapping the soap dispenser a few times to get some slimy liquid cleanser onto it.

I lather and place my hands under the faucet, only to recoil in pain when boiling water cascades down onto my hands.

I back away onto one of the stall doors, looking up at the mirror.

I see myself, and to the far left, standing in front of the stall with the busted toilet, are two

shadow creatures, warped phantoms in office-approved attire, doing their best to approximate human forms.

Their eyes and teeth glow yellow-green, and the rest of their features swirl around their faces.

Whatever evil entity created them is still working on its final draft.

I look over and see nothing there, but when I glance back at the mirror, They haven't moved.

Still there, grinning in a way that's less of a smile and more of a bearing of fangs.

What the f-

I can't get the expletive out of my mouth.

Don't worry about our names.

Your tongue can't pronounce the syllables.

We're from subhuman resources.

Yes, we're here because your performance hasn't been meeting department standards.

Your supervisors on this plane have been frustrated, but didn't feel it was worth their time to dismiss you themselves.

So we've been summoned to step in.

I work up the nerve to say something back.

Dismiss?

This is...

I'm being fired?

That's what this is?

Not exactly.

You're letting go.

I'm being let go?

No.

Letting go.

Very different.

Take your fellow co-worker there.

One of them lifts up a tentacle trying to imitate an arm, gesturing toward the ceiling.

My eyes drift up, showing me a swirling black liquid vortex emanating from the eternally flushing toilet stall, curving and stretching down all the way to the other guy's stall on the opposite end.

I push open the door on the last stall on the left, confirming that this inky whirlpool is coming from the toilet.

I ignore the distorted mutterings from the forms in the mirror as I run over to the stall on the right.

This time, I wind up a leg and kick the door open.

Either the poor bastard never locked it, or whatever's in control here wants me to see, because it swings open with ease.

I wish it would have stayed closed.

The other guy's legs are still there.

Blood splattered on his thighs.

Pants pooled around his ankles.

His head, shoulders, and chest are gone.

Consumed by the vortex.

Blood and blackened saliva from the swirling vortex maw dripping down under the twitching remains.

His forearms and abdomen are there, his hands still texting on his phone, stuck in a final mortal spasm as this water demon slowly consumes him.

The cacophony of the eternal flush becomes interminable and the room slowly expands, steadily shrinking.

That's Dylan from payment processing.

He's also letting go.

A series of cracks and crunches sound off behind me, somehow louder than the flush.

And I spin around to see the mirror, now spanning from floor to ceiling, dwarfing and cracking into countless fragments.

The rapid spider webbing of the glass turns the two shadows into more inscrutable forms, but I can still spot those glowing fangs and eyes.

You'll be paying through the end of next week, though it'll go to your next of king.

We just want to clarify that this has nothing to do with your personality.

You were generally well liked, but your performance

has been lacking.

Yes.

We're glad you understand.

Goodbye.

With that, I'm dropped into darkness again.

I scream longer than my lungs should allow, my wails echoing in the expanding walls of this cavernous nether realm.

I feel water rushing around me, pooling at my feet, rising fast.

I keep screaming as the water rises past my neck, submerging my head.

I hope that I'll get to experience the supposed euphoria drowning victims are said to have right before they expire.

But those hopes are dashed when I feel the sensation of small but steady gnawing all over my body.

My flesh abandons me in chunks, and I am left with the violent despair of my final thoughts as sanity leaves me.

I am nothing now.

Was never anything to begin with.

The truth was written in the stall.

I truly am.

Existential excrement.

Flash away.

Flash away.

Flash away.

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Sometimes a job can be hell.

Not because of what you have to do, but because of something that happens while on the job.

And if that event creates a lot of false rumors, you need to learn the truth.

And in this tale, shared with us by

some unholy obscenity, we learn of a tragedy around the opening of a strip mall.

And the truth spawns even more horror.

Performing this tale are Jesse Cornette, Graham Rowett, and Atticus Jackson.

So tell the truth.

Don't spread lies and definitely don't cry wolf.

The archivist.

I've never fucking heard of you.

I don't think I want to know you based on what you've asked me already.

Parasites existed long before you were pissing in your drawers.

So don't come to me thinking I don't know your game.

I've seen a hundred people like you, and I'll see a hundred more.

Bloodsuckers.

That's all you fucking are.

Come to make a quick buck off a tragedy.

All of you piss me off.

But you are right about one thing.

I want to tell this story.

