Yes, I know, who in their right mind uses TikTok?

I was always starkly opposed to Social Media, especially TikTok. That cesspit of stupidity and regurgitated jokes should’ve never become a thing, and not one as huge as it is today.

I wish I’d never downloaded the damn thing. I really wish. Or maybe… maybe I do, after all? Well, never mind.

One night I was bored. After my computer broke, all I had was my phone. I was never a book guy, hell I didn’t own any and mobile games could only entertain me so much.

So, one day, I gave in and downloaded TikTok as my play store recommended.

At first, I was annoyed, more than annoyed. All I found were short clips of people acting like idiots.

After a while, though, I found the occasional interesting piece of content. Little live hacks, for example. Videos on how to survive in the wild, do-it-yourself guides or how to prepare a hot meal without using a stove. I was always intrigued by these things.

Needless to say, I got hooked.

For the past weeks, however, I got interested in a different type of content, urban exploring that is.

The real deal, I mean. Not the bullshit in which a creator’s friend covered in a bedsheet pretends to be a ghost in a dark hallway.

No, I liked to watch people explore old mineshafts, abandoned buildings or ghost towns.

While it was fun for a while, I didn’t like the fact that I’d never be able to visit any of the places I saw.

After getting acquainted with the shitshow that was TikTok’s search, I began browsing hashtag after hashtag. Eventually, I’d found a few local content creators who explored abandoned places in my area.

Now my city isn’t huge, but it’s not small either, so there was quite a bit of content.

Occasionally, I’d even watch a livestream.

There was something exhilarating about urban exploring. Before long, I put together my own list of places I wanted to see. If I ever left the house, that is, and if I ever was man enough to do so.

Tonight, I was notified about another livestream.

It was by two guys I’d recently discovered. Most of their content was typical for TikTok, stuff I didn’t care about. Sometimes, however, they checked out abandoned palces.

I joined the livestream and heard they were on their way to one of the ‘notorious abandoned areas’ of my city.

“Yeah, bro, this place used to be like hot shit back in the day! Like everyone wanted to live out here!”

“No way, dude. You’re fucking with me! That tower block over there’s going to collapse any minute now!”

“I swear, man, but it was like decades ago. I heard they even wanted to renovate the place at one point, but never did.

“Yeah? Why didn’t they?”

“No clue, place’s a money sink, I guess, or they realized it’s all old shit.”

“Yeah, like the rest of this city!”

Both of them began guffawing, and I couldn’t help but frown. They seemed to talk in the typical, annoying, over-the-top way all influencers did these days. I hated it.

Before long, however, they’d reached a giant, old apartment complex.

For a while, they continued on down a small, deserted street. Then they followed an alley that led them right into the center of the complex. The entire place was ruined. What might have once been a nice little park was now completely overgrown. Rubble was everywhere and here and there I saw stacks of old, half-rotten construction materials.

“Hey man, do you hear that? It sounds like crying or something!” one of them suddenly said.

His friend’s face appeared in front of the camera, an anxious look washed over it. Then he began laughing.

“Fuck, bro, you almost got me!”

By now, both of them were laughing again, like the idiots they were. I wasn’t. God, these guys were annoying.

With a sigh, I put the phone down, ignored their annoying voices, and couldn’t help but stare at the empty wall in front of me. What the hell was I even doing? Why the fuck was I watching some teenagers’ stupid TikTok livestream in the middle of the night?

While I questioned my life choices, a flashlight beam reached me from outside.

In an instant, I got up and went towards my balcony door.

Having a ground-floor apartment always makes me uneasy. The area I live in isn’t a bad one, but it’s not exactly a good one either. You never knew what could happen. One of my biggest fears was to find someone trying to climb onto my balcony and to break into my place.

I took a deep breath. It was probably just someone’s phone. Then I pushed aside the curtain, trying my best to stay hidden.

Right outside, in front of my building, I saw two figures. Each one was holding a flashlight in their hands, blasting their beams over apartments and windows alike. What the hell were they doing? Didn’t they know people were trying to sleep?

Once more, one of them sent their beam straight into my apartment, illuminating my living room.

Those assholes. I bet they were trying to fuck with people!

From outside, I could hear their laughter and their high-pitched teenage voices. Got nothing better to do, eh?

Growing angry, I pushed open the balcony door to tell them to fuck off.

Right when I stepped outside, one of them was actually trying to climb onto my balcony. For a moment, the beam of his flashlight hit me right in the face.

“What the fuck?!” I screamed while I instinctively shielded my eyes from the blinding light.

Screaming in surprise, the guy tumbled backwards and crashed back down over the balcony railing.

In an instant, I was back inside, throwing the balcony door shut. That was it. Now I was pissed. Fucking around with flashlights was one thing, but trying to break into my place was a whole different story.

I put on my shoes, threw on my jacket, and stormed outside. Before I did, I got a hold of a broom.

Just in case, I told myself.

When I pushed open the apartment building’s door, I saw they were still right there. One of them was on the ground, probably hurt from tumbling down, while his friend was trying to help him up.

The moment they saw me, they both froze.

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” I screamed at them.

In my anger, I began waving around the broom, hoping to show them I was serious.

“N-no, we did nothing, I swear! We didn’t know someone lived here, so… We’re sorry, we’re sorry!” one of them called out to me.

By now, the one on the ground had gotten back to his feet.

“Get the hell out of here,” I spat at them, taking a single, well-measured step forward.

By now, both of them were shaking. They were pleading with me, crying and repeating their ‘we’re sorry’ as they backed away.

As I stood there, watching them, this entire situation felt weird. Why the hell were they suddenly so scared? Just moments ago, they’d tried to climb onto someone’s balcony and now…

My anger evaporated, and I almost felt sorry for them. Almost. Still, I lowered the broom and tried to look as non-threatening as possible.

“Yo, I won’t do anything to you guys, all right? Just leave.”

They were still scared, but nodded vehemently, promising they’d never ever be back again. Then they both turned around and booked it.

As I looked after them, I still didn’t know why they’d been so scared. I mean, sure, I’m a big dude, but more fat than muscle. Don’t tell me it’s because of the freaking broom?

On the way back inside, I couldn’t help but laugh about the entire situation. Freaking teenagers…

I’d barely entered my living room when I heard their voices again. I jerked around and went back to the balcony. Don’t tell me…

No one was outside. The balcony was empty, and so was the area in front of the building.

What had I just heard?

Then I saw my phone. TikTok was still open, and the stupid livestream from before was still playing.

“Holy shit, bro, what the fuck was that?!”

“Did you guys see that? Did you just fucking see that?!”

As I picked up the phone, I saw that the two of them were still running.

The chat was going crazy. Messages were coming in at an almost astronomical speed. I could barely read anything, but what I did mentioned the words crazy person and squatter.

As I continued to listen, there was soon no doubt anymore. It was the same two guys, the same two idiot teenagers who’d just tried to break into my place.

Hadn’t they gone to some abandoned area, though? How’d they ended up here?

I reasoned, they’d given up on their urban exploring and went to fuck with people, but…

How’d they made it here so quickly? Wait, where exactly did they go? There weren’t any abandoned places nearby!

By now, more and more people in chat were asking about the abandoned area, about its location. When one of the hosts finally answered, I was even more confused. It was my area, my home. But, this place wasn’t abandoned! I lived here, people lived here! I was right here, sitting in my living room, there was my bedroom and over there… No, calm down, don’t be an idiot!

This was TikTok after all! Who knows, maybe that entire livestream was pre-recorded and in reality they went out to fuck with people for new content. Hell, maybe they found me on their follower list, saw I lived nearby, and decided to prank me or something. Yeah, that had to be it.

The more I tried to convince myself, however, the more I realized how ridiculous those scenarios were. Yet the alternative…

A new notification interrupted my thoughts. It was a new TikTok video, one just posted by the guys whose livestream I’d just watched.

When I read the title, I shivered.

Highlights of the CRAZIEST livestream EVER! Run-in with INSANE squatter! WE almost DIED!!! HOLY SHIT, guys!!!

I read the title again, then once more. With slightly shaking hands, I pressed play.

I watched as the two of them walked past abandoned buildings. Then they were at the apartment complex, moving their flashlights around. Finally, one of them tried to climb onto a balcony.

Right at that moment, an unkempt, bearded guy jumped from an opening that might once have been a balcony door.

“What the fuck?!” I heard him scream.

The phone slipped from my hands and my head spun. There was no way. There was no freaking way!

That was my voice, my face. Only it was… different. In the video, I looked dirty, unkempt, bearded. My voice sounded rougher, deeper, and, most of all… crazier.

I told myself I was wrong. This entire night was getting to me and my mind was playing tricks on me, that’s all.

Then I picked up the phone and played the video again.

There it was. My face. My voice.

I watched as my alter ego burst from the building, holding a metal rod in his hand. I heard, as I screamed at them in an almost incoherent voice. Almost. I understood enough.

“The hell do you think you’re doing!?”

It was the same words. The ones I’d screamed at them not even an hour ago.

In an instant, I threw the phone across the room. There was no way this was real. It had to be fake! Some sort of stupid trick, a deep fake or god knows what!

In an instant, I dashed into my bathroom, turned on the lights and stared at myself in the mirror. There I was, cleanly shaven, slightly muffled hair, but overall, pretty presentable.

Then, for a second, I could almost see my hair grow, could almost see the dirty unkempt beard and the crazy eyes I’d seen in the video.

I cringed back. No, it’s not fucking real!

Back in the living room, I shivered again. Why was it so cold? I could almost feel a breeze blowing through my apartment.

I checked the balcony door again, but it was closed. As I stared outside, however, I wondered.

How long had I lived here?

When had I last spoken to someone?

Hell, when had I last seen anyone else who lived here?

I’m sitting here now, typing this out in as much detail as I can.

I don’t know what the hell’s going on. With all of this. I mean, I’m right here, in my apartment, sitting on my living room couch!

Yet as I’m typing this, I can feel it again, this cold, almost freezing breeze. And every once in a while I almost can’t help going through a beard I know shouldn’t be there.

It all started a few days ago.

What can I say? When you live in a city under lockdown, life can be lonely. I’m sitting here alone, all by myself.

Books, Netflix, and YouTube can only grab your attention for so long. With no chance of real social interaction, I’ve given into more, let’s say, primal urges.

Before I knew it, I was back on trusty old Pornhub. For a while I clicked around, watching random videos before I was awestruck by a certain pornstar. I will not name her here, since my tastes can be a bit… special.

I scurried all over Pornhub for every single one of her videos. Once I couldn’t find any new clips, I visited some other pages. Still, it didn’t even take half the day before I was out of new material.

Eventually my urges drove me to some less secure pages. As I clicked from Google result to Google result, I felt like I was wading through a morass of degeneracy.

I opened page after page, most likely turning my system into a festering pit of malware and viruses. Well, I didn’t really care; I was hooked on this girl and I wanted to find more of her.

It took me a while, but eventually I found a scene I hadn’t watched before. It wasn’t anything special, pretty much your typical porn scene with cheesy music and even cheesier acting.

As the video started to play, something caught my attention.

Down at the bottom, between other related videos, there was one that looked different. The title was gibberish, the preview the grainy image of an attractive woman that seemed to stare at me. It was unnerving, yet strangely mystifying.

Postponing my immediate pleasure, I decided to investigate and opened this video in a new tab.

When I clicked play I saw a grainy, low saturated view of a room. It reminded me of those old home videos.

