Before I start, I’m using a throwaway account to protect my identity to an extent. My Partner could probably recognise this as being about them if they ever discovered it, but I need to get some outside opinions on it all and how I should act next, if at all.
For context, me and my partner have been together now for what will be 6 years on our anniversary this May. We’ve lived together for 4 years of this relationship, and they proposed this last November just gone to what was an immediate yes from me, cue plans to get married on what would be our 6th anniversary this year. I love them dearly, and do not know what I would do without them since we have began living together. They are simply an ingrained part of my life and emotional wellbeing at this point.
Anyway, fast forward to this January, it’s been a while since the proposal and things have been going well in my own opinion, however my SO has grown cold, antisocial, I don’t know how else to describe it but they have changed rather suddenly into a recluse that seems to only be interested in their computer. I should probably mention that they have worked from our home in the web development industry since COVID first became a thing, a job they had held previously from the office for the last 5 years, so the majority of our entire relationship I have always known them to be something of a tech fanatic, always enthusiastic and thrilled to tell me about the newest feature they’d been working on even if they knew I didn’t share the same level of knowledge, and seeing how much joy it bought them to work on these things and share the accomplishments with me I too have tried to be passionate about their passion.
But as I mentioned, that changed this January, and suddenly they have become almost instantly cold and antisocial, nothing like their normal self. My first thought knowing they’ve had a history of mild depression was that their mental health was simply playing up due to the usual stresses of modern life, bills and meeting expectations etc. however 2 weeks into this behaviour and it hit a peak when for the 4th day running they stayed in our office typing away until the small hours of the morning with the door locked and the lights turned out. They had completely stopped coming up to bed at this point like we would every other day of our lives living together prior to this change in behaviour, and would instead crash out in the office while I slept alone upstairs, and by this 4th day I’d had enough, having gotten maybe 5 whole sentences out of them over the entire period and no explanation when asked if something was wrong other than that they were “Busy with a new project and it was very important.”
At this point it was not like them at all, and although I may sound overdramatic I was deeply concerned, and had all kinds of thoughts going through my head. Were they seriously ill with mental health? Were they cheating? Had I done something I was unaware of to warrant how cold they were being? I didn’t have any answers, and speaking to them provided none either, as they would just brush me off on what was becoming the rare occasion they wasn’t locked in our office typing away in the dark. Skip to the end of this January, it’s around 3 AM one night and for whatever reason despite having gotten used to them not sharing our bed I couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs to check if they was still up and saw the office door left wide open, weird but not that strange in the grand scheme. What was weird however was that at 3 AM with no notice or explanation they was nowhere to be seen in the office itself, or downstairs at all for that matter. I called out for them, thinking perhaps they’d went into the living room and I just hadn’t noticed them, before something urged me to check the office further. People talk about gut instincts and I suppose given how strange and antisocial they had been acting recently with no explanation that I was just following mine, because for whatever reason I went in and checked.
Their computer was still open and running on the screen when I went in, not that odd had they been downstairs still and not long left the room I suppose, so I decided to look at it. Again, I don’t know why and I guess it was just gut instinct given my fears they had been cheating or suffering mentally with their recent change in attitude towards everything. While I never use it myself it is technically our shared computer, although they was the only one to use it for their work from home, and as I owned a separate laptop for sending emails and studies I never had reasons to have checked it before this. What I saw when I did confused me greatly.
I’m not a computer wiz like they are by any means, but I knew what the desktop usually looked like. A wallpaper of a photo of us together on a date, celebrating our first year together, taken only a few weeks after they’d gotten the web development job, covered in about a thousand different shortcuts and a completely disorganised mess, but one that they claimed before now was how they liked it as they knew their way around it all. Now though there was no wallpaper of us, no shortcuts, it was just blank. And not blank like a generic background you get on a new PC, no, literally just a white background with the menu bar at the bottom. It was like they had completely reset the PC and set the wallpaper to a plain white background, save for one shortcut in the middle of the screen. It was a text document simply titled HELP ME. My mind raced as soon as I saw this, putting 2+2 together immediately with them not being anywhere to be seen and their recent attitude changes that I was right about them being mentally sick. I clicked the document without thinking and it opened to an empty text document, save for one website link. I won’t include the link in this post as I don’t know the rules surrounding doing that, but I checked it out myself immediately. It could have been an important work project they’d labelled that way as ‘HELP ME’ because they was struggling to get through it, it could’ve been anything, but with all the doubts and questions running through my mind I didn’t stop to think reasonably. It was nearly 4 AM at this point and my partner was nowhere to be seen following weeks of them having turned into a hermit locked in this office ignoring me, and I wasn’t about to ignore this potential source of answers. I copied the link, opened Google and pasted it quicker than anything.