So it's out of my fucking head.

So I'm not alone in remembering Claps.

I don't know how so many people forgot already.

Claps was a good man.

Now just a memory.

And one nobody seems to share with me anymore.

So

you want a ghost story.

But here's your fucking ghost story.

In the summer of 2007 in Tacoma, Washington, I was part of a team of construction workers that were helping build a strip mall.

Town was on the smaller side, 20,000 to 25,000 folks.

You know the deal.

It was an exciting time, and most had nothing better to do on the weekend except jump in the river or spread gossip.

Trouble was, everybody had gone through the rumor mill twice over and the river was getting gunked up.

People needed something new.

So with the shops coming to town, everybody was beside themselves.

A place to spend their cash.

A place to hang out.

It was supposed to be a good thing.

The team consisted of myself, Jimmy, Nat, a few temps, and of course, Ben.

Ben, we called claps because anytime anything good happened, he'd clap about it.

Not important to the story, but that's who he was to us.

It was memorable.

It still is.

For me, at least.

We were a ragtag group, and there weren't many of us, excluding our dickhead foreman.

You know those depictions of construction workers whistling at ladies who passed by their sight?

I shit you not.

I saw the jackass do it twice in one week.

A couple of barbs from me and the boys cut him down to size.

Earned us some overtime, but that's ancient history now.

Sorry, I know I'm getting off track.

The meat and potatoes of this story just don't sit well with me.

Anywho, the fact is that the construction felt cursed from the get-go.

Infrastructure wouldn't hold.

Blueprints even got muddled at one point.

Couldn't tell you how that one happened.

White collars, man.

From the fucking onset, we were struggling.

Bunch of noise from up top, too, since the stores that were purchasing spots in the upcoming mall were throwing hissy fits about their timeframes.

We were up shit creek without a paddle, and gators looking at us like we was pork chops.

Despite all this, we got our shit together.

Specifically, Nat, Claps, and I did.

Started doing more than we were expected to.

Eventually, the problems slowly dissolved, and holy shit, we were back on track.

We were still a bit behind deadline, but whatever.

It was coming together okay.

There was a night where me and the boys decided to go out drinking.

In truth, there was a lot of those nights after work, but this one matters.

Like I said before, the rumor mill was always a buzz in.

Bored people who hated themselves found no greater joy than spreading miserable news that weren't even real.

Pathetic, if you ask me.

Nothing we could do to stop it either.

Not that any of us gave enough of a shit to try.

Still, that night, the bartender looks down at me and claps while we were laughing about something dumb.

She barked something at Claps about watching his back if she were him.

And that Danny Majors was gonna whoop his ass.

Now, for context, Danny Majors was a loud-some bitch who made himself well known around here for his short temper and drinking problem.

His wife, Nance, was a bombshell, but no class act.

She'd been caught with more than a few married men around town, and Danny was even sore for it.

Started a couple of fist fights.

Spent some nights in the tank.

Dude was a fucking mess.

It turns out the pretty blonde slinging us shots that night had heard old Claps was the most recent to be betting Mrs.

Majors.

Klaps and I laughed about it, knowing that shit just wasn't true.

Guess the truth don't matter much anymore.

Do it.

Fast forward a few months, and what do you know, brand spanking new strip mall ready to unveil itself.

We weren't originally going to do a grand opening, but the fact that we dealt with so much bullshit from the get-go with this project made it feel all the more like a victory.

So we convinced the foreman and the city to let us do one of them ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

It was already good news for the town.

Why not make it a celebration?

Funniest part about it is, we couldn't get one of them giant scissors.

We figured it didn't matter.

An awkward, slow reveal was oddly fitting for our town anyways.

Well, it didn't matter.

We never got that far.

When the town showed up, the crew and the foreman all stood behind the red ribbon we'd haphazardly tied to two traffic cones.

We laughed about it, and so did some of the townsfolk.

It was a good time when it started.

Our mayor gave a speech about togetherness and community that I tried not to chuckle at.

Dumb fuck figurehead never showed his face unless unless it made him more popular.

Mid-speech, the crew and the crowd watched as a beat-up Honda Civic tore ass out of nowhere and pulled right up beside the left cone of the ceremony.

The driver's side door swung open and out stepped Danny Majors, followed by a clacking string of empty beer cans.

I'll never forget what he said when he stepped out of the car.

I didn't even see the.45 in his hand.

We're going together, you stupid motherfucker!