The camera was completely still, pointing at the woman from the preview. She was sitting on a chair at the back of the room, wearing nothing but black lingerie that hid almost nothing of her voluptuous body. Her hands played with her long, dark hair in a bored, almost distracted manner. It seemed as if she was unaware of being filmed.

As I continued to watch, the video gave me a strange vibe. There was something wrong about it. Yet, as second after second passed, nothing happened. She just kept playing with her hair. I was about the close the video when the woman suddenly looked up and focused on the camera. Her intent stare startled me and it felt almost as if she was staring directly at me. A sly smile appeared on her face and her eyes grew a tad bit wider.

All right, now we’re on to something, I thought.

For a second she bit her lip, and inhaled deeply, pushing out her heavy breasts.

A moment later, she threw her head to the side and giggled. I looked wrong, somehow. Her head was hanging at an angle that made me think her neck was broken. It lasted only for a few seconds before she was smiling again. No, I realized, she was grinning.

She moved forward to the edge of the chair and slid to the ground. There was something sensual about the way she moved her body, sensual and dangerous, reminding me of the way a snake moved.

She slowly pushed herself up on her elbows, her face still showing that same hungry grin. Then she began crawling forward.

No, not crawling. The way she moved was entirely wrong. It was as if she was slithering forward. Her arms entangled her body, moving over every inch. For a moment she threw herself onto her back, and a strange sound escaped her throat. It was a moan, but at the same time it wasn’t. It started high-pitched and ecstatic, but sizzled off into a sort of hiss.

This was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t help but lean forward. I was rock-hard as I watched this strange woman.

“Why don’t you come over here,” she whispered as she stared at the camera.

Again, her voice trailed off into this strange hissing sound.

She was quiet for a moment, unmoving, staring at the camera as if waiting for an answer.

I expected some guy to enter the scene, but instead she continued on, slithering towards the camera.

The closer she got, the more details I noticed about her. There was something about her hands, her fingers. They looked malformed, almost claw-like. When she closed her eyes and reopened them, her blue eyes that had been there before had been replaced by something green and snake-like.

I had to admit, whoever had made this weird fetish video knew what they were doing.

By this point, she’d almost reached the camera. Once more she stopped, again staring at the camera, but this time with such intensity that I could almost feel her stare on me.

“Don’t be shy,” she whispered and for the blink of an eye I thought I saw a snake’s tongue flash between her lips.

She crossed the remaining distance and pushed herself onto her knees in front of the camera. I waited for her to stand up, but at that moment I got a better view of her feet. They looked strange, as malformed as her fingers or… grown together?

A feeling of unease washed over me, but a moment later all I could see was her face. It was right in front of the camera. Her mouth was twisted into the same hungry grin, but with each passing second it grew wider, almost dividing her face. Her eyes blinked once, twice, before she spoke again.

“Well, if you won’t come over here, maybe I should come over there,” she hissed.

With that, her claw-like fingers grabbed a hold of the camera and she began pushing her face against it. At first she was only slightly touching it, but soon she pushed herself hard against the glass. All the while her hungry were staring directly at me.

I sat there, frozen, my erection all but gone, watching the strange spectacle in front of me.

And then it happened. It was a moment before I closed the video, but it looked almost as if my screen was bulging outward.

I cursed, sweating heavily. What the fuck kind of video was that? Who the hell got off to shit like that?

Well, I thought, after the initial shock was over, probably quite a few people.

I laughed at my little freak-out. Man, there’s some weird shit out there on the internet.

I shook my head and went back to the video of my new favorite girl that I’d discovered before. Man, just seeing her lying on the bed like this made me hard again.

When the action in the video started, I got ready for some action of my own. I’d barely started when I noticed something. Back, far back in the room’s corner, I saw a figure. A female one.

At first I thought this might be a threesome, but I quickly realized there was something wrong about this figure and I knew what it was. The same dark long hair, the same weird fingers and the same weird movements.

The snake-woman slithered through the backdrop of the scene, inching closer to the action on the bed. I froze, staring in absolute disbelief at what I was seeing. How in the hell was something like this possible? This made no sense!

Over the cheesy music and the moans of the two actors, I heard her hissing voice again.

“Now, why are you so shy?”

She slithered onto the bed, joining the two people already on it. She moaned and giggled as she entangled the woman, snaking her body around hers. A moment later, she pushed herself up again, twisting her body into an angle that made you think her spine had popped. She got a hold of the man, pushed herself against him and smiled at me.

The two actors continued their scene, oblivious to the giggling intruder that had joined them. All the while, her eyes rested solely on me and all the while her hungry grin remained.

The moment she pushed herself off the bed and up against the camera again, I closed the video. Fuck this! Fuck this site, fuck this video and fuck whatever this thing was!

It had to be some stupid trick. Some dipshit’s idea of a prank. Uploading this strange video of a snake-like woman and then altering all the related videos to fuck with people.

Yeah, it would a ton of work. Hell, it’s probably impossible! I just tried to reason with what I’d seen.

After that, I didn’t watch porn anymore. Instead, I stepped away from the computer altogether and decided to read a book. God knows, maybe sitting in front of the damned computer for a whole week had done something to my brain.

When I got up the next day, however, I was right back on Pornhub. By then, I’d already struck up what had happened at some strange internet mystery and moved on.

The moment I opened the very first video, though, I saw her again. She was lurking in the back of the scene, smiling at me from afar before she slithered towards the camera once more.

I don’t know how many videos I opened or how many pages I visited, but she was always there, always lurking somewhere in the background as if waiting for me.

At first it was only in porn videos, but a day later I discovered her in others. She appeared in YouTube videos and on streaming platforms. Hell, I even noticed her in a freaking Netflix movie.

I tried to reason with myself again. This had to be some super advanced computer virus. Some piece of complicated software that altered videos and replaced segments of it with this weird creature.

While I was scanning my computer, desperately trying to prove to my theory, I saw something from the corner of my eye.

I jerked around, but the moment I looked it was gone. I could’ve sworn there had been something on the ground, something that slithered towards me from the back of the room.

As I’m typing this now, I don’t dare to look anymore; I don’t dare to even move, because I can feel her hungry eyes on the back of my neck. And every so often, I hear a low hissing sound from right behind me.

I know I’m not just by myself anymore. I’m not alone anymore, but dear God, I wish I was.

Some of you might be puzzled a bit about the title.

An online scavenger hunt is a series of riddles or puzzles on the internet. Throughout the years there have been quite a few them. The most famous example, without a doubt, are the puzzles created by Cicada 3301.

As long as I can think back, I’ve been interested in puzzles and riddles. I guess it’s a mixture of curiosity and wanting to challenge myself.

When I was little, I spent a lot of time with puzzle games and the likes. Once I grew older, during the advent of the internet, I also started to look for them online.

In the past, I’ve taken part in a few of them. Most of the ones I found were rather simple and usually ended with a troll face or silly message. I know some supposedly reward the winner with a price, like the Cicada puzzles mentioned above. Regrettably, I’ve always missed out on them.

Two weeks ago, I finally got my chance to take part in an online puzzle that was a bit more complex. As I’m sitting here now, typing this out, I wish I didn’t…

It was on a Saturday evening that I stumbled upon a strange Tumblr post. It had been reblogged by a few of the accounts I follow. Most of their content is about curious internet stories and hidden pages. When I saw that a post made the rounds, I took a more in-depth look.

Going through the chain of comments and reblogs, I learned that people had actually deciphered a message included in the post. It led to a page on blogger.com that consisted of several cryptic blog posts.

Most of them were quotes by famous people and a few nonsensical sentences below. Two of the posts even contained images.

It didn’t take long for me to find an invite to a discord server that someone had created to solve whatever this was.

All in all, there were about thirty people on the server. When I joined, only a few were actually online. They were busy talking about the blog post and trying to find a connection between the quotes. So far, it seemed, nothing had proven useful.

There was one user, however, that stuck out between the rest. His name was FireSnake89.

While everyone was talking about the quotes and trying to figure out a hidden message, this guy said it was all a waste of time. His posts were riddled with insults like ‘freaking idiots,’ ‘mouthbreathers’ or ‘tumblrfags.’ I sighed when I saw his messages. Found the troll, I thought.

My opinion of him changed would soon change. It wasn’t long before he proclaimed he’d figured it all out. Of course, people called him out. After five minutes of explaining and mentioning the power of his ‘boundless autism,’ everyone was quiet.

The quotes he said, were all from famous works of fiction. That’s all there was to them. Sure, the theme of the quotes was related, but that was only there to lead people astray. He continued on about different editions of books, publishers, checksums and a hidden message on the website itself.

“It wasn’t too tough,” he bragged, “just a bit tricky.”

Sitting in front of my computer, I couldn’t help but be impressed by this guy. I’d no clue how he’d figured out half of it.

“Let’s see if you dumbasses can figure out the rest on your own,” he wrote and posted a line of numbers and letters:

696e7374616772616d2e636f6d2f626c75727065310a

My first impulse was to enter it into Google, but that didn’t give me any results. A chat message by another user proved that I wasn’t the only one dumb enough to try this.

At first, I started to calculate the digit sum of the numbers between the letters, to see if that give me a hint. It was all nonsense, though. Another attempt at using Google didn’t help either.

I sat there, puzzled, staring at the numbers and letters when it hit me. I’d seen something like this before, hadn’t I? All the letters were from early in the alphabet. There had to be a reason for this.

Right away, a memory from my IT class came back to me. HEX code consisted of nothing but numbers and the first six letters of the alphabet!

Looking at the line that Fire Snake had posted, I realized that the highest letter was indeed an f. That was the highest letter in HEX code as well.

I started dividing up the line into pairs, which gave me this:

69 6e 73 74 61 67 72 61 6d 2e 63 6f 6d 2f 62 6c 75 72 70 65 31 0a

Moments later, I entered it into a HEX converter. I’d expected it to give me nothing but a garbled mess, but what appeared on my screen was the URL of an Instagram profile.

instagram.com/blurpe1

I blinked, pressed convert again, and then entered the URL into my browser. To my surprise, a somewhat typical Instagram profile appeared on my screen.

It was supposedly the profile of a twenty-two-year-old girl. There was a URL that led to a simple WordPress site. The account itself consisted of half a dozen pictures, all of the same girl.

I posted it in the discord chat. Three other users were still trying to figure out what the line of numbers and letters meant.

Once I’d posted it, the chat was quiet for a moment before people asked me to explain.

The first replay came from FireSnake, saying that there seemed to be at least one person with half a brain in here. I’m a bit embarrassed, but I smiled at this ‘compliment’ by someone who was obviously much smarter than me.

For the next half hour, I started to check out the Instagram profile as well as the WordPress site. I didn’t even know where to start. I clicked through the pictures, checked out comments, read through the WordPress site, but I was utterly overwhelmed.

In the end, I said goodbye to the people on discord, told them I’d be there again tomorrow and headed to bed.

When I got up the next day, the first thing I did was to recheck discord. The chat was a bit more active now, and quite a few people were online. Most of them talked about the WordPress site on which they’d supposedly found a hint. I was about to ask them what they’d found, but I saw I’d got a message by FireSnake. It was a simple one-liner:

“That WordPress site is a red herring, check the hashtags.”

I asked him what he meant, but I saw he wasn’t online at the moment or at least invisible. Needless to say, I didn’t get an answer.

It was about an hour later that I’d put the next clue together, a short little riddle. It took me quite a bit to figure out the answer, but once I did the next step was clear: Using Google Images.

I was about to post it in the general chat of the discord, but the moment I was about to send it I paused. Then I deleted the message and opened the private chat with FireSnake.