It loaded up a website, a screen just as empty as the text document I’d found the link in, save for characters written all down the screen. It was a literal wall of text, all just unintelligible strings of letters and numbers, none of which made any obvious sense. The only way I can describe it is that it looked like one of those screens out of the matrix, only with black text on a white screen rather than green writing, and it clearly wasn’t English or any recognisable language. It sounds weird given my concern but it actually put my mind at ease a little when I saw this. I was expecting the link to take me to conversations with other people being unfaithful, or some kind of emotional breakdown, but instead it was just a text document of some unintelligible characters that probably related to their work in some way. I closed the website and thought nothing more of it at the time, more concerned by where they was at this time in the morning with no explanation having left the computer running in this weird state. I rang them a few times to no luck, going to voicemail each time, left them a message asking where they’d gone and debated going out to look for them, but ultimately I left it and instead waited in the living room, deciding I’d contact their parents if they hadn’t returned by the morning to see if they’d heard from them. After all, they’re an adult, they aren’t under a curfew, however odd it was.
I must have fell back to sleep waiting for them, because I was woke up by the sounds of banging nearby. I jolted awake as anyone would to see them pacing the room and hallways, hitting the walls as they went. Immediately I jumped up and went to ask them what the heck was wrong, and when I did they turned on me and started shouting that they knew I’d been snooping through the computer. To say I was shocked would be an understatement, even at the coldest points of their recent mood change they had never been angry like this, and in the entire time we’ve lived together while I’ve never made a habit out of going through the computer they’ve never cared before if I have had to use it, much less to this level of aggression. I tried to explain that I just closed it down when I saw it open, and was confused where they’d disappeared at that time, but it didn’t matter to them. They just shouted that I “didn’t f*cking know what I was getting myself involved in” and stormed into the office locking it behind them. I banged on the door a few times, telling them I didn’t understand, not to ignore me, that I was worried about them, but none of it went through or got a response. It sounds petty, but I was heartbroken. My partner of 6 years I was engaged to had never hid things from me, much less treated me like this over something so trivial and unexplained. I went back up to bed, locked the door and after venting to a friend about my concerns over text and sending them the link to see if they agreed that my partner was out of order reacting the way they did to me opening it I fell back to sleep, having barely slept properly waiting up for them and being woke to this.
I woke up again a few hours later to a quiet house, and noticed they was laid next to me under the covers fast asleep having obviously climbed in while I was out of it as if nothing had happened. I got out of bed and went back downstairs, made a coffee and went to sit on the front doorstep with a cigarette, opened my phone and saw a fleet of messages from my friend spamming my inbox as if there was a dire emergency, telling me to message them back ASAP and that I was right to be confused.
I should mention that said friend is actually a shared friend of both me and my partner that they knew long before I did and long before we got together, although when I first befriended them it was through College, and I had no idea they knew my partner at the time, so we formed a close friendship for many weeks before finally realising we all knew each other when they came round to the house and needed no introduction from me. I only mention this to provide the context that they knew my partner’s occupation, and shared an interest in computers and the like.
I rang them back while my partner was still up sleeping, and they told me that they’d seen the link and that it was really weird. I agreed but downplayed it, I mean yeah it was odd that they had a link to a load of gibberish and nothing else but in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t the strangest thing imaginable. Only it wasn’t gibberish according to the friend. I probably should’ve thought more into that when I discovered the link, but I was more concerned by my missing partner and the fact it was titled Help Me while they were nowhere to be found, given their attitude over the past weeks. Upon asking my friend what the heck they meant they explained to me that the writing on the website was actually a coded message, which I suppose wouldn’t be so surprising at all on a developer’s computer, but my friend went on to explain further when I retorted with that, confused why it was such a big deal to them.
Apparently the code wasn’t just some website that was hard to work on like I might have presumed, it was actually an encrypted piece of writing. They explained that they’d recognised the first few lines of text to be something called a Caesar Cipher, like the salad, and that it was apparently an incredibly basic and well known way of encrypting text, or at least basic and well known to everybody within those circles excluding me I suppose. They explained further that the text was written for the first 3 or 4 lines in this way and that they’d been able with how simple it was to translate those first few lines into something that resembled English, but that it wasn’t intelligible or coherent writing by any means, and that after a few lines it simply either stopped making any form of sense or switched to a different encryption, because they had no luck whatsoever of making anything out of the rest of what was there past the first few lines.
Obviously this all made zero sense to me, so I told them this and how confused I was by it all and they apologised, explaining that they didn’t mean to confuse me and that it was probably just incoherent button smashing for the rest of the text, not to worry about it all unless more came from it and that they could send the translation they’d managed to make out of those first few lines over to me if it’d help to put my mind at ease, warning that it really didn’t make any sense as it was and could easily be an incorrect translation on their behalf with how nonsensical and strange it seemed. They sent me a text shortly after and I’m honestly unsure now of how to feel at all about it all, whether I should confront my partner further regarding it or what to do. According to the translation they managed to make, the first few lines of the gibberish code read the following, and there’s an entire page filled with more my friend couldn’t decode for me:
“She is underneath the big room and they keep saying they will know how she got there. If this is public I am sorry but I need to explain this before the blackmail continues. I am not the monster they want for it I only cooperated for our safety. I now wish I never saw.”