Then Danny put a gaping hole in Clap's face.

Danny then turned the gun on himself, painted one of the temps with his brains.

I don't think I moved.

The crowd erupted in terror and screams drowned out all other sounds.

I was close enough to Claps and Danny that my ears were ringing from the blasts.

The following few minutes are all that really escaped me.

None of it felt real.

That's the part you probably already heard.

Murder, suicide, crime of passion, and what the fuck ever was said.

Whatever bow scum like you want to package a story with so it sells.

Right?

You love your little titles.

And what you didn't hear...

What you wouldn't hear...

is what came after.

We had Claffs' funeral.

I heard there was one for Danny, but it'd be a cold day in hell if I was going to be present.

He took my friend from me.

Over a fucking rumor.

Nance Majors pretty much vanished.

Some saw her around, but I never did.

Can't imagine what she went through.

I think she skipped town quietly, but I really couldn't tell you.

The other quiet part was the mall opening.

No more big unveiling.

They just let that shit ride not even a week after its parking lot had been covered in gore.

Fucked up if you ask me.

Fucking white collars.

Huh.

I didn't go.

Not at first.

I couldn't go.

Could you imagine?

Going and splurging at a place where your friend was turned into a whole punch.

Well, some people didn't seem to care as much as I would have liked.

But I don't control them, do I?

Seemed like it was okay for a minute.

Things turned out how they were supposed to.

The kids had a place to hang and everyone was excited about the new shops.

It brought the town together and part of me wants to believe Claps is responsible for that.

That some went for no other reason than to honor the death of a good man.

I don't know, though.

Can't confirm none of that.

After a while, though, the rumor mill came back into full force.

However, this time was different.

Nothing about who was fucking who or who lost their job.

Nah,

For the first time in the club,

we had a ghost.

The first time I heard about it, stuck with me.

Reason being that it was Nat who told me.

You aren't gonna believe this shit.

I saw claps the other day.

I nearly spit my beer all over the counter when he said that.

Except instead, it just choked me a bit, and I had to clear it out the other pipe.

What the hell you mean?

You visited him.

No, man.

At the mall, I saw his ghost.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Nat wasn't a religious man, let alone a spiritual nut job.

Him saying all this?

Rocked my world.

Nat said that he went to try and get over the incident of the grand opening, that maybe some retail therapy and the reminder that it was indeed just a place would clear his memory of that day.

He shopped around a bit, even tried some shit called bubble tea.

After about an hour there, he was starting to feel better.

A bunch of people were there, and he ran into a few neighbors and had a good time.

That was until he saw the store in there that was still under construction.

He went to check it out, considering there was likely going to be a call coming in from our foreman since he hadn't heard nothing about an unfinished store.

It was some juice joint that didn't get finished, and must have been a later addition since Nat and I had nothing to do with it.

Matt moseyed over to the store to see what the damage was,

and that's when he saw him.

He said Claps was in there, trucking away at the building.

Nothing he did made a difference, being a ghost and all, but he didn't seem perturbed by it and kept moving.

Nat stood there in disbelief at what he was seeing and couldn't think of a thing to do except call out to him.

Claps looked at him then, and Nat said he lost his lunch.

It was Claps, all right.

The gaping hole in his face is what made that clear as day.

Blood and brain dripping from the top of his head down to the bottom of the wound before slumping like gravy to the ground beneath.

He gave Nat a smile and a wave and went back to work.

In any normal circumstance, I wouldn't have believed such a horseshit story.

Problem was Nat.

He weren't a liar.

And when he told me that tale, goddamn, I have never seen such fear in a man of his stature.

You ever see a 6'4, 270-pound man quiver?

That'll make you believe just about anything.

I did my best to comfort him.

Best as I knew how.

Even as a thought dawned on me, part of why I hate this story so much, archivist.

Is that I guessed this next part.

Remember Danny Major's last words?

We're going together, you stupid motherfucker.

If Claps was lingering around construction sites due to unfinished business,

well then what the hell did that mean?

for Danny.

Wouldn't be long till we found out.

A couple more rumors began to pop up regarding claps.

Sightings were becoming commonplace.

Kids were coming up with tales about what he'd do to you if he caught you.

I never saw him because I never went to see him.

I really thought about it.

I'm not sure if I regret that or not.

However, the mill was about to switch shifts.

Tale goes that around 8 a.m., one week after the mall's opening, a man walked through the door of Betty's, a diner not far from the new mall, and asked for a table of one.