This time a reply came back almost instantly.

“Not bad,” was all I got.

After I returned from the kitchen to get another cup of coffee, he’d sent me a couple more messages.

So far, he hadn’t figured out the next step. He said he had a few ideas, but nothing feasible. I asked him why he didn’t say anything in the general chat. His answer was short:

“You think those idiots can figure shit out?”

When I took a look at the chat, I saw that people were still analyzing the WordPress site. To be honest, he had a point.

It was from this time onward that we started to work together.

I’d planned to hang out with friends that Sunday, but I ended up canceling. Instead spent the rest of the day figuring out a few more clues with FireSnake.

To be honest, I’d no clue why he needed my help. Apart from a few flashes of inspiration, I felt utterly useless and always a few steps behind. I was hooked on solving this thing, though. I really wanted to see where it would lead us.

For the next couple of days, I was obsessed with this thing. I did nothing but going to work and trying to figure out clues. Even at work, I spent more time with these online riddles than actually doing my job.

During these days, FireSnake and I scanned various websites, Facebook profiles, talked to automated chatbots and even sent an email to an autoreplier. This whole thing was nothing short of absolutely fascinating.

I also learned a few more things about my new friend. He told me his real name was Mike. He’d been kicked out of university a good year ago and ever since he’d been unemployed. The guy seemed to be the prime example of a basement dweller, but man was he smart. He told me he dabbled in a few things online, like cryptocurrencies, private bot networks, and automated blogs. So far, none of them had really taken off. So for now, he spent most of his days on the internet, doing things like this scavenger hunt.

Needless to say, he was quite the weirdo. Still, figuring this thing out together was fun.

It was near the end of the week that I told him I’d not be around for a while. I’d be attending a family gathering on Friday and Saturday. He gave me his condolences and made a few weird jokes, but said I should have fun. He’d see what he could figure out on his own.

While I was with my family, I still checked discord on my phone every once in a while. There was the occasional message by him, in which he told me what progress he’d made. On Saturday afternoon, he got quiet, though.

Once I was back home, I sent him a message, joking how unexpected it was for him to be stuck that long. I figured he’d be offline, but even after a couple hours had passed, I got no reply.

After that, I decided to follow his progress. It was much harder than I’d expected. Mike had a cryptic way of talking and always forgot to mention half the things he’d figured out.

I messaged him a few more times, asking about some of the clues, but still got no reply. Had he solved the whole thing on his own already? If so, fuck me.

In the end, I decided to solve this thing on my own if that was even possible. I checked the general chat, but people were still way behind.

As I kept going, I noticed a few things. The links that led me on weren’t hard-coded anymore. Instead, they seemed to be dynamically generated. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it, but then it clicked. From a certain point onward, it seemed that people got their own, private clues.

I couldn’t help but smile. This was very interesting. I wondered how much effort went into creating a thing like this. Maybe this was the reason Mike hadn’t answered me? I was sure he’d figured this out days ago and was busy solving them on his own now.

Making progress was tough. I noticed that things got a bit easier, though. Before it had been all about hidden messages and Metadata. Now, it was more about simple riddles or figuring out specific lines of text. Maybe it was to discourage team efforts from here on out? Either way, I continued on.

It was five days ago that one of the clues made me scratch my head. It was clear that I was supposed to figure out a specific location.

I went over it and couldn’t help but laugh when I realized that my home area would fit the clue quite well. I continued tinkering with it, but the longer I did, the more it seemed I’d already found the solution. It was, without a doubt, my home area’s name.

I sat back, a bit confused. So far, all the clues and riddles had been in English and were related to American pop culture. So why did it suddenly talk about an area in the middle of nowhere in Germany?

I shrugged it off. Maybe the creator of this thing had included a few bits and pieces here and there related to my IP address? It wouldn’t be too farfetched, and it was an excellent addition. Still, were those riddles and clues automated as well? Would someone go to such lengths for something like this?

The next clue proofed that he indeed would. I felt weird when I was sent to the Wikipedia page of the next town over. I was supposed to search through the recent edits. In there, I found a link to yet another random blog post.

The next clue, however, sent me to a picture stream, showing locations in my town.

I leaned back in my chair, baffled. How in the hell. Finding the rough area I lived at was one thing, but finding my exact town solely via IP was impossible. It made no sense. Was it a coincidence? Could it be that this thing was just using different towns in the area?

The riddle this time was simple. It was a URL hidden in the website’s code.

Once I’d followed the link though, I couldn’t pretend that all this was happening by chance anymore.

What I stared at was a picture of my room, obviously recorded by my webcam.

For a while, I sat there, too shocked to do anything. Then m hand shot forward, turning it away before I disconnected it altogether.

What the hell was going on? Then I realized that I must’ve been hacked. This whole thing had just turned into a stupid joke to fuck with me, hadn’t it?

Well, really funny, I thought, really fucking funny. I was sure by now that this was all nothing but a stupid troll. I was about to just close the page when I read the text below the picture.

‘Enter the name:’

Next to it was a text field in which I could enter text.

Yeah right, I thought at first. After a while, though, my curiosity took over. I’d spent more than a week trying to solve this thing, and even if it was all bullshit, I wanted to get to the end.

What name, though? What was I supposed to enter? I looked at the image of my room again. There was my bookshelf, my bed and the pictures on my wall. Was he talking about one of the books? I haphazardly entered the names of various authors, but none of them worked. I leaned in closer and looked at the picture intently.

After a couple minutes, I felt strangely watched and jerked around, but I was obviously alone. I rubbed my temples and told myself it was all a stupid joke.

For the next half hour, I tried everything I could think off. Hell, I tried my own name, but nothing worked.

It was at this point that I noticed something. It was a picture of my girlfriend and I sitting on my bookshelf. When I entered her name, the page started to load, indicating that I’d solved this riddle.

I was waiting for yet another cryptic message, but I was greeted by a page that said ‘WINNER’ at the top.

I frowned, waiting for a troll face or rickroll to appear on the screen, or hell maybe a picture of me sitting in front of my computer, looking like an idiot.

Instead, a short sentence appeared in the middle of the screen:

‘The greatest reward of all is the truth.’

As I read the message list of eight links appeared on the screen below. ‘Secret 1’ was the first going on until ‘Secret 8’.

What the hell? Don’t tell me this was some shitty conspiracy theory or esoteric bullshit. I was prepared for almost anything. To find out that Trump was a lizard person, that Obama was an alien or to see some sort of sick graphical images.

I took a deep breath and clicked the first link.

What opened up was a recording of Facebook.

I stared at it in confusion, but then I realized it was my girlfriend’s profile. How the hell was there a recording of her account?

Whoever was recording this clicked around for a bit before the messenger was opened. One was a conversation with a guy from our group of friends. The cursor moved down and started to highlight messages one after another.

“How are you doing today, sexy girl?”

“Kinky, what about you? :-*”

“Won’t Robert be mad if you send something like this to me? :p”

“Haha, no way, he’s got no clue about us ;)”

As I continued reading, my heart dropped. What the hell was this? Was this… real? Did this mean that Claudia was cheating on me? What the fuck?! What the fuck was going on here?

I clicked back. This had to be some sort of stupid troll that was trying to trick me!

I clicked on the next one and found a different recording. This one was of an email account. At first, I thought it was mine, but when I scanned the screen, I could see that it was my mom’s Gmail account. Why the hell would someone hack her email?

Then I saw the cursor move around once more. One after another, it opened up various emails about cancer treatments and medications. I felt very cold all of a sudden. A thought appeared in my mind, but I quickly pushed it away. Mom had been sick for a while, but she’d said it was nothing but a long lasting cold, hadn’t she?

I went through the other links. As the title said, they all revealed the secrets of people I knew.

One showed me that my best friend had raped a girl, but got away due to the influence of his parents. Another proved that my uncle had been cheating on his wife for years by now.

I don’t know anymore why I kept going, but I clicked through all of them. Afterward, I felt empty, cold, and most of all, crushed.

Again, I read the message that truth was the greatest reward of all.

I cursed at the screen and at this whole damned thing. Why the fuck would anyone do this? Why would someone send me all this information? Was it just to fuck with me? Why?

It was right at this time that discord notified me that I’d gotten a direct message. I clicked and saw that it was from Mike.

“Congratulations on making it to the end. Took you a bit longer than I expected, but it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it? Thanks for playing, and I hope you enjoyed your reward?”

I was in a pure and utter rage, insulting him and asking him how the hell he’d found out who I was. All I got was another condescending message.

“Now riddle me this. Why do you think I forced you to send me an email and log into your Facebook account? It was too damn easy to get your private data.”

I didn’t type my next message. No, I almost beat it into the keyboard. I asked him what he got from this and why he was doing all this. His answer was as simple as can be. It was only one line that he sent before he blocked me.

“You know, some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Ever since live webcam feeds became popular, I’ve been a fan of them. It’s strangely relaxing to watch them.

I’m not talking about streamers on Twitch or other pages like that. I’m talking about live feeds of public places.

By now there are millions of them out there. You can watch a public square in the center of Tokyo, switch to a small town in Eastern Europe and after that look at a busy street in the US.

What I was most interested though were the feeds of my own city.

I often sat in front of my computer, wondering what other people were up to at the same moment. How many people were sitting together with friends and family? How many were alone? How many people were born and how many died at this exact moment?

These questions often lingered in the back of my mind. These feeds helped me to satisfy my curiosity, at least to a degree.

It wasn’t long though before I tired of the normal feeds. In the end, it was nothing but watching public places and open spaces. I wanted something different, something more intimate.

It was right here on Reddit that I stumbled upon a different type of feed.

I didn’t know they existed, but there are thousands of hacked webcams and compromised security cameras out there. Nowadays, everything is digitized. Most people have a webcam at home.

It was satisfying to watch people in secret. You could simply turn in to someone else’s life and see raw, unfiltered events.

I could see the dreadfully boring atmosphere in an open-space office or watch a happy family of three playing a board game.

All of those were only mildly interesting though. Once I started to dig, however, I eventually stumbled upon things that were a bit stranger.

One feed was from an office in my city. The walls were plastered with motivational pictures and far eastern dogmas. The moment I opened the feed, a strange productivity ritual was going on. There was no sound of course, but watching a dozen people move in unison as if in a trance was creepy enough.

Another feed showed me an old man in a wheelchair. For a while, the man was going through a book, but then a young woman entered the room. She was wearing a nursing outfit and brought a bucket into the room with her. She filled it with water and started to wash the old man’s body. The weird part began when she undressed as well and started to wash her own, naked body in front of the man.

There were many other such feeds. In one, I saw middle-aged woman hugging a life-sized doll that looked exactly like her. Another one showed a family in a perpetual argument, screaming at each other and behaving like rabid animals.

What made things even worse was the integrated chat function. If you tuned in to one of those compromised feeds, you’d automatically join a chat. People in there were going livid, poking fun at and laughing about the miserable lives of others.

I’d like to tell you that I was disgusted by it, but to be honest, I was fascinated. The people on screen, the chat, my own emotions. It all came together into a weird, strange mix that made me feel alive.

I longed to peek into people’s private lives. To see what was below the mask. I searched for feeds that allowed me to satisfy my own voyeuristic tendencies.

At first, I’d switched through these feeds randomly. Soon enough though I reverted back to my old habit. I started searching for feeds in my city specifically.

Most of the feeds I found had specific names. I guess it had to do with the set-up. As I went through the list, I saw SecurityCamera1A, Lobby-21-C, Bedroom, MyHome2, and so on.

