Work Text:
Case #0190801-1023 - Statement of Holly Mason regarding her experience with an unusual computer bug.
<STATEMENT BEGINS>
Hello again.
By my count, this is my one-thousand-twenty-fourth first time making a statement. Part of me hopes it’s not the only one that makes it through to you, part of me hopes that this is the only one I’ve actually written, so the last three years can be written off as nothing more than what should rightfully just be a bout of insanity. My coworkers used to warn me the stress would get to me eventually. I don’t talk to them as much anymore, mostly because it’s been a while since they’ve said anything I haven’t already heard a thousand times before.
Basics first, I’m a programmer in Sydney, Australia, 29 years of age before the incident began, no visible aging during the course of the incident. I know you mainly deal with strange occurrences in England, I wouldn’t even know about you if it wasn’t for a former roommate of mine who told me about your work and about the statement he gave. I’d rather not mention his name, I’m sure he’s not related to this incident and he moved halfway round the planet to get away from the things he went through. Would that I had the same option. Still, if there’s one thing I pride myself on as a programmer it’s my meticulous documentation, and there’s no one else I could think to send this to.
Before I get to the incident, a brief note on my work. “Programmer” is a term I use loosely for “professionally good with computers”. I’ve been called a digital architect, a solution designer, consultant, advisor, manager, it’s all kind of a mess. I like to think of myself as a detective, or a kind of archaeologist, digging through systems to find the logic at the heart of them, trying to understand why a given algorithm might have been used, seeing the patterns, making them make sense. I take a tidy sum home every month and I get to work as independently as I like, which is a big plus for me. Never been big on offices or coworkers. It’s not that I’m unsociable, quite the opposite, I just hate being seen by other people.
I started programming when I was pretty young, I liked making games for my brother. It was gratifying as hell seeing the delight on his little face whenever he’d play them, always impressed by what I’d cobbled together in an afternoon. The beautiful thing about computers is anything is possible until you tell them otherwise. It makes the bugs almost as interesting as the games themselves. One of the first games I made was an electronic version of snakes and ladders. Not very complicated, but I made a small error that caused the game to behave as if there were extra spaces that lived off the grid entirely, tokens hopping about in empty space. Matthew laughed his head off when that happened. Then a snake got one and it disappeared, I’m not sure where to. He didn’t laugh at that.
The day of the incident was the day after my 29th birthday. I hadn’t slept well, but I rarely do. I’d gone to sleep angry at my mother, she’d sent a nasty text message just before I turned in for the night and it had gotten stuck in my head. Ironically, I can’t recall the exact words now, I deleted it almost immediately after seeing it, but not before it could sink in. Something to the effect of “happy birthday to the son I buried.” Let me be clear that I only have one sibling and he’s perfectly fine, at least as far as I know, and we don’t share a birthday. No, the “son” she was referring to was… well, is me, I suppose. It’s been years since I transitioned and she still hasn’t let go of the notion that I “killed” her “son” by coming out. I wish I could tell you I hate her for it, but honestly all I feel when I think about her is disappointment.
I arrived at the University of Sydney a little after ten, which is actually significantly earlier than I usually start working believe it or not. I work out of the university labs on occasion because a friend of mine lets me in the door without question and because it’s literally the only place in Sydney with decent internet. I’d make a joke about the real monster being the mismanagement of Australia’s infrastructure, but if you know anything about what’s going on in our country right now you know there’s far worse happening in broad daylight. Sorry, forget that aside unless you’d like to investigate a few of our government ministers with the pointy end of a stake.
People come and go from the labs all day but I work best in my own little world, so I paid no attention to who might have seen me there. I was keeping my head down, trying not to think about my mother’s message, trying not to think about having one year left until my thirties, just trying to get the work done. Simple concerns. The day passed in a blur of code and emails, productive but mentally draining. By the end I wasn’t really thinking so much as responding to inputs. I didn’t notice the time until it was almost midnight and I found myself alone in what seemed to be the only room left in the university with lights on. This was the first thing that struck me as odd, not that it was midnight, or that I was alone, but that there were no other lights on. I might lean towards the far end of the bell curve when it comes for weird working habits, but by the university’s standards I’m downright normal. The thought of being completely alone there was unusual, maybe even just the tiniest bit alarming.