He ordered eggs and two sausages with an English muffin with just water to drink.

Every account that saw this man, be it patron or employee, said these exact things happened.

However, What came next was slightly different for different people.

Patrons claim that another man came in wearing a beanie with a stench of alcohol about him.

He sat at the same table across from the man and immediately asked him if he was fucking his wife.

The man himself says no and raises his hands up as if he were being questioned by the police.

The second man calls the first man a liar, grabs him by the hair, and smashes his face into the table over and over until his face is an unrecognizable pulp of blood and flayed skin.

The employees, however, claim to have never seen a second man.

The waitress came back out and saw the man raising his hands and talking to an empty booth across from him.

He then proceeded to crush his own face.

into the table until he was dead.

Both parties say the man was pleading for mercy until he could no longer make comprehensible sounds.

The first man's name was Connor Archer.

He had a wife.

He had a dog named Lucky.

He had two kids, and it was rumored that he had fucked Nance Majors.

Rumored.

This was never proven as a fact.

A week later, employees of Best Buy reported a man screaming for someone to leave him alone and watched as a red line drew across his throat.

And he bled out in agony on their floor.

The customers of that Best Buy saw a man in a beanie ask him if he had fucked his wife.

And then when he defended himself, cut him across the throat with a broken beer bottle.

Oh, and in case it wasn't perfectly fucking obvious, that man had been rumored to have slept with Nance Majors as well.

He left behind a wife and a newborn.

His name was Dwayne.

Danny Majors went with claps to the same place, just as he promised to deal with his unfinished business.

Didn't take long for the story to spread because it just kept happening.

Men rumored to have had an affair with Nance kept dropping dead in increasingly gruesome ways.

Woodchippers, Zambonies,

you fucking name it.

Became a playground for Danny to murder on.

He weren't no ghost.

That man became the fucking devil.

The worst of it was how popular the story became.

The legend of Danny Majors who seeked vengeance on those who dared touch his woman.

A vigilante against adultery who came back from the grave to dish out justice.

They even named him.

Can you believe that?

Cry Wolf.

They named the demon Danny Majors Cry Wolf

because he killed over hearsay.

They made a fucking game out of it.

They made a game out of a murderer.

The man who killed my best friend.

It was like overnight everyone had forgotten what he'd done in his life.

The lowlife that abused, started fights, and killed a man and then himself was now revered as a local legend.

It made my stomach sick.

Nats, too.

But Nat's gone now.

You know, that's the funny thing about a rumor mill.

You never know when it's your turn to take your shift in it.

No one was around for Nats.

He was found with his entrails pulled out.

He was cutting firewood in his backyard when Danny came for him.

So the story goes.

So the story goes.

So there.

There's your fun little ghost story.

Happy?

Now,

please leave me to my drinking.

According to the pretty blonde behind the counter, I'd been seeing Nance behind the bowling alley every couple months for roughly two years.

Well, that's news to me, but I guess this town wanted another story to tell.

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Some of you might know that I was a software developer for 14 years.

Coding was fun for a while until it wasn't.

It's easy to look for distractions to overcome the boredom boredom of functions and call stacks, just like Ryan did.

You see, in this tale, shared with us by author Gerald Burke, Ryan tells us about how he found a game to play, which turns from a quick, fun break into something far more immersive.

Performing this tale is Matthew Bradford.

So try not to get pulled too far from your work, especially with the game called Choice of the Emergency Dispatcher.

My parents taught me when I was growing up that the first step to coming to success in life was to go to college.

They did not, however, explain what would happen if I approached college from a purely utilitarian perspective.

I remember spending my senior year of high school researching salaries, career paths, and earnings statistics for people working in various fields with various levels of education.

Going this route, I found my best value for my money was going to be computer science.

Computer science would allow me to do my four years and come out swinging with a job that would put my peers going into other disciplines in the test.

The thing I never bothered to research was whether programming would actually be something I liked doing.

I found out very quickly in college that it wasn't.

My peers would spend every extra bit of time outside of class programming, not just for assignments, but for portfolio development or challenges and seemingly the pure joy of doing it.

That wasn't me.

That was never going to be me.

I was the kind of kid that knew how to pass a class, and I always did, but I never connected with the material and Anytime I had to sit at the computer for more than a few minutes actually writing code, it felt like a Sisyphian chore.

Nonetheless, I graduated.

No portfolio, no expert coder challenges, no whiteboard practice.