When I stumbled upon one that consisted of nothing but numbers and letters, my interest was piqued.

The preview was nothing but a dark screen.

I clicked it and was greeted by complete darkness. At first, I frowned and thought the camera might be broken. Then I noticed something moving in the dark. I tried my best to figure out what it was, but it was too damn dark to see anything.

Was the camera indoors or outside? Frustrated, I was about to close the feed off, but then I saw more movement.

I cursed and leaned forward, trying to figure out what I was watching. Suddenly a flood light came on, and for a moment, I cringed back.

When I looked at the screen again, I saw that the broadcast came from a vast hall. No, I realized when I saw the empty shelves that lined the walls, a warehouse.

The camera had to be situated in one of the upper corners to allow a view of the whole area.

As I watched, I saw people walking around. Was this the security camera of some warehouse? Was I watching a nightshift or something?

When more people came into view, I realized that couldn’t be it. No one would need a dozen people to take care of a warehouse, let alone multiple dozen. As I continued to watch, I saw that there had to be at least fifty people there. Some were dressed in casual cloth, others were wearing more expensive outfits.

Had I stumbled upon a private party? Or hell, maybe this was a secret meet-up? In my mind, ideas about underground society and secret cults formed. Then I laughed out loud. This was real life and not Hollywood!

It was probably nothing remotely like what I’d imagined. Hell, it might be a start-up that had bought this old warehouse and planned to transform it into a make-shift office or something equally dull. Still, I told myself I’d watch for a bit longer.

When I saw people dressed up like security guards, I watched with more interest. They seemed to talk to one of the more costly dressed people and soon vanished again, off camera. Then people looked up to somewhere else that I couldn’t see. I cursed, these damned feeds never had any freaking audio. I wanted to hear what was going on, for Christ’s sake!

What’s this shit? someone typed into the chat next to the camera feed.

I always ignored the chat. I really didn’t want to interact with anyone. When I checked it out now, I saw that three other people were watching the feed with me.

Illuminati, someone else answered.

Yep, that’s precisely why I didn’t associate with these people.

As they continued to talk about what the Illuminati planned to do at an abandoned warehouse in some random city, I continued to watch the feed.

Right now a new figure came into view. He walked between the assembled people who formed a circle around him. The man was holding a microphone and addressed everyone present.

Must be a party, after all, I thought.

Suddenly there was movement from outside the circle. Two of the security guards moved towards it, dragging a third man behind them. He was struggling in their grip, trying to get away.

Alright, what the hell was I watching?

The man was thrown into the middle of the circle. He looked around, visibly agitated and seemed to yell at the attendees. Many times he tried to break from the circle, but each time the security guards stopped him.

As I watched the man’s desperate attempt at escape, I almost missed the other figure who walked towards the circle. The moment I noticed him though, I couldn’t look away anymore.

This guy was tall, unnaturally tall. He seemed to be at least a head taller than everyone else. The camera was a bit too far away, so at first, I thought he was wearing a mask. When he opened his mouth though I realized that this had to be his real face.

There was only the hint of a nose between scar tissue, and his mouth seemed almost lipless. His arms were massive, bulking with muscles and ended in hands the size of bear paws. What the hell was this guy?

People in chat went wild when they saw him. I read the words mutant, super solider, and even a reference to Resident Evil. I frowned.

The moment the man reached the circle, the attendees hurried out of his way to let him pass. When the other man saw this hulking abomination, he tried to escape once more, but it was futile.

By now, all the attendees seemed to be in a state of utter excitement. The man with the microphone first turned towards the smaller man who’d tried to escape. Then he turned to the freak show of a man that had just entered the circle.

He nodded at both of them before he turned around and joined with the rest of the attendees in the circle. People were applauding and yelling, and I finally realized what I was watching.

This was a fight, a pit fight to be precise.

Freakshow, the name I’d given to the abomination, stepped forward. With no more than a few steps, he’d crossed the distance between himself and the other man.

The man reacted quickly and escaped to the other side of the circle. Whenever he got too close to the attendees, though, they pushed him forward to the center again.

It wasn’t long before Freakshow was able to grasp the man and threw him to the ground. The man got back to his feet, but a moment later, Freakshow’s giant first connected with his face. Blood exploded into the air, and the man was blown off his feet.

“Holy shit,” I pressed out.

The audience exploded into applause again.

The man got up once more, but he was staggering. Then he leaned to his right. One of the audience members had handed him something.

Only when he charged forward, did I see that he was holding a metal rod. Freakshow raised his giant arms to protect his face, but one of the hits still connected. This sent him into a frenzy. A second hit connected as well, but there was no visible reaction.

When the third blow came, Freakshow effortlessly caught the metal rod. He ripped it from the other man’s hands and kicked him backward. This time he didn’t go down, but a swing of the metal rod finished the job.

Freakshow went forward and put his foot on the man’s chest. I saw the small frame desperately trying to get away. Then Freakshow took the metal rod and rammed it into the guy’s face.

The feed was silent, yet I could hear the man’s painful screams in my head. Blood and teeth splattered over the floor.

Jesus Christ, what the fuck was I watching? I’d thought this was just some sort of fight, but this went way too far! The fight was over now, wasn’t it? That guy couldn’t possibly fight anymore!

It wasn’t over yet, though.

With one hand Freakshow shoved the metal rod straight into the man’s ravaged mouth. Then he raised his other hand high into the air before he brought his fist down on top of the metal rod with full force.

For a few moments, the body below him was convulsing before he lay still.

I sat in front of the camera, stunned. I stared at the screen unblinking. Had I seen what I thought I had?

On the feed, the man with the microphone walked back into the center of the circle. He raised Freakshow’s arm up into the air, most likely proclaiming him the winner of the fight. The audience exploded into toneless cheering, while security dragged the body of the loser off camera.

Had I really watched someone being murdered?

Chat was slow now. Everyone must’ve been as shocked as I was.

Is this real, guys? one person typed.

Probably a movie or something, another answered.

A movie? But there was no set. No film crew, no other cameras, nothing. It had looked so damn realistic!

Right at this moment, a new person entered the chat.

Guess you’ve been watching, haven’t you?

No shit, someone answered. Similar comments by the remaining two followed.

Well, then you know that you should at least mask your IP address and cover your own camera. Otherwise, it’s really easy to figure out where you are.

When I read this, I froze. I looked at the webcam on top of my monitor. I stared directly into it and only now did I notice the tiny, green light that showed it had been active all along.

In an instant I ripped it off my computer and moments later I closed the strange camera feed.

However, there’d been one last message. I’d only seen it for the blink of an eye, yet I’d read it.

It was only two little words that drove me into a state of sheer and utter panic.

Too slow.

I first heard about ‘The World of the Macabre’ about a week ago.

It was in a post by one of my favorite horror writers, Melody Madness.

She’s a rather niche writer. I found her work half a year ago and loved it ever since. You could say I’m a bit obsessed with her work.

Melody is great, fantastic even, but as I said, she’s still mostly unknown. It’s a shame. She really deserves more recognition.

The moment she announced she’d be featured in a new, upcoming podcast I was as excited as she seemed to be about it. On Facebook, she wrote that the creators reached out to her and wanted to feature her story in the pilot episode. The name of the podcast was ‘The World of the Macabre.’

The pilot episode was to be a special event done live on air at first. Later on, it would be distributed online as well. It was an interesting idea.

Melody wrote that she’d do a live reaction stream on Facebook to help with the promotion.

The moment I read this looked up. Melody liked to play around with Meta elements to give her audience a bit of an extra edge. Many times before she’d posted random updates about her day or her life in general, only for things to get a bit strange as she kept updating. You’d only realize after a while that you were actually reading another one of her stories. I loved the style. So the moment I read about a live reaction, I was sure she’d planned a bit more.

When the day of the stream arrived, a happy, bouncy Melody greeted me and the handful of other fans that had joined. She said the podcast was scheduled to start in about twenty minutes. Until then, she’d talk a bit about future plans and upcoming stories.

Sipping from a cup of coffee she told us about new ideas and a novella she was working on. It was mostly incoherent ramblings due to her excitement.

“God,” she laughed, “I’m so scatterbrained today.”

After a while, she decided to tell us a bit more about the podcast.

One day an email arrived in her inbox, asking if she wanted one of her stories featured on an upcoming podcast. When she checked out the website, everything looked fine and professional. So she wrote back almost instantly that she’d be happy to contribute. After a bit of back and force, she sent them a few of her stories and let them pick one of them.

“You’ve got no idea how excited I am about this! They even said they are going to pay me $50 for it! Maybe this can be the start of something big!”

Can you link the website? I typed in the chat.

“Sure, hold on, Megan. I’m going to copy it!”

She clicked around for a while and then posted the link in the chat.

“Hm, that’s strange, it doesn’t seem to work anymore,” she said, scratching her head.

When I tried to open the link all I got was a blank page.

They are new? I typed once more.

“Yes, the creator was in touch with me and told me it was a sort of passion project for him. They created the website only recently. He told me they got in contact with quite a few writers, but I was their first choice!”

Congratulations and thumbs up flooded the chat.

“So, do you guys think-“

Melody broke up when the podcast suddenly started.

“Friends of the macabre, welcome to the very first episode of our special podcast, The World of the Macabre!”

The voice of the man was loud and booming, almost thunderous. He had a weird accent, stretching some of the vowels a bit too much.

“Today, on this very first episode, we’re honored to feature a very special, writer, Melody Madness!”

Melody was beaming when she heard her name spoken out loud.

“This is it, everyone! God, I’m so excited!” she called out.

“The story we’re going to feature this evening can be best described as a true crime, murder mystery,” the host continued.

“I guess you could call it that,” Melody said frowning for a moment. As soon as the host started narrating though, she was all smiles again.

“Night had descended, and the sun had handed over the world to her nocturnal sister. In the glimmer of the moonlight, hidden between long shadows, a man followed a lonely road. There’s but one thing on his mind, the thirst for blood. As this ghastly abomination in human form made his way…”

The production of the show wasn’t the best. It was rather amateurish, to be honest. The voice of the narrator, however, made up for it. His accent worked exceptionally well to put you into the right mood. As the minutes went by, and the story continued, I could see that Melody’s expression changed. From a happy and excited one, it turned to one of confusion.

“Wait a moment, I didn’t write that! That’s not my story!” Melody called out all of a sudden.

Not your story? I thought they said yours would be featured? Maybe they’ll narrate it after this one?

“No, it is my story, at least the beginning, but they changed the rest!” she exclaimed.

“Why are they doing this? I should write them another email and-“

Suddenly a low noise could be heard in the background. It sounded almost like scratching. The moment Melody heard it, she looked up.

“What was that? Y-you guys heard it, right?”

“Slowly ever so slowly our hunter stalked his prey.”

People were quick to reply in the chat, asking if something was wrong. As I watched on, I started to smile. Melody was doing it again. This had to be another one of her shenanigans. I knew a live reaction was a bit too lame and straightforward for her. I leaned in closer and watched the stream with double the interest.

“He didn’t open the door just yet. The night was still young, and it was still too early to make a move.”

“Alright guys, I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is getting creepy. You heard that noise, didn’t you?”

“From afar the hunter kept track of his prey. His victim was still there, still oblivious and still… moving. For you see, a coffee is not always just a coffee. There are many ways to make someone compliant, but as our Melody here knows, some are better than others.”

Melody jerked around and picked up the cup of coffee she’d finished right before the start of the podcast.

“No way, it was just a story,” she pressed out. She picked up her phone, but right then something hit the window, and the phone slipped from her hands.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” she said over and over again.