I turned back to my work and tried to make sense of where I’d stopped. I was surprised to realise I’d apparently finished up work a while ago and had been programming another game for Matthew. I didn’t do that much anymore, he hadn’t had the same reaction to my transition our mother had, but he still lived with her and I was always worried that she might make his life unpleasant if she knew he still played the games I sent him. I suppose I was doing her work for her, creating that distance, but it was the only way I could think to shield him from her until I was earning enough to get a bigger flat and bring him to live with me. The game I’d been working on, it was something small, just about wandering through a maze. I tried to compile and run it just to see how far I’d gotten and found it worked, but it looked like the wall collision still had some bugs and I’d neglected to put a start or finish in the mazes. As it stood, they were just nonsense spirals with a little non-euclidean geometry thrown in to really bend the mind. I was proud of the work I’d apparently done without thinking, even if it made me a bit queasy after a few minutes.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. I’m not a terribly inventive games designer and I’m sure I’m not a terribly unique case for your institute. Like I said, I’m on the far end of the bell curve compared to the general population, but put me in the right crowd and I’m completely unremarkable. I packed up my things and went to leave the room, only to find the door locked. That was unusual but not strictly unprecedented. The system’s automated, I’ve gotten locked in before when my friend hasn’t disabled it for the night. Fortunately the University’s security has a few obvious flaws and if you apply enough sudden pressure to this door you can make it jump just enough that it unlocks itself. I prepared to shoulder charge it as I’d done maybe a dozen times before when the floor lurched like the whole world had tilted under me. I lost my balance, fell instead of charged, headfirst into the locked door and closed my eyes in preparation for what promised to be a nasty bump. Instead I just… fell.
I hit the ground a full second after I’d expected to and all the breath was knocked from me when I did. Everything ached like I’d fallen two metres rather than two feet and when I stood up I could see why. I was no longer in the computer labs, instead I’d fallen down into a long concrete passage, which smelled nauseatingly like spray paint. The walls were covered with graffiti, words indistinct in an absolute chaos of colours and abstract patterns. There were images, or there had been, but they’d all been layered on top of each other far too many times to still be visible. The only light in this passage was an old fluorescent tube light which flickered almost menacingly. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.
You’ll think at this point that I must have hit my head or huffed some paint and had a nightmare about the University’s graffiti tunnel and I really wish I could tell you that was the case. The two differences I would offer between the real thing and this nightmare replica are that the real graffiti tunnel is so short you can see sunlight at both ends on a clear day and that I have never seen anyone in that tunnel who was not hurrying to get away from the aging smell of caked-on spray paint. In one direction, my nightmare tunnel continued on as far as the eye could see with no apparent breaks or corners. In the other direction, a tall man with long, receding hair and a scraggly brown beard stood staring straight at me.
I woke up in bed almost immediately that time. The ache I’d felt after hitting the ground was gone, I was tired but no more than usual and though it lingered in my memory I could no longer smell the tunnel full of spray paint. I was happy for the nightmare to be over, until I checked my phone and found the real nightmare was only just beginning. The time was a little after eight o’clock and the date was very clearly the day after my 29th birthday.
I won’t bore you with the attempts I made to verify that the day was in fact repeating. I’ve gone through them all by now. I’ve watched every Groundhog Day episode from every tv show searching for clues and found none. I’ve retraced my steps trying to find some apparent cause but even after so long I’m still not certain of exactly what’s doing it. The text message from my mother the day before is a likely culprit, whether she’s done this to me somehow I don’t know. She won’t answer my calls and on the few times I’ve flown interstate to get to her before the loop resets I’ve found her house empty and no signs of anything out of the ordinary. The game I was making is also a significant possibility, though I’m quite confident by now that I’m not the one who made it, as it appears on my computer even when I make a conscious effort not to touch the thing for the duration of an entire loop. I’ve tried to debug it plenty of times but those collision errors are a nightmare to fix and I still can’t find any way to set a win condition. The only thing I was able to glean from my digging through its code was that I was mistaken about the number of players the game had. I’d previously thought there was two players, as the game lists the player count as the number one. This probably sounds like the most insane thing I’ve said so far, but it’s common in programming for counts to begin with zero instead of one. This broken convention has been the biggest leap in my understanding of the problem in more than three years.
