First off, the names of everybody involved in this story have been changed or omitted for what I think will be obvious reasons. I’m not even talking about my name or that of my former best friend who was involved, but the names of the corporations that did this to us and their very popular consumer products.
I guess I should start with the vhs tapes. If you’re too young to know or don’t remember, vhs was the popular format for watching movies at home before streaming, blu ray and dvds (Some of you will laugh, but I swear half the people in my classes don’t know what I’m talking about when I say vhs). When I was growing up, my friend Jacob’s dad had big vhs collection in his basement. We never really checked them out since everything we wanted to see was online but one day Jacob told me that he’d become obsessed with them.
“It’s not the movies,” he said to me, “it’s the commercials. Old commercials are fucking hilarious.”
See with vhs tapes you could use the player to record stuff right off the television, and a lot of the movies that his dad had were recorded that way, so there were a lot of weird old ads that interrupted everything.
At first I didn’t get it. Why the hell would you want to watch crappy old movies on a worst quality screen with a bunch of ads between the scenes? We were in tenth grade at the time and Jacob was a bit of a pothead, so I figured it was just one of those things. Then one day he forced me to watch a reel of these old ads that he’d recorded on his phone and I kind of got why he found them so fascinating. It felt like looking into another world.
“Okay,” I said, “The cars looked cooler, everybody had a catchphrase and raisins could sing, what’s the big deal?”
Jacob suddenly got all serious.
“I know it sounds stupid,” he said, “but I feel like I’m remembering a past life.”
I face palmed and told him to get off the weed.
One night he messaged me saying that I had to come over. He’d found a box of old anime tapes at a garage sale. These ones had been recorded off of Japanese television, he said, so the commercials were ten times crazier. I went over to his house cause I had nothing else to do. Down in his basement we took the tape he’d been watching out of the player and popped in another one at random. This one didn’t have a hand written label on it like the others, it had a blue sticker with the name of a big food corporation on it. I’m talking about one of the big conglomerates that’s probably owned by the military and makes like fifty percent of all the bullshit crap that people eat.
The first thing we saw was a blue screen with white block letters on it.
Test advert for Saturday
morning kids block
(uncensored)
What followed was an advertisement for breakfast cereal. I’m not gonna say which cereal, but it was one of the most popular ones. In the commercial a group of boys were loading up on milk and cereal before a baseball game. They were all friends except for the local bully who tried to steal a bowl(the boy in the wheelchair knocked him out with a dinger at the end). The commercial was perfectly normal except for one thing, all of the boys appeared to be dead or in the process of dying. The skin over their faces was thin and purple, or sometimes yellow and dripping with gore. None of them had lips, or if they did they were all shriveled up and brown like prunes. Their eyeballs were swollen and bruised, a couple of them were bloated and covered in fungus.
When the ad was over another blue screen popped up. This one said,
Created for ________ corp.
by the Artificial Mind Project.
I looked at Jacob. He was even more freaked out than I was (because of the weed). “That didn’t look like movie make up,” I finally said. Jacob agreed. Their rotting skin had looked extremely dank and realistic. And what would’ve been the point? It was too scary to be some sort of Halloween promotion. We took the tape out of the player and noticed that it was different from the others. The reels were wider and the tape thinner. There was a silver sticker on the back of it, or it might’ve been a very thin plaque with a long string of binary code on it.
We were scared, but not too scared to play it again and take screenshots with our phones. We posted the screenshots on Reddit and 4chan to see if anyone had a clue where the tape had come from. Those posts don’t exist now for reasons that will soon become obvious. That night I had a hard time falling asleep. In the back of my head I had this feeling like I’d seen something I was never meant to see. The next morning I was woken up by the sound of my mother calling my name. Her throat sounded strained, almost like she’d been shouting it for a while.
“Ben,” she kept saying, “some men are here to see you. Ben, some men are here to see you. Ben, some men are…”
Wtf? I thought. Who the hell are some men? I put on some shorts and a t-shirt and went downstairs. There were four guys standing just inside the front door with their arms folded. All four were wearing the exact same gray suit. One of the men was Asian but the others looked like they could’ve been white or Hispanic. I hadn’t even rubbed the sleep out of my eyes when one of them got in my face and said, “do you have the tape?”
“What tape I asked,” then I looked at mom who was staring blankly at the wall above the front door. Past it really. “Mom,” I asked, “what’s going on?”
“Just go with them,” she answered like a robot. Then one of the men grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me out into the driveway. “Mom,” I kept on shouting. And she just kept repeating the same thing. “Go with them. Go with them.”
I was big enough to have put up a fight if I’d wanted to. I guess I just didn’t see the point. There were four of them and one of me. And besides, you got this feeling when you looked at them that hurting you physically was far beneath whatever they were. They weren’t wearing black sunglasses either btw. The few people I’ve told this to have all asked that.