The chat exploded with activity. No one knew what was going on.

Once more noises could be heard in the background. Melody’s eyes were wide, terrified. That’s some pretty good acting, Melody, I thought.

“Lease all the olice,” Melody mumbled. Her voice was weird, muffled, and she swallowed half the words.

Once more, she tried to pick up the phone, but it slipped from her shaking hands again.

As the creaking of a door was heard, she turned from the camera towards the door of her room. She took one shaking step, then another before her legs gave way and she crashed to the floor. Soon enough, she wasn’t moving anymore.

Only moments later a figure stepped into the room.

“Finally, our nocturnal hunter was ready to catch his prey,” the narrator continued with the story.

With that, the figure stared directly into the camera. I cringed back at the sight before I realized that the man was wearing a creepy mask.

He refocused the camera on Melody and meticulously started to bind her arms and legs as well as putting a gag into her mouth.

“Hungry, oh so hungry, the hunter was for the flesh of another human.”

The man grabbed hold of Melody and pulled her away from the camera and out of the room.

“The blade was old, dull and rusty, but enough to finish the job.”

There was a sickening sound somewhere of camera followed by muffled screams.

“In ecstasy, our hunter sank his fangs into the prey. Flesh tore, and bones broke as he started to devour the body.”

I was sitting there, staring at the stream. I could hear the muffled screams and a disgusting, wet, sound. This was still fake, right? It was yet another one of Melody’s tricks. It had to be!

“Well then, friends of the macabre. With this today’s episode comes to an end,” the narrator spoke over the muffled screams off camera. “We want to thank our writer Melody Madness for her contribution to our new show. Hopefully, other writers are interested in working with us as well. The World of the Macabre is always looking for young and enthusiastic contributors!”

After that, the narrator went quiet. All that was left was a low static and the sounds off camera. By now there were no muffled screams anymore. All that could be heard was heavy breathing the tearing of flesh.

Then, a minute or so later, the same figure, now covered in blood, walked into the room and ended the stream.

It had to be fake, I told myself. There was no freaking way any of this was real. She’d got me good, I thought.

People started to comment on Melody’s profile and timeline. Many were as confused as me. Others were unsure what they’d seen. A few even said they’d be calling the police.

I entered the podcast’s name into Google, but nothing came up. When I clicked the link she’d shared again, it was still a blank page.

For long minutes I stared at my computer.

With shaking hands, I wrote a message to Melody.

Hey Melody, that stream was really something else. You’re okay, though, right? It looked so real! People are even calling the cops. Are you sure you didn’t take it a bit too far?

I waited and waited and waited, but even after an hour, the message was still unread. She’s just keeping up the facade, I told myself. She’s just playing along.

When the message was still unread the next day, I told myself the same thing. After another day had passed; however, I started to have doubts.

By now it’s been almost a week. My message is still unread. There have been no new updates by Melody at all. In the last days, I reached out to her via email but got no answer either.

Yesterday I contacted the police and explained the whole thing. The woman on the line listened intently before she connected me to another officer. The man informed me that they’d received multiple calls about this stream already. There was an ongoing investigation, but as of now, he couldn’t give me any more details. I kept asking him what was going on, but he only repeated the same thing. In the end, I hung up in frustration.

An investigation, I thought. Did it mean what I’d seen was real? I thought back to Melody’s expression, the fear visible on her face and her passing out. If this was real, then… dear god had I actually watched as she was murdered?

I’m so lost right now. I tried to find out more about Melody, about what happened, but I don’t even know where she’s from! There’s nothing on the internet about it yet.

I’m writing this down now because this is a place for aspiring horror writers. I remembered what Melody had said. The producers of ‘The World of the Macabre’ had reached out to quite a few writers. I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but if they reached out to any of you, don’t reply. Don’t submit any stories. If you did, call the cops. You might be in grave danger.

I’m sure you all know about IRL streamers. There are so many stories about them on the internet right now. You’d have to live under a rock to not know about them.

For the past month, I’ve been doing these types of streams myself. I don’t have too many crazy stories to tell. Most of what happened was rather harmless. The only trouble I ever encountered was to get kicked out of a mall, but that’s about it.

It was about a month ago that I noticed I’d hit a dead end. Sure I had my core audience, earned a bit of money, but I couldn’t seem to reach any new people.

To change things up, I partnered with another streamer from my city, Sander. He’s a bit more popular than me, but neither of us are big names.

For a while, we’d just go out together and stream our antics, but we realized that this wasn’t it either.

Our idea was to actively include our audience in the streams.

Now here’s the thing. Most streamers are on Twitch. It’s without a doubt the most prominent platform. Sander and I were active on a different platform called YouNow. Maybe some of you have heard about it. What’s unique about the page is that you’re able to invite other people as guests into your stream. What happens is that it creates a split screen and you can interact with one another.

The first thing we did was to do a sort of treasure hunt. We let the audience decide where we’d go and see what would happen. Looking back, it was a pretty dumb idea. Sure, we checked the places out beforehand, but we were still trolled quite a bit. The worst that happened was us trespassing on private property. We got in quite a bit of trouble for that one.

After this ordeal, we decided to change our approach a bit. Our new idea was a bit more boring and conservative. We decided to do a sort of meet and greet with members of our audience. People could join our stream, we’d meet up with them and hang out with them for a while. It went quite well, most people absolutely loved the idea of being a part of our streams.

Tonight, things turned out a bit different.

For the past week, one of our subscribers had been really active in the stream and donated a good amount of money. When he asked to join the stream to hang out, we were more than happy to.

The moment we invited James, he was thrilled and excited.

He was a guy in his early twenties and lived in an apartment complex in the outer parts of town.

When we checked Google Maps, we saw it would take us almost a half hour to get there. There were no tram stations nearby, and after our last trouble with a bus driver, we decided to walk.

After a short tram ride, it would be another fifteen minutes to get to James’ place.

He told us to follow Main Street for about ten minutes until we reached Mendel Street. From there it wasn’t long before we’d arrive at an intersection. That’s were Cornelius Lane was. He was going to meet us there.

As we continued Sander and I noticed that the area was almost a bit too quiet. There were no people out in the streets, and we only saw a few parked cars here and there.

At first, we thought it was due to the late hours, it was almost ten in the evening. The further we walked though, the fewer and fewer the signs of people became. It seemed as if no one was living in the area.

“Yo, James, you sure you gave us the right address?” I asked.

“Yeah, why? Anything wrong?”

“Well, there’s no one living here. The whole area is a ghost town.”

“What? No way! Where are you guys right now?”

“Still on Main Street.”

“Then you’re on the right way. There are a few office buildings nearby, maybe that’s where you’re at.”

I looked around for a moment. Hadn’t we passed the office complex a couple minutes ago?

We continued on and joked about the whole situation with James and the audience. Soon enough, we reached Mendel Street, and the apartment complex James was living in. By now, we were walking in almost complete darkness. Only a few of the street lights in the area were working.

When Sander next to me checked out Google Maps, we saw that Cornelius Lane was no more than a few minutes away. I scanned the area, but there was still no sign of people.

“Alright, James, are you trolling us?”

“What? No fucking way, guys! I’ve wanted to be on your stream since forever so why-“

“Yeah, alright, you got us, man. Ha ha, very funny, you led us to an abandoned building complex.”

“Wait, no!” he said, startled. “Abandoned building complex? That can’t be. You must’ve taken a wrong turn or something. Wait, let me put on Google Maps and show you where you’ve got to go!”

With that, he started to tinker around with his streaming software and soon put a Map on the screen to show us his location.

“You see this? That’s where I live. So how far away are you guys? Maybe you missed Cornelius Lane or something.”

Sander scanned the Map on my phone screen and compared it to Google Maps on his. Everything checked out.

“Alright, man, but you live in a seriously weird area. Don’t you get the creeps living out here?”

“Out here? What are you guys talking about?”

“There’s no one here. The street lights aren’t working, there’s no cars and no people at all. How’d you end up in a place like this?”

“That makes no sense,” James said, perplexed, “there are tons of people living here. Take a look!”

With that, he moved his webcam towards the window and showed us the brightly lit adjacent building.

“See that? That’s Cornelius Lane!”

This was starting to get weird. Sander and I looked around, but we were in the dark and utterly alone. By now, it was evident that this guy was messing with us.

“Come on, man, just admit that you trolled us. You obviously faked your location and lured us out here to this creepy place. Well played, man. We’re out of here.”

“Guys, wait! I swear I’m not doing anything. Maybe your phones aren’t working, right? Maybe something’s wrong with your GPS.”

“Yeah, man, we really got no time for this. Thanks for the donations and all that. You got us good.”

“Freaking hold on! I swear, I’m not trolling you. Just hold on. I’ll get my phone, and I’ll come get you. I’ll be back in a sec!”

With that, he left the stream. Sander next to me sighed.

“Well, can’t say I’m surprised something like this happened. Let’s just get out of here. We got a lot of other people waiting to get on as well.”

By now, I saw that the whole chat was being spammed with laughing emoticons and messages telling us how dumb we were to fall for this.

Somehow though, the guy’s reaction and acting, it was almost too good. It had been so genuine.

“Let’s wait for a bit,” I started. “We came all the way out here, might as well see how this plays out.”

For a moment, Sander stared at me, giving me a ‘really man’ expression, but then he shrugged and continued to follow me. It wasn’t long before we arrived at the intersection. A street sign informed us that we were indeed at Cornelius Lane.

The whole complex was abandoned entirely. As I looked around, I saw that most of the buildings were in questionable condition. The windows were broken, and many of the entrances were boarded off.

“Let’s get out of here, man, this place gives me the creeps,” Sander pressed on.

I still insisted on waiting, and the moment I saw another request by James, I hit accept.

“Where the hell are you guys? I’m right here, but I don’t see anyone.”

I turned around and scanned the area, but we were still completely alone.

I looked at his stream again and saw that he stood in the middle of a busy apartment complex. The whole area around him was alight by street lights, and I could hear people in the background.

“Yeah man, just give it up, we’re-“

I broke off. I could see James’ face on the screen, but behind him, I saw a very familiar street sign. It was a bit too far away to read it, but I was sure I was mistaken.

“James, what’s that sign behind you?”

“I told you, Cornelius Lane.”

With that, he focused the camera on it, and I could read the same letters I saw right next to me. I couldn’t help but shiver.

“That’s impossible. Just to make sure, you’re living in the same city we are, right?”

“Hm? What the hell are you-?”

I cut him off right away and made him repeat the name of our city and the postal code. He laughed a bit and asked what was going on.

Sander and I hurried to show him the street sign.

“H-how the hell are you guys doing that? I can’t see you! Is this some sort of trick?”

“No, James. We’re right here. Look at Sander’s Google Maps.”

With that, Sander held his phone up right in front of mine. I saw James frown, but soon his face changed to confusion.

“Okay, but how come I don’t see you guys?”

“No freaking clue,” Sander mumbled next to me.

“Here, see, you’ve got to be somewhere else!”

He turned his camera around to slowly take in the whole area around him. I watched his camera feed, and every once in a while I looked up at the buildings around me.

There was his apartment building and the building behind that. Then he showed us the rest of Cornelius Lane and the small parking lot at the end. The next thing I saw was a small playground, and then he panned over more apartment buildings to our left. Everything was exactly the same. Only his version was bustling with activity, and ours was a freaking ghost town.

“James,” I started in a shaken voice. “We’re exactly where you are, only that it’s,” I held my breath for a moment before I spoke the word. “Different.”