I was fresh, raw, and I felt just as ignorant of my chosen field as I did when I started.

But anyway, this is what all the suffering was building towards.

Getting out there and doing the work, bringing in the salary, and eventually settling down and starting a family.

I had a path.

It was the only one my parents took, and I really didn't know any other.

I wasn't the last of my peers to get hired out.

Believe it or not, there were actually a few people that finished the program that were worse than me.

Some of them are either still looking or moved into different fields.

But after about six months, hundreds of applications, and maybe five interviews, I found someone willing to take a chance on me.

It was a local company.

They had hired a few of my fellow graduates over the summer, and attrition had poked enough holes into their staff that they were gearing up to hire again.

The company had a reputation for snapping up new grads, paying them abysmally, and then getting a new batch each time the last one matured enough for them to get better paying work elsewhere.

It was the kind of job where all you needed was a pulse and some familiarity with a computer.

I was glad for it, and as a student worker for the previous four years, the bad money was still better than any I'd been making up to that point.

I was put on a maintenance team.

Essentially, it was my job to fix issues with our existing programs that were reported by users and rooted through quality assurance as tickets.

I found out after a few months that if I completed at least three tickets a week, regardless of the length of time it took to fix them, management would stay off my back.

I wasn't skilled, and I didn't like it, but I found out pretty quickly that my temperament was far from unusual in my department, and I soon fell into a pattern.

Grab a ticket, fix the issue, stretch the ticket a few days, and sit at my desk and twiddle my thumbs.

Here's where I think it's important to mention that I'm a gamer.

When I was in high school, I would spend a lot of time playing shooters and RPGs.

The strangest part about moving to my career career was that focus started to shift more to niche games.

Particularly, I found myself enjoying the various work simulator games.

As tedious, lax, and unfulfilling as my day job was, I found solace in performing virtual trades.

I was a car mechanic, a truck driver.

I even ran my own pressure washing business.

There was something in these games that gave me a sense of purpose.

Tasks were small and clearly defined, progress was linear, and I could tell that I was getting better as I went along.

I felt like each time I played through one of these games, I was building something.

This was something I didn't have at my day job.

I guess others might have seen it that way, but maybe that's why some of my peers were more successful, but I didn't.

There were only two problems.

The first was that eventually I would hit the upper limit for progress on these games, and playing them no longer felt rewarding.

Because of this, I was always on the hunt for new ones to fill the hole.

The other problem was that many of these games I would play on my home console or through a distribution service on my PC.

The distribution service where I bought and kept most of these games was actually blocked by my works firewall.

I guess there were some incidences where developers were discovered to be playing games their entire shift.

You could get away with a lot, but if the C-level guys ever came into our department, there was a sea of people shutting down browsers, turning off Netflix, and otherwise hitting the boss key on whatever they were doing that wasn't work.

This made it incredibly difficult to try to get away with playing these kind of games at work, in spite of the six plus hours of downtime I had on an average day.

That's how I found the choice of games, a series of games put out by one publisher, but written by a collection of various others.

The games were browser-based text games, easy to play and conceal at work, that allowed you to take on various roles.

I tried a few of them, a samurai game, a vampire game, but none of these scratched my itch.

I was never really a high fantasy person.

In fact, the idea that I could work a job where I wasn't white-knuckling it through every day was all the fantasy I needed.

And some days, I honestly felt like some of the notable high fantasy stories were more believable than a job I didn't hate.

I was close to giving up on these games, finding another avenue, when I came across a listing on their site under the new category, Choice of the Emergency Dispatcher.

The name evoked something in me.

It was right up my alley.

I had even played a game where you simulated the job of emergency dispatcher on my PC at home.

When I opened it up, it was indeed incredibly new.

The release date was the day I first looked at it, and there was only one view listed on the page.

I was the first.

I gave a little look around, the universal sign I was about to do something I probably shouldn't.

My mother had always told me I wore my guilt on my sleeve and I'd be better off being honest.

She wasn't wrong, but no one in my office ever seemed to care enough to notice.

I clicked on the Play Now button and was brought over to a new tab.

The game itself looked identical to the other choice of games, a flat gray background with a chunk of text at the bottom describing the scene.

Beneath it was a series of choices you could select before pressing the continue button.

The first screen read, Welcome to the choice of the emergency dispatcher.

Please select your postal code.

The question caught me off guard.

What bothered me even more was that the three choices given for a postal code included the one where my home address was, and the one where my office was, and another adjacent postal code in town.