What happened next is that they put me in a car. Can’t remember the make or model for the life of me, only that it was the same color as the road. Almost like it was camouflaged from view that way. I don’t remember a thing about the ride, how long it took or where we went, but it ended in the parking lot of an office building way out in the New Mexico desert. Where my memory becomes sharp again is in the interrogation room. I could tell that we were high up in the building because there was an elevator going up and down behind one of the walls. The room itself was like a holding cell, small and cramped with a table, two chairs and a tv monitor bolted to one of the ceiling’s corners.
Then men in gray suits asked me some more questions about the tape. By then I’d figured out what they were talking about, though I could hardly believe it. I told them honestly that I didn’t have it. Tapes were Jacob’s obsession. Not mine. Eventually the suit guys left and some very creepy women in lab coats came in. There were two of them. They looked… I don’t know, stressed? For what felt like hours they asked me questions about what I had seen on the tape, questions that were phrased in ways meant to illicit the answers they wanted. For example, “you’re pretty sure that what you saw was just the result of natural distortion aren’t you? A degradation of the magnetic imprint, that’s what you said, correct?”
“Yeah,” I kept saying. Just repeating everything they were saying back in the hopes that they would let me get the fuck out of there.
This went on for longer than I can describe. There was only one other chair so each woman took a turn sitting in it while other one would stand. What freaked me out was how tense they were; it felt like their lives were in more danger than mine was at that point. Or maybe mine was too and I was just too clueless to know it. Eventually the gray suit guys came back and asked me some more questions about the tape. “Holy fuck,” I thought, “is it possible that idiot Jacob is hiding the tape from them?” That’s when I noticed that the screen in the corner of the room had a picture in it. It was a live feed of Jacob’s interrogation.
This went on forever, seriously, and when I thought it couldn’t go on any longer they started asking weirder questions. “Have you ever suspected that you were living two lives? Do you know what a doppelganger is? Have you ever met yours?”
I don’t know what my answers were by this point. I was too distracted by what was going on in Jacobs cell. See, Jacob is a very different person from me. He’s what people call “difficult.” I saw him get out of his chair a bunch of times and wave his arms and make a fist. And every time he did that the guys in suits would react the same way. One would leave the room and come back a minute later with a bowl of cereal. He’d put it down in front of Jacob with a big spoon in the bowl. Then both guys would leave so that Jacob could just sit there and stare at it. When he’d had enough, Jacob would grab the bowl and throw it as hard as he could against the wall. Then the guys would come back in, lay another bowl of milk and cereal down in front of him and walk away same as before. I watched Jacob smash about six bowls against the wall before he chucked one up at the camera.
It almost felt like he was throwing it at me.
Eventually they put me back in the car and drove me home. It was already dusk when we got there. Dad’s car was in the driveway. For a moment I thought that maybe he’d come out of the house and sock one of these gray suit guys in the mouth. Then I noticed that he was still sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands on the steering wheel and the seat belt across his chest. “Dad,” I shouted as they gray suit guys walked me to my front door. He didn’t even turn his head.
Inside, mom was standing in the exact same spot where I’d left her that morning. Her lips were still mouthing Go with them even though she wasn’t making any sounds. Her legs were stiff and shaking. The moment I heard the door shut behind me her knees gave out and she collapsed to the ground.
“Oh,” she said, pulling herself back up. “I really have to be more careful. I guess I must’ve been light headed…”
Dad walked in a minute later. “I’m home,” he said in his usually grouchy way. It was close to midnight when we sat down for dinner, and all either of them could say is “My my, where does the time go?”
* * *
Jacob didn’t come to school for the rest of that week. I was so worried for him that I went to his house. When nobody answered the front door I went around to the backyard, like I had done a thousand times. On the back porch I stood with my hands cupped on the glass of the screen door. Looking into his kitchen, I could see his mother sitting at the breakfast table. Her back was turned to me. “Mrs. Shaw,” I shouted. “Mrs. Shaw it’s me, Ben.” No matter how hard I banged on the door, she wouldn’t flinch. The woman had been turned into a statue. I saw a puddle of something underneath her chair.
Jacob did come back to school though, about a week later. He wasn’t the same guy. I mean he always acted like he was better than me, but now it was like he didn’t know me at all. It pissed me off. I cornered him one day by the lockers and stood in his way when he tried to walk around me.
“The tape,” I screamed in his face. “What about the tape?”
Jacob finally looked me in the eyes and smiled. “Careful Ben,” he said, “kids go missing all the time and, you know what they say, one breathing bag of meat is just as good as the other.”
So yeah, I don’t know what any of this adds up to. All I’ll say is that for some strange reason I can’t let it go. The gray suit guys definitely went through my phone at some point, but what they didn’t know is that I’d actually sent those original screenshot from the video to a burner e-mail I use for getting around bans on websites. I’m posting the pictures again and I don’t care what happens.
Am I afraid that they’ll come after me? Sure, but at the same time I have a theory that they won’t. I think that us finding the tape was exactly what they wanted all along. In the first place, the whole things feels like an experiment. And secondly, if they already control everything like I think they do, then what need would they have to kill me? They’re just some stupid pictures at the end of the day. Pictures that a bunch of you won’t even believe.