James shook his head and started to laugh nervously. “Yeah, sure you are, guys.”

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I did the same thing James had done moments before. I used my camera to show him the entire area around me.

As I did, I saw his face contort from disbelief, to shock and finally fear.

“There’s no way. You guys are fucking with me! This is just,” he broke off for a moment, shaking his head again. “You recorded this somehow! There’s just no way…”

“James, look at this, we’re right in front of the same damn street sign! I’ve got no clue how any of this is possible.”

By now, I couldn’t help but be crept out by the absurdity of the situation. Whatever was going on here was freaking weird.

I turned my phone around and focused the camera on Sander and me standing right in front of the street sign.

I saw James camera shaking. He was panting and hurried back into his apartment. I could hear him mumble to himself over and over again.

“This is just some freaking troll. Seriously, fuck you guys. Fuck you for this shit. You’re not funny at all!”

He was out of it I realized as I watched. I felt goosebumps all over my body. “James we-“

“You guys got the wrong fucking area. I don’t know how you’re faking this, but it’s clear that you’re fucking with me!”

With that, James left the stream.

“Dude,” Sander pressed out right next to me.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said with a shaken voice.

We started to walk off, but soon enough, we started running.

“Shit, man, what the hell was that?” Sander asked me again and again, but I couldn’t answer him.

I called out to James yet again, but I got no reply. Meanwhile, the chat was exploding with activity. Some people were crept out as we were, other’s called us out for faking the whole encounter. There was no sign of James, though. For all I knew he’d signed off.

It wasn’t long before we arrived back at the tram station. We took the first line that would take us back to the city center.

There were a lot of other people who wanted to join the stream, either to meet up or to talk about the events of the night. We denied all of them and eventually called it a night.

On the tram, we tried to wrap our head around what had just happened, but we couldn’t. James’ area had been an exact replica of the one we’d been at. How the hell was something like that possible?

Sander started to talk about alternate realities, but I cut him off right away. I was not in the mood for any of these weird theories. Not right now.

When I was home, I looked up Cornelius Street online. There wasn’t much though. All I found was an old article about ongoing renovations in the early 90s and insufficient funds.

For all I knew, the area had been abandoned more than two decades ago.

Even now, I can’t sleep. I’m still too confused about what happened. Every time I think about it, I feel goosebumps all over my body.

I checked out YouNow once more. I searched for James’ profile, but I couldn’t find it anymore.

I told myself he’d deleted himself right after the stream. This was most likely an elaborate and complicated joke, I told myself. In a couple of days, I’d see myself in some dumb video on YouTube about streamers being trolled.

At least I hope things will turn out like that.

There’s one thing; however, James’ reaction. It was too real, too genuine for a fake.

The look of disbelief, of shock, and finally that of real terror still sends shivers down my spine. What the hell happened today?

I first stumbled upon GenSearch in an IRC chat room.

While most people think IRC is dead and a remnant of the past, it’s still very much alive. The user base has shrunk quite a bit though. Most people moved on to more modern platforms.

I’m one of those people who still use IRC quite a bit. I blame it mostly on a slight case of paranoia. I never trusted the modern tech giants, and after the whole NSA thing, my doubts increased tenfold.

Not that I don’t use Google or Social Media, but most of my time is spent on encrypted IRC servers talking to other people as paranoid as me.

A few months ago, back in January, I hang out on there when I suddenly got a private message from a random user. When I opened it I read the following:

GenSearch is the search engine of the future. Forget about Google. Find tomorrows search results today.

Attached to it was a cryptic link with the string GenSearch in it. At first, I ignored it. This sounded way too fishy. After a while, though I grew a bit more curious.

After all, I knew what to do if it was malware and how to get rid of it.

When I clicked the link, prepared from my system to momentarily evaporate, I was brought to a bare bone website. There was only the name, GenSearch, on it and a simple search bar.

For a moment I considered closing the page, but then I decided to give it a try. After a few seconds, I decided to look up news about The Sinking City. Ever since its announcement I’d been obsessed about the game.

When I saw the search results, I looked up.

One talked about the troublesome launch of a bug ridden game.

Another one talked about the developers not living up to their promise to deliver a bug fix within a week of the launch.

The rest of the results were similar in nature, talking about missed chances and a launch failure.

Wait a second, the game is out already? I opened up steam right away. Damn those reviewers, if the game was out I had to play it! When I searched for it on Steam though, something was strange. It said the game wasn’t out yet and the estimated date of release was 2020. What the hell?

I went back to GenSearch and rechecked the results, but they all talked about the launch of the game. Hell, I even found a review of it.

A bit confused I went to Google to search for the game as well. The results there were completely different. There were no articles about the game’s launch. All I found was information about the games upcoming release, trailers and promos. Why the hell did GenSearch tell me it was out already?

Maybe all the articles on GenSearch were shuffled content to trick users?

I slowly scrolled to the bottom of one of the articles. There was the name of the author and next to it the posting date.

It said the article was from the 2nd of July 2019, but that made no sense at all. That was months from now. Even more confused I opened up another article. Once again the posting date was from July of 2019. By now I was almost sure this had to be some elaborate troll, but how the hell would the thing know I’d searched for the game?

Then I remembered the weird message I’d gotten: Find tomorrows search results today.

I shook my head and laughed. I was being stupid.

I decided to enter the term ‘current news’. What I was greeted with was nothing but news reports from the future. One was from a few days from now, yet others were from months into the future. This was ridiculous.

For a while I sat there staring at the page, trying to wrap my mind around it. Then I got an idea. I searched for news reports in my local city. As I scrolled through mostly irrelevant bits and pieces, I finally read about a tram accident. When I clicked the link, I was brought to a news article about a man who was hit by a tram and had been badly hurt.

I went back to Google, but there was nothing about the accident. Nothing at all. The only accident involving trams that showed up was from more than a year ago.

Well, guess that settles it. Nothing but a content scrapper or shuffler. Quite a bit of work, I had to admit. What I wondered about was who’d go to such length to fuck with people, but I guess that’s the internet for you.

It was a couple of days later that I got a bad case of Deja-vu. During my break at work, I had a quick look at the local newspaper. I’d gone through the first few pages when I read a headline about a tram accident. I shivered when I started to read it. I knew this story. I’d read it before, hadn’t I?

It was at this point that I remembered the result on GenSearch. This couldn’t be. How in the hell was something like this even possible? Had I really found a freaking search engine that showed me… the future?

Once I was home, I did the same thing I’d done before. I looked up news articles on GenSearch. I even took screenshots of my findings and decided to see what would happen.

After a few days, I couldn’t deny it anymore. Every single one of these future news articles came to pass. It was utterly bizarre.

It didn’t take me long for a new idea to pop into my mind. Couldn’t I use this to my advantage?

Before I could follow this train of thought my phone started to ring. It was my good friend Thomas. Wondering what he wanted I answered the phone.

“Erik, I’ve got some amazing news! We finally did it, we got our first big gig!”

“Holy shit, are you serious?”

“Yes, and it’s at the Factory of all places! This is going to be huge, really huge! You want me to put your name on the guest list? Fuck, this could be our big break man, this could be it!”

For as long as I can remember Thomas and his band were trying to get booked in one of the bigger clubs in our city. Until now all they’d gotten were rejections. He was right though, if this went well, it could be their big chance. The Factory was pretty much the most popular club in our city. If they could make it there, they had a bright future ahead of them.

Once he hung up, I looked at the search bar of GenSearch again. For a moment I hesitated, but then I looked up the name of his band and the club.

When I looked up at the search results one stuck out to me right away.

‘Live Event at The Factory Canceled – Band Member Severely Injured after Traffic Accident’

What the hell? When I started to read the article I learned that the band got into a terrible traffic accident. The bassist had to be hospitalized, and the event at the club had to be canceled.

Holy shit what the hell was this? A freaking traffic accident, but how? There was nothing else mentioned in the article!

For the next two days, I was all pins and needles. Was this even real? Was something actually going to happen? And if so, what the hell could I do? I used GenSearch again and again, but I found nothing else. I thought about warning Thomas and the band, but what should I tell them? That they weren’t supposed to go to their first big gig? Yeah right!

Once Saturday arrived, I couldn’t calm down. Thomas invited me to hang out with the band before they went to the club. Instead of drinking and chit-chatting with them, I was completely nervous and still trying to come up with what to tell them.

“Yo, an hour till we’ve got to get going guys,” Thomas called out, “Mark, you’ll drive, right?”

“Yeah sure, only got two drinks, I’m pretty much sober,” he answered laughing.

I almost jumped up when I heard this. Was this how they’d get into the accident? I had to do something!

“Wait, no, you can’t drive!” I called out nervously.

Everyone in the room turned to me and eyed me with a mixture of confusion and annoyance. Shit, now I’ve done it.

“Eh, I heard that the cops started to crush down on drunk driving recently. Ever since that accident a couple weeks ago they take anyone who drinks alcohol before driving straight to the station. If they stop us, there won’t be any gig!”

“Fuck man, don’t be such a pussy, it’s only two drinks. Not like anything will happen,” Mark the drummer spat at me.

“Tell that to my friend Stefan,” I started to make up a story. “He did the same thing and got into a lot of trouble. They kept him at the station until morning. What if they-“

“Fuck your friend and fuck your stupid story. Who the hell even are you to-“

“Alright guys, calm down,” Thomas started. “We’ve got all the equipment at the club already, right? Why do we have to take the car anyway? If Erik’s right and the cops really are up to something like that, let’s not jinx it.”

After a bit more arguing with the rest of the band, and a few angry glances into my direction, the issue was settled. We’d take the tram to the nearest station and walk the rest of the way to the club.

Once we arrived though, we had to walk a good ten minutes. By then we were in quite a hurry to make it in time.

“See, that’s the reason I wanted to take the freaking car, asshole,” Mark called out to me once more. I didn’t reply anything. Instead, I kept my distance from him.

It happened five minutes later. By then we were all pretty drunk. We were crossing a street in front of a taxi when Andrew the band’s bassist tripped. He fell down right in front of the path of the approaching car.

The taxi driver hit the brakes and tried to swerve the car, but he still ended up hitting Andrew. The bassist came to a crashing rest a meter or so in front of the car. He didn’t move at all.

For a second silence descended before all hell broke loose. While everyone, including the taxi driver, rushed towards Andrew, I froze.

No freaking way. There was no freaking way. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was precisely what I tried to prevent, so why? Why did it still happen? Don’t tell me it’s because I did…

“Fuck, are you listening, Erik? Hey?” Thomas called out to me, but I was still in utter shock.

“This wasn’t supposed to,” I started but broke up when Mark came up to me.

“It’s because of your goddamn idea! If we’d just taken the car, then none of this would’ve happened!”

“Say something asshole!” he screamed at me. Then he hit me right in the face. As I stumbled back, he stared at me.

“Shouldn’t have listened to your shit! It’s because of you that Andrew is… Fuck!”

The ambulance and the police arrived a few minutes later. It was pure luck that Andrew had survived the collision and he was taken to the hospital right away. The rest of us was ushered to the police station to give our statements.

To be honest, I can’t remember what I told them. Most of what happened after the accident is a blur. There was only one thing on my mind. Did I cause this to happen? Was it because I tried to prevent the accident or was it… because I searched for it to begin with?

The next day I couldn’t do a thing. I sat in front of my computer, merely staring at the screen.

GenSearch.

What the hell was this page? I opened it up once more and typed something into the search bar, but couldn’t bring myself to hit enter. No. What if I was causing something else to happen?