This should have struck me as a red flag of sorts.

As a software developer, I knew how trivial it was to ask that information from the browser, but two things were left unanswered.

How did it pull location data from the browser without getting user permission?

And why on earth did it actually need it?

Yeah, at the time, I brushed it off.

For all I knew, I'd given the site location permissions before without thinking about it.

And maybe they were using an API to pull place names to make the game feel more personal.

I was still a a little weirded out, so I selected my work postal code rather than my home one.

Just a little layer of anonymity, as much as could be managed.

When I got to the next screen, I felt vindicated in the explanation I gave myself.

Today is your first day as an Almeida County Emergency Dispatcher.

How are you feeling?

That was my county.

It was nothing sinister, just a clever developer using modern technology to give the game a little bit of flavor.

When I looked down for the choices, I found something else that was different about the game.

There was an input box in the place of the multiple choice menu that was typical of these games.

I groaned a little under my breath.

Text parsing games were fine, but they tended to be more of a pain as you play as they were usually limited to simple combinations of words, arranging nouns and verbs like they were puzzle pieces.

So I answered simply, fine.

I pressed continue and the next prompt came up.

Just fine.

This took me back a little bit, but I just chuckled to myself.

The developer thought he was clever, but at that point my goal became not to play the game, but to break it.

Yeah, I'm not really a big fan of the genre.

I don't want to sit here all day typing jump and eat rock.

I felt suitably smug and self-satisfied, until the response came in.

Don't worry, it's very unlikely you'll have to eat a rock, or jump for that matter.

Your creativity is the only limit to the input that can be processed.

Are you ready to begin?

My blood ran cold, and for a second my lizard brain sent out a distress signal to its big brother.

But then I got it.

It's an LLM.

It was only a matter of time.

An LLM, or a large language model, is a form of artificial intelligence capable of interpreting and producing human-like patterns of language.

The idea of using one of these in a text parser was so simple and clever, I found myself angry that I hadn't thought of it myself.

I remembered that I'd been asked a question.

Now that I was communicating with an entity I could converse with, however inhumanly, I suddenly felt the itch to respond, as if it would have been rude not to.

Yes, I'm ready.

I hit enter and found myself holding my breath in anticipation.

You are sitting at your desk.

A call comes into your queue.

Will you answer it?

I type in yes.

Hello?

Hello, Almeida County Emergency Services.

What is the nature of your emergency?

I had watched enough true crime in my time to get the gist of how to play play an emergency dispatcher.

At least that's how I felt at the time.

It's my dad.

He isn't breathing.

I pulled into the gas station for a drink and when I came back out he was just laying against the window.

I don't think he's breathing.

I don't know what's going on.

Which gas station?

I typed, remembering that figuring out where to locate the person in distress was vital.

The shell by the Kroger.

What's the address?

I knew that wouldn't be enough information.

I tried to rack my brain, but couldn't think of the place the person was describing.

I don't know.

Please, he's not moving.

He's not breathing.

I need someone to come down here.

I need help.

What street are you on?

Um, Sutter, I think.

The humanness of the dialogue seemed different from other LLMs I'd interacted with.

It was a little unnerving.

I found myself jumping over to maps and searching for Shell Sutter Street.

Are you still there?

That response came without a prompt on my end.

It seemed like the game was timed, which annoyed me.

What annoyed me even more was that there was no visual indication of a timer.

Still, I found myself beholden to the sense of urgency.

I'm still here.

I'm trying to pull up your address.

Have you tried taking his pulse?

My search came up with three results.

One of them was near a Kroger grocery store.

It amazed me the level of detail that was put into this.

I can't find his pulse.

I don't know if I'm doing it right.

I don't know how any of this works.

I suddenly realized I had never taken a person's pulse.

I had no idea how to direct them.

I pulled the address from Maps and put it in the input box.

I asked, please send a paramedic to this address.

After I pressed enter, I got a notification on my desktop that paramedics would be en route, with an estimated time of arrival of 15 minutes.

What do I do?

The answer surprised me.

I thought I'd solve the problem with my last message, but the game clearly wanted more for me.

I have alerted the paramedics they are on their way to you.

Please don't hang up.

The message made my heart drop.

I I won't, I promise.

It was the best I could offer in the moment.

I found myself engrossed, invested in this narrative in a way that I'd never been before.

I felt like I was doing something important.

Like I was being there for someone when they needed me.