The other part of the loops is similarly predictable, somewhere around midnight I’ll lose consciousness no matter what I do and when that happens I end up falling through the floor, for lack of a better term, and landing in those tunnels. The texture of the tunnels changes to match the place I passed out, graffiti like the first time, sleek modern concrete and steel if I fall asleep at home, I’ve even ended days in nightclubs before and awoken in austere darkened concrete with distant, pulsing music. It makes no difference. I fall through the ground and then I’m there and then he’s there.
I say he but I hate using the term I wish he was an it but that’s not accurate either. He’s clearly a person, or he clearly used to be. I’ve gotten a better look at him over the years and there are a few things of note. One, his features are… distorted somehow. Like a caricature. His hands are too big, his arms too hairy. His hairline recedes and his brow protrudes to an almost comical degree. The few times he’s appeared without a beard his jawline has been stiff as anything and his adam’s apple is the sign of an actual apple.
You’ve probably already picked up on where this is going too, but this last detail should give it away. His eyes don’t change. They’re always the same light blue, like looking into the ocean on a sunny day. Monstrous as he is, I can’t hate his eyes, because I’ve loved that colour for as long as I can remember. I’ve loved those eyes as long as I can remember. They’re a family trait after all. My mother has them, my brother has them, I have them, and when I look this monster in the eyes with his disgusting parody of my face, I cannot hate his eyes, because they’re my eyes looking back at me.
He’s killed me a couple of times, in those tunnels. I’ve killed him at least once. I’ve no idea what mechanism allows me to take something into the nightmare with me, it’s certainly not in the code, but every so often I’ll manage to get a knife in there somehow. He’ll usually just choke the life out of me when the mood strikes his fancy, though once or twice he’s bitten my throat out with his overlarge teeth.
I hate him, I really do, but I know that there’s little point in hating. Nothing I’ve done there has been productive. Nothing I do stops him from existing, nothing in the tunnels and nothing in the real world. Running, fighting, talking, pleading. None of it matters, none of it makes a difference. I’ve even tried ending my life before I can fall asleep, but that hasn’t broken the cycle, it only guarantees he’ll be furious when I arrive in his domain.
I’ve done my best to make an accurate estimate of the number of cycles it’s been, though at times despair has made it a little hard to track. Computers, for all their seemingly infinite possibilities, do have some limitations. One of them is memory. I’ve long been concerned that whatever horrible game I’ve trapped myself in has been running some kind unbounded loop, repeating the same code over and over again, the failed attempts piling up in memory with no hope of escape until the register overflows and the program crashes. What that means for me, for the world, for reality, I have no idea. I’m scared that my struggle here might be affecting more people than just me.
I’m sending this in the hope it survives the loop somehow, though given it’s by post it certainly won’t reach you before I’m back in the tunnels to face my worst self. You’ve never responded to any of the other statements I’ve sent, but who knows, maybe you received them too. I’m going to try something new tonight, the first attempt in a while. I’m not sure if it’s going to do the trick but some part of me has faith. I won this fight once, years ago, when I came out, when I decided to be myself instead of whatever that thing in the tunnels is. It’s me, but not me. I think it’s time I accepted that. I think it’s time I stopped hating it.
Love will win.
<STATEMENT ENDS>
I’ll give Miss Mason some credit, it’s not every day someone tries to abuse the Institute’s good faith for a bit of viral marketing, but unlike most statement givers she maintains an online presence. She has wisely kept any mention of her statement or the Magnus Institute from her social media feeds, but from the description of her upcoming game debut, she was clearly hoping to generate some “hype” by creating a rumour the game itself was haunted. Her statement matches the advertising footage of the game almost directly.
Frankly even this investigation was far more time than the statement warranted, though not as much time as Miss Mason put into her hoax, given the Institute received just over a thousand handwritten statements from her by mail in a single day, all dated identically yet some quite badly deteriorated, as if they had been left untouched for years before being sent. For the sake of our magnetic tape budget, I’ve only recorded the apparent last of the statements sent through, particularly as a large number of them were very, very repetitive.
<RECORDING ENDS>