And then another thought hit me. I thought about all the bad things I’d read in articles on there. Had I been causing all of them? Without another second I closed the damned page. There’d be no more tinkering with it.

Yesterday, for the first time in months I went on it again.

An old friend of mine from high school, Steve, was in the city and we’d decided to hang out for old times’ sake. We had a few drinks and talked about old times when Steve suddenly went to the computer.

“Got to show you something.”

With that, he typed the name of one of our old classmates into Google. He scanned the search results but then frowned.

“What are you doing?” I asked him a bit puzzled.

“Hold on, Google’s a bitch, need to use Bing for this.”

He opened up Bing and entered the name again.

“Hah. Look at this! The guy’s name comes up in this weird fetish forum! I always knew he was into some weird shit.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a bit, but then I shrugged. “Why the hell would you look him up?”

“Dunno, it’s a bit fun to see what people are up to nowadays.”

“You know you could just add them on Facebook or drop them a message.”

“Nah that would be boring. Want me to do you next? I’m sure you got some weird stuff out there as well.”

A bright grin showed on his face.

“Go right ahead, you won’t find a thing. Got to go to the toilet anyways.”

While I was on the toilet, he called out to me.

“Hey man, what’s up with this weird search engine you’ve bookmarked? The dates are all messed up!”

“Wait, what are you…? Dude leave that alone!”

“What? I can’t hear you out there!”

Goddamnit Steve, I cursed as I made my way back.

“Yo, this is freaky! Look what kind of stuff comes up when I search for you!” he called out to me again.

No way. He didn’t. I rushed back to the computer, but when I saw the screen, I knew he was on GenSearch. And there, in the search bar was my own freaking name.

Below I read the title of a search result that Steve was now pointing at.

“Mysterious Death of Young Man Puzzles Authorities”

Before I could do anything, Steve clicked the article.

“The death of young Erik M. puzzles authorities after the body was found-“

“What the fuck are you doing?!” I screamed at him and pushed him away from the computer. “Why in the hell did you go on that page?!”

“Hey calm down, you said I wouldn’t find a-“

At that point, I freaked out and pushed him again, this time harder. I was about to scream at him again, but then I looked at the screen. I scrolled down until a picture came up. There was no doubt about it, I was staring right at my own face.

“You know what, it’s just a sick joke. Maybe one of those band guys you told me about put it up? Look,” he came up and pointed at the screen, “Just scroll down here and-“

“Get the fuck away from the computer!” I screamed at him again.

Steven backed away and gave me a hard look.

“You know what? I didn’t come over here for this. You got some serious issues, dude. To get so worked up over something like that.”

With that, he turned around and left the room. I didn’t go after him or say a word when he left. I was still staring at my screen.

This couldn’t be real. Why did this article exist? Why was I in it?

I’m now sitting here in front of my computer. I read the article over and over again, but there are no specifics about my supposed death three days from now. Nothing at all.

I’m freaking scared now. If this thing truly shows you a future you can’t prevent, then what can I do?

What the hell can I even do?

I really love Instagram. It’s probably the app I spent most of my time on.

I don’t have a big following or anything, but I love to share pictures. Guess, it’s pretty normal for a teenage girl like me.

In my time on Instagram, I saw my share of weird things.

There was, of course, the spam bots and fake accounts who would comment on your content. Then there was nudity and pornography. For a site that has a strict policy against this, you sure stumble upon a lot of it.

There was one thing that was a bit creepier. There was a guy who had a crush on my friend Lisa. We found his Instagram by accident and saw that he’d shared dozens of pictures of her on the account.

Two weeks ago though, I found something else that was way more creepy.

It was an account by the name of cutzieee52. It didn’t have a lot of followers, but it had posted a fair amount of pictures.

At first I thought it was a regular account. When I scrolled through the pictures, I saw that they were all of young girls. Probably the account of some guy who posted pictures of girls he found attractive, I thought.

As I continued to scroll through the account, I realized that they were all my age or even younger. After a while, I noticed something even more unsettling. All the pictures were unprofessional and seemed to have been taken in secret.

Here was a picture of a blond girl on her way to school. There was a picture of a brown haired girl on a bus. It continued on like that. What the hell was this? Was this the account of some creepy stalker or something?

I decided to check out the comments on the newest picture. It was of a young girl with dark hair at a train station. I already knew what I’d find: lots of perverted comments.

When I started to read through I found none of that. All I saw were smiles and thumbs-up. I’d have written it off as nothing but spam if not for the numbers. In-between all the spam a random number would be posted. The first one was 300, followed by 500 and going all the way up to 1200.

When I clicked on one of the many posters all I found was either an empty profile or a suspended one.

I continued on with the other pictures, but all I found was more of the same. Spam and numbers, nothing else.

In the end, I told myself it was the account of some perverted creep and left it alone.

To be honest, I’d completely forgotten about it until today.

I’d gotten home from school and was about to check my emails. I use one of the popular German email providers. It’s one of those pages that is stacked with news bulletins and other ‘recommended’ articles. Most of it is rubbish or celebrity gossip.

Today though I saw that one article was about a missing young girl. As I clicked it, I read that young, fifteen-year-old Emily H. had been missing for a few days now. The girl had apparently vanished near a train station on her way to school. There was something about her picture though. I had seen it somewhere before, but I couldn’t say where. Maybe in a newspaper?

It was later that day, in the evening that I went on Reddit to search for something interesting. It was half an hour later that I had found a thread about one of those weird internet mysteries. When someone mentioned Instagram, I suddenly remembered the creepy account I’d seen two weeks ago.

It took me a while of searching through my history, but I found it again. I was about to copy the link and start a thread when I noticed something.

The latest picture of the account. The dark haired girl at the train station. As I stared at it, I knew why I’d recognized the fifteen-year-old girl in the news article.

This was her. This was Emily H. the young girl that was missing. I checked the comments once more, but it was all the same, spam and numbers.

What the hell was this? I was so utterly crept out.

I copied the link of the profile and sent it to one of my friends via WhatsApp, but she didn’t read it.

“Damnit, Nicole, check your stupid phone!” I cursed.

It was half an hour or so later that she finally read the message.

Oh, miss popular has got another stalker, hasn’t she?

As I read it, I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Wait, what do you mean Nicole? Do you know that girl?

No reply. I sent her another message and then another one. Finally, I called her.

“Oh Marie, what’s up?” she answered the phone.

“Nicole! What are you talking about? You know the girl in the picture?”

“Well duh, dummy, I’d recognize you anywhere!”

As she said this the phone almost dropped from my hands.

“What the hell are you talking about!?”

“That picture of you! Guess some creeper has a crush on you. Isn’t that just like what happened to Lisa back in…?”

I didn’t listen anymore. What the hell was she talking about?

“Marie, hey, you still there?” I heard her call out to me.

With shaking fingers, I clicked on the link again. With each passing second, I cursed at my computer to load the profile. When it finally did the phone dropped from my hands. Right there, at the top of the profile, there was a new picture. It was me standing in front of a store in the mall. It was from this afternoon.

When I checked the comments, I saw the same thing I’d seen before, smileys and numbers. They were all posted recently. I refreshed the page and saw the numbers climb up.

Finally though, after I refreshed it again and again, I got an error message.

Sorry, this page isn’t available.

Whatever I tried, nothing turned up anymore. Searching for the account name on Google or any other information, nothing turned up. For all, I know the account, the account is completely gone.

I’m sitting here now typing this out. I can’t make sense of what I found there. I keep telling myself that this was just the account of some pervert or stalker. That picture of Emily though… Those numbers… It’s all way too strange. I’m starting to think that there’s something terrible going on.

Please, everyone, tell me that it’s just my imagination. Tell me that nothing is going on there.

Tell me that I’m not in danger.

The wound caused by my parent’s death never really healed. I often had days when the pain was too much, and the longing to see them again was too strong.

I recently suffered through one of those days. It had been more than two years since my parents had died, but the pain felt fresh and burned hot in my chest.

I went back to one of our old family photo albums. It always helped to have a look through them and reminisce about times long gone.

Here I was as an infant in my mother’s arms, there was my first day of school and what followed were the pictures of various family trips.

I went from page to page until I reached one of our many trips to small towns. My parents never took me to different countries. They were boring like that. Instead, we mostly went sightseeing in Germany.

In the picture, my parents and I were hugging each other in front of a small restaurant. I felt tears coming to my eyes once more when I saw us like that. It had been such a nice trip.

A few minutes later I decided it would be a great idea to take a trip there and revisit the place.

The picture was from a trip to a small town about an hour away from here. When I checked out the town online though the pictures of our trip didn’t seem to fit the scenery at all. The small restaurant had been in front of a backdrop of distant factories and industrial areas. There were none in the town I was looking at.

I was a bit baffled, but maybe the pictures were from a different trip. Mom must’ve put them in the wrong place or confused the names. God knows, she was always a bit scatter-brained.

I scanned the picture for anything tangible and finally read the name of the restaurant. When I googled it, I got more than a dozen replies. It was a common name after all. I looked at each of the results, but they were entirely different places.

Great, I thought, the picture was from fifteen years ago. The place has probably closed down by now. Still, even if the restaurant itself didn’t exist anymore, it would be nice to visit the town itself.

I continued my search, but in the end, I had to give up. I couldn’t remember the name of the town at all. There was no use in trying further.

Instead, I posted the picture on a German subreddit to see if anyone would recognize the place. I didn’t have much hope, considering it was just a random small town, but who knows, maybe I’d get lucky.

When I rechecked the thread later, I’d gotten a few replies. Some were wild guesses, others were dumb jokes. Well, not like I expected anything different. I left the post open for the time being and decided to prepare some dinner.

When I came back, I had a handful of new replies, but none were helpful. I’d also gotten a message. Maybe someone had figured it out after all?

The message though proofed to be a bit strange.

It was written by a poster somewhere in Germany who stated that he had a picture that looked almost exactly like mine.

I wrote back to him and asked what he meant. I got a reply a couple minutes later, this time he included an imgur link of the picture he was talking about.

As I looked at it, I was a bit weirded out. It was almost exactly the same picture, only with a different kid and family in it.

Everything else was the same. The angle, to position his family stood at, hell even the items in the window behind them, they were all identical.

This had to be some sort of stupid joke.

I sent the guy a message back stating that he almost got me and that his Photoshop skills were pretty good. Of course, he started to deny it, but I didn’t bother to reply anymore.

Soon another reply arrived, and the guy asked me if I had other pictures of the supposed trip. What the hell was the guy’s problem?

I knew when yet another message arrived.

When I opened it I read the following:

Hey, I’m sure you’re a bit crept out, sorry about that. Do you have any pictures similar to the ones below?

Attached to the message were half a dozen imgur links.

When I clicked the first one, a feeling of recognition flooded over me. I took out the album of my old family trip again.

I looked at the picture on the screen. It was of a young boy sitting on a bench with his mother in the middle of a park. Leaves littered the grass, and there was a small fountain in the background.

When I looked at the pictures of my family trip, I started shivering. There it was again, an exact duplicate. There were the leaves, there was the fountain, and there was the bench in the park. The only differences were my mom and me.

What the fuck was going on here?

I went and clicked through the rest of the imgur links and with each one my head started to spin more. They were all exactly the same. The only difference was the people in the pictures.

Was this some kind of sick joke someone was playing? But how would he have gotten a hold of the pictures?

I wrote him back asking how the hell he did it. He replied that that’s what he was supposed to ask. Ok, this was getting weird, really weird.