This was a feeling unlike any I'd experienced in my forays into the genre of simulated work.

When I played my truck driving game, I mean, there was no believable human avatar at the end of the route telling me they needed a thousand gallons of petroleum to save their dying father.

It was intense.

I didn't mean for this to happen.

Change of tone caught me off guard.

Distress had shifted to guilt and shame.

Something in the words was melancholy.

I couldn't explain why I felt this looking at a string of text on a screen, but it was deep and real.

What do you mean?

I asked out of genuine curiosity.

I wanted to see where this was going.

What new twist was going to be added to the narrative.

I left him.

I didn't stop for a drink.

I stopped for a fix.

I go to this gas station station because the bathroom is detached and no one ever uses it.

I must have fallen asleep or something.

I didn't think I was in there that long.

I brought my keys in with me because I needed them.

It dawned on me what they were saying.

I checked the weather report on my desktop and it was a sweltering 90 degrees.

Something I didn't think about sitting in my cool air-conditioned cubicle.

But the game thought of it.

The ingenuity of what they had accomplished was stunning.

However simple the data aggregation they performed was, the outcome was so detailed.

It felt like the game had a real awareness of the world around me.

I should have left the window down or I don't know.

I don't know why I let this happen.

He can't move around on his own and I left him.

I just left him.

I think he's dead.

I really think he's dead.

It's okay.

The paramedics are on their way.

The situation was gut-wrenching, but it was real.

It felt so real.

I ended up chatting with the person on the other end until they said they heard the sirens.

I got got off as soon as I could after that.

It took 15 minutes on the dot, and I had ran over the time I was going to take for my lunch.

The game alerted me that I had another call waiting, but I closed out the browser window, locked my computer, and went out.

The fresh air did me some good.

My thoughts kept going back to the game.

Nothing I'd ever played felt as real as that did.

It was just words on a computer screen, but somehow I felt each one in my bones.

It was deep and real, and I was hooked.

I spent all of my free time the next week playing the game.

I even started to cut into my not-free time, and before long, I wasn't even completing the handful of tickets I usually finished.

By the end of the week, I hadn't closed one.

Friday afternoon, my supervisor pulled me into a room with himself and the principal engineer.

They explained that my performance, well, never stellar, had been slipping below what they could tolerate.

The short of it was, shape up or ship out.

I apologized profusely, and they told me to take the rest of the afternoon off.

I didn't have it in me to sit and play any game, even the one that had consumed my life during the previous week.

I sat on my couch and scrolled social media.

My obsession with true crime media led me to being fed a lot of crime news on my feed, and one post in particular caught my eye.

It was a mugshot of a woman staring red-eyed into the camera, sorrow chiseled deeply into her jaw and the corners of her eyes.

I clicked the image, which linked to a news story.

A woman had called 911 at a gas station where paramedics found her elderly father dead in the passenger seat.

He had been left unattended in the vehicle in the heat for several hours, and the woman admitted to leaving him alone while she did drugs in the bathroom of the gas station.

A wave of recognition and nausea hit me.

I had checked the date on the story.

The events had happened the day before, but the story had been published today.

I searched for any earlier version of the story, thinking that maybe the game had somehow pulled something from the local headlines.

No other similar story appeared, and all evidence pointed to everything having happened when the article stated it had.

It seemed too close to what I had experienced to be a coincidence, that the thought of any alternative led to the onset of a panic attack.

So I did my best to put it out of my mind.

After a long and sleepless Friday night, I got up at 4 in the morning on Saturday and sat down at my desk.

I made a list of every call I had assisted with in the game that I could remember, every detail I could remember, names, addresses, all of it.

The original event happened six days after my interaction with the game, so I started to line up the times and dig into the ones that were six days out from my last contact.

The woman whose son had ingested dish detergent, she didn't pop up, but...

I found reports of a fatal accident on a road that matched with a call I had worked in the game.

I jumped between my list and combing every corner of the internet until Monday morning.

I might have slept a total of two hours the entire weekend.

I was exhausted and convinced that the stupid game I'd been playing was somehow predicting horrible events around me.

But life in the real world crashed in on my caffeine-driven conspiracy.

After the discussion I had with my bosses the previous Friday, I knew I would be summarily fired if I just didn't show up to work.

And maybe they were counting on it.

But I couldn't let it happen.

I had no savings, no backup plan.

If I was fired from that job, I would be homeless by the end of the next rent cycle, and I didn't have the skills to pick up another job in that amount of time.