For a moment I wondered if it might all be a coincidence. Maybe the two of us were there the same day? Those things can happen, right? I opened his pictures again and started to search for the tiniest differences, but there was nothing.

Then I got an idea. It was outlandish, silly even, but there was this nagging feeling in the back of my head. I sent him a picture of yet another trip me and my parents had taken. This one had led us to a different town in Southern Germany.

I was antsy as I waited for a reply. I refreshed the page again and again. After a couple of minutes, the red message sign popped up. I clicked it instantly.

There’s something incredibly weird going on here. Why do you have that picture as well? I’ve got the same one in front of me right now!

Attached to it was yet another imgur link. When I clicked it my eyes grew wide. It was the same picture. The only difference was that my dad and I were replaced by him and his dad. Everything else was the same.

I replied to him and included my version of the picture. For a long while, I got no answer. It was half an hour later that I finally got one.

We should meet. I don’t know what’s going on, but this must be somehow connected.

Should I really meet this guy? Once more I thought about the possibility of this all being a sick joke, but it made no sense. All the pictures here were from an old fashioned, analog camera. They’d never been digitized in any way. So how the hell would this guy have them? Once more I looked over all of them again. This situation was so utterly bizarre.

I had to figure out what the hell was going on here, so I finally agreed to meet the guy.

He wrote me back his address and we soon arranged on a time to meet. He urged me to bring any pictures similar to the ones I’d sent him. After looking through my old photo albums for a while, I decided to take a few that included various family trips.

It was about a week or so later that I set out to meet this guy. It was a three-hour car ride. I felt strange and apprehensive the whole time. Who the hell was he? For a moment the idea of a long lost brother popped into my mind, but it made no sense at all. After that, I came up with more abstruse ideas. What if he was some sort of doppelganger or an alternate version of myself? No, this is not a freaking science-fiction movie. Calm down, you idiot.

When I finally arrived, I was relieved to find that the guy’s house looked completely different from my own. Still, it took me a while to get out of my car.

After I rang the doorbell, a chubby guy, almost twice my age opened the door. He was as surprised as me when he saw how different the two of us were.

“Are you Michael?” I asked.

“You must be Steven, right?”

I nodded.

“Well come in, did you bring the pictures?”

“Yeah, I brought a whole stack of them.”

This guy’s place was messy, seriously messy. It looked as if it had been weeks, if not months since he’d last cleaned. He didn’t even seem to care as he led me to his living room. I looked up when I saw that the whole side of the room was taken up by a giant desk. Multiple computers, monitors and an assortment of tools covered it.

When he noticed my stares, he showed me an awkward smile.

“Oh, sorry about that, I guess I’m a bit obsessed with the whole computer and internet thing. It’s where I do most of my work anyways.”

“Oh, so you’re a programmer?”

“Something like that, yeah,” the guy mumbled.

“Alright. Well, I got the pictures, so what do you think is going on here?”

The guy laughed for a bit. “To be honest, I’ve got no clue. I thought it might be some weird coincidence, but there are too many things that don’t add up. When did you say you and your parents visit that restaurant again?”

“I think it was back in 2005.”

“Right, and you’re how old?”

“Twenty four. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Well, it’s because I’m thirty-six and I took that same trip back in 1992.”

I had heard what he’d said, but I didn’t understand. How the hell could the pictures be identical if they were thirteen years apart?

“You got it, right? So how the hell is any of this possible? That other picture you sent me. When were you there?”

“Hold on,” I opened my backpack and took out the photo albums. “It should be here somewhere,” I said as I started to look through them. “Ah, here it is. Let me see… that one was back in 2002.”

Michael grimaced. “Same trip, only in 1990.”

“Freaking hell, what is going on here?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he rummaged through a cupboard and brought out stacks upon stacks of pictures.

“Well then, let’s see if there’s more.”

In the next hour, the two of us went through all our pictures and compared our various trips. The result was that all of them were the same. At first, we were utterly horrified and crept out, but in time the sheer surreality of the situation pushed us into a state of apathy. We went from picture to picture and compared them. Every once in a while one of us would laugh a little or shake his head, nothing more.

“So, what about your parents, how are they doing?” I asked as I put another picture back into one of my albums.

“Both dead, they died about two years ago.”

“In a car accident?!”

Michael looked up at me, puzzled. “No, they both died in a fire.”

“Oh god, for a second I thought,” but then I shook my head.

“No, what is it?”

I sighed. “Well, mine died two years ago in a car accident. For a moment I thought it might have been the same for yours. I don’t know anymore. This is all way too strange.”

Michael said nothing.

In the end, there wasn’t much the two of us could do at the moment. We were both way too confused, and we didn’t have much to go on about. Our names were different, our birth dates and birth places were different, and our parents weren’t related in any way. For a while, we made wild guesses what could be going on, but it was all nonsense.

When afternoon turned into evening, I decided it was time to make my way back home. Before I did though, we exchanged phone numbers and emails, in case one of us would find out anything.

Michael also took copies of some of my pictures and told me he’d have a look online. He knew certain people that could find out if any of the images were doctored with.

Only when I was in my car and drove home did I fully realize how bizarre everything was that had happened. The more I thought about it I felt anxious, sweaty, almost sick.

Once at home, I went to bed right away, but sleep didn’t come easy. My dreams were haunted by doppelgangers and plunged me into weird alternate realities. When morning finally came I was more tired and exhausted than the day before.

I went to work, but I was barely functioning. It was in the early evening that I got a text from Michael, telling me to check my email. He’d got some news for me.

For the first time that day I was wide awake. I signed into my email and opened the one Michael had sent me.

In the email, he told me that someone had gotten back to him about the pictures. It was an older man from Russia, who wrote he used to work in a print media company in the Soviet Union. He remembered the picture right away.

I looked up, what the hell? The Soviet Union?

The man wrote he recognized the scene in the two pictures right away. He used to work with the original version. It was a somewhat popular stock photo, often used in propaganda pieces of the late 70s. They all showed happy Russian families. Added to the email was the same picture once more. The family was a different one, but the scene was almost identical. There was one difference though. All the German in the picture was replaced by words in the Cyrillic alphabet.

How the hell was this possible? How the hell were my parents and me in a picture from a Russian propaganda piece? Then I realized it. There was only one way. The picture of my parents and me, it had to be… fake.

With shaking hands I went through the photo albums again, looking at all the pictures of my parents and me. How many of them were actually real? How many were fake?

Yet there was something else that slowly crept into my mind. Who had faked them and most importantly, why?

I was taken from my thoughts when my phone started to ring. It was Michael.

“It’s not only that picture,” he said in a shaken voice.

“Wait, hold on, what do you mean?”

“Remember the trip to the lake? Another stock photo. Same about the one to the museum. Also stock photos.”

“But how? Why?”

“God if I know. I’m talking to this guy right now and sent him a few more. He says that most of the pictures are taken from some photo series about Soviet towns. There are some though he has no clue about. He noted that almost all of them looked like stock photos or have been doctored with though.

“You’re trying to tell me that all the pictures here,” I broke up. I couldn’t say it.

“Yeah, they’re all fake,” Michael finished the sentence for me.

“But what the hell does it mean? That’s my life, I mean, our lives! How can someone fake all this?”

I got no answer from the other end of the line. I only heard heavy, shaky breathing.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m going to keep talking to this guy though, and I’ll see if I can find out anything else.”

“Hey, Michael, what are you,” but I didn’t get to finish as he hung up.

“Fucking hell!” I cursed.

For the next days, I was unable to do anything. I went through all the pictures and photo albums again. If all those were fake, then why did I have memories of the trips? How the hell could I remember visiting a freaking museum in the middle of Russia?

Finally, I took out a picture of my parents. It was two years ago, wasn’t it? Memories of the police arriving at the door, the funeral, it was all still on my mind.

Then I started to think about the funeral. For the first time, I really began to think about it. When exactly had it been? I knew it was two years ago, but what day? What month? Where had it been? It must’ve been in this town right? I mean that’s where I grew up.

I shook my head. I was out of it. I’d barely slept, and my mind was fuzzy. Of course, it had been here, right? If I went to the graveyard, I’d find their grave right there. Suddenly a cold shower went down my spine. Where exactly was their grave?

I was about to set out when my phone rang again. It was Michael once more. I answered right away.

“You found anything new?” Nothing. All I heard was shaky breathing and sobbing.

“Hello? Michael? You alright?”

“I did, but no, sorry Steve, I’m sorry. Please, leave this thing alone. It’s not worth it. Just forget you ever found out about it. Nothing good will come from it.”

With that, he hung up. When I tried to call him again, it went straight to voice mail. I didn’t get what was going on.

I wrote him a message on Reddit, then later an email, but I never got an answer.

I don’t know how often I tried to call him. Eventually, I went to bed.

It was a few days later, almost by sheer accident, that I saw Michael’s picture in a German tabloid. A few days ago, late in the evening, a man in his mid-thirties had jumped to his death.

My jaw dropped, and I stared at the article with wide eyes. What the hell was going on? What the hell had Michael found out that drove him to do this?

I felt goosebumps all over my arms, and for a moment a surge of anxiety flushed over me. What had Michael found out that was so terrible?

I remembered his last words. I was hearing them over and over in my head during my three-hour car ride to his home.

The place was dark and quiet but looked exactly the same.

I didn’t know what I was even doing, but I wanted, no, I needed to know what the hell was going on.

The front door was locked as I’d expected, but I found a cracked window that I could open up.

I sneaked inside and made my way through the messy place until I was back in his living room. Half of his computers were trashed. Freaking hell. Did he know I’d come here?

Then I found a stack of papers on the floor. Some were printouts of stock photos, the others were covered in text.

When I picked them up, they looked like scientific documents.

STAGE 7 – MEMORY ALTERATION

Test subjects are infused with artificial memories to create the illusion of a normal life.

What the hell was this? I went through the stack and checked another one.

STAGE 3 – GROWTH ACCELERATION

 Gen manipulation ensures maturity of test subjects in only a fraction of normal human growth period.

What was I reading? This made no sense. I checked the rest of them, but they were all the same. STAGE 4 – MIND EXHILARATION, STAGE 8 – SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR THERAPY, and on it went. I looked through the whole stack until I found the last one.

STAGE 13 – PROJECT TERMINATION AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Test subjects show insufficient results. Project deemed unsuccessful and to be terminated immediately. Euthanasia of remaining test subjects considered unnecessary. To be kept under surveillance to gather information about adaptability to society and social norms.

What the hell was this shit? I didn’t understand any of it. When I checked the date though I saw that this last document was from early 2017. That was the same year my parents had died.

My head was spinning. This couldn’t be real, could it?

I went through the stack once again to read more, but then I heard something. The front door was opened, and there was the shuffling of heavy feet.

“… think he told the other subject?” I heard a voice say.

“No. The logs show that he attempted contact, but didn’t share anything.”

I froze. Shit, who the hell was this? When the heavy steps got closer, I told myself I had to get out of there. As fast and as quiet as I could I made my way back to the window and got out.

It wasn’t even a minute later that I drove off. I had no freaking idea what I’d just witnessed. Could any of this be real? This had to be a sick joke, hadn’t it? But then what about those damned documents that Michael had found?

I don’t remember much about my drive home. I was entirely out of it. I still am.

Once I was home, I went through my whole place to find any sort of information about my parents. There’s nothing though. They seem to only exist in my memories and these old photos. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much I don’t know about them. When were they born? How old had they been? Did they get married and if so, when?

As I’m sitting here typing this out, I don’t know what to think? Is any of this real? Are my memories real?

Am I even a real person?