So I got into work, and I could tell by the looks coming from my coworkers that I looked terrible.

I didn't bother to check myself before I left my apartment, but if I looked a fraction as bad as I felt, I knew I'd be drawing attention all day.

I tried to hunker down on my cubicle and focus on getting caught up.

I even felt like I was hitting my stride when, by lunch, I had finished the ticket that had sat in my queue since the previous week and was well on my way to finishing another.

I decided to sit in my car for lunch.

I wasn't particularly hungry and I had a deep urge to go back to checking headlines.

Another one of my calls had been confirmed, a man that had expressed suicidal thoughts.

The call ended with a gunshot.

That had hurt when it happened, but it hurt more profoundly when I found the story of a man found dead in a car in a grocery store parking lot from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The rest of the afternoon was harder with the weight of yet another life on my shoulders, but I managed to complete my tasks through the day.

And my team lead even offered me concern-tinted smiles whenever he passed my desk.

Around 5 o'clock, my usual time to shut down and go home, I got a desktop notification.

People are dying, Ryan.

They need you.

This chilled me.

I knew there was something more to whatever this thing was, but the fact that it could know my name hadn't dawned on me.

I was about to log into the game to ask how all of this was happening when my boss came around the corner.

He was on his way home as well.

He told me he was sorry about the previous week and he was glad I was showing initiative, but I didn't need to burn myself out.

I smiled a weak smile and locked down my computer.

That night, after cruising the headlines and trying to build up the courage, I finally opened up the game on my home PC.

There was a message waiting for me when I got in.

There is a call waiting in the queue.

Who are you?

How are you doing this?

How do you know my name?

The words came out in mad scratchings.

I hammered the keyboard like a drowning man banging against the side of an abandoned ship.

We know everything about you, Ryan Stancil.

We know you were born in March of 2001.

We know you live at 1312 Crestmoor Drive.

We know that you used to burn your fingers with matches when your father yelled at you.

How we are doing this isn't important.

The only thing that matters is you answer the call.

The forced memory of my father's anger and the ways I would hurt myself to numb the pain caused my body to shake.

I felt defeated, resigned.

I typed, Hello, Almeida County Emergency Services.

What is the nature of your emergency?

I was thankful that the words didn't rely on my shaking chest and lungs to break out into the world.

Tears welled in my eyes.

I was thankful who or whatever was on the other side of this thing couldn't see that either.

It's he's Jesus Christ.

He's dead.

Slow down.

What's going on?

Who's dead?

My time playing the game saw me develop a calm and collected demeanor in responding to calls that I was not able to mimic in that moment.

It's my co-worker.

He's his face is just, I think he shot himself.

I don't know.

I don't know how long he's been here.

My heart dropped out.

Another death I'd have to read about next week.

Another death where I knew deep down there was nothing I could have done to prevent it.

What is your location?

I tried to focus on the task at hand.

If this was real, if this man needed help, I couldn't let any of my other feelings get in the way of that.

Business Informatics.

It's in the industrial park on Kenmore.

132, South Kenmore, I think.

I can't remember our suite number.

Fuck.

That was my work.

That was where I worked.

Somewhere where I worked next week, someone was going to be dead.

Yeah, I needed to find a way, find a way to stop it.

I needed to do something, interfere somehow.

Listen, this is very important.

What is your co-worker's name?

It's Jesus.

It's Ryan.

Ryan Stancil.

Our phone lines have been cut.

The cell signals are lost.

But we will return to delve into your darkest hang-ups when the calls will be coming from inside your house.

The No Sleep Podcast is presented by Creative Reason Media.

The musical score was composed by Brandon Boone.

Our production team is Phil Migulski, Jeff Clement, Jesse Cornette, and Claudius Moore.

Our editorial team is Jessica McAvoy, Ashley McInalley, Ollie A.

White, and Kristen Semito.

To discover how you can get even more sleepless horror stories from us, just visit sleepless.thenosleeppodcast.com to learn about the Sleepless Sanctuary.

Add-free extended episodes each week and lots of bonus content for the dark hours, all for one low monthly price.

On behalf of everyone at the No Sleep Podcast, we thank you for taking our nightmarish calls.

This audio program is copyright 2024 and 2025 by Creative Reason Media Inc.

All rights reserved.

The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors.

No duplication or reproduction of this audio program is permitted without the written consent of Creative Reason Media Inc.

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