A couple of years ago I was what you would call a bit of an edge lord. I was obsessed with disgusting and scary images, offensive humor and no right was more important to anyone than my free speech, which mostly meant throwing slurs at people over voice chat. I’m not sure if I can say I’m a better person now, or more mature, but thinking or acting the way I used to usually results in me running to throw up. I can barely witness anything gory or offensive without it instantly relating it to myself and getting flooded with unwanted images that escalate worse and worse. I’ve turned into the guy who PM’s you and thanks you for trigger warnings, saving me from getting violently ill at work.
As you might guess I did not suddenly mature a lot in a couple of years, this is the effect of trauma, PTSD my therapist called it although he does not believe in the events that caused my PTSD. He has a theory that it was a nervous breakdown over years of desensitizing myself, coupled with false memories and other junk. Maybe that is what my insurance is paying him for, not to fix me, but to give me an alternative explanation that is a lot less disturbing than what happened that night.
I used to work second shift customer service, heavily unsupervised, so after the first shift was completely gone we would regularly drink and do drugs to make it through the evening. We kept a group chat where we would post crazy stuff, making each other crack up in the middle of calls. Also we had this gamer girl we worked with who always shared video game memes and stuff like that, and one day she starts chatting about this thing called the Nope Game. She said it was like a video compilation of messed up stuff and the challenge is to see how long you can watch it without shutting it off or turning away.
Well it sounded like something hilarious to do, but the more we looked into it we realized it is not like a video that is out there, it is a specific stream you need to know about as it is almost always streamed through different platforms with brand new accounts. So after hours of digging we found out that one was happening in a few days around midnight. That was perfect, normally we got out around 11 and hit up a diner to get drinks and breakfast food, so we were gonna do that instead. One guy was joking about watching ‘people dying’ videos to condition himself to win, another said it would be all cringe stuff or extreme fetish stuff. In hindsight we were so naive, acting tough and even salivating at the prospect of showing how crazy we were.
The night of the transmission all 5 of us went to the gamer girls’ apartment, basically just a bedroom and living room with stained carpets and empty take out containers everywhere. Her computer was actually in her bedroom, so we all piled in there however we could… on her bed, sitting on the floor or just standing around. We had been drinking and smoking since we got off work but let me just say we were all still pretty level headed, like we had gotten perfect scores on calls while being a lot more messed up than that.
The gamer girl set up a recording app so we could re-watch the nope game later, or maybe even do our own streams of it. We figured that is how these things spread, anything that goes online gets shared to death and people move on to the next thing once it gets boring. We were just early adopters of this nope game. At this point I realize I’ve been stalling a little, because I do not really want to write about it. Anyone who reads this will probably find it stupid, or silly, like somebody else’s nightmare. But that was a real nightmare we shared.
There was an old timey countdown reel and then the transmission started. It was just a teenaged Asian girl in a hospital gown, sitting on a metal chair in some sort of clinical room that was white and spotless. Literally as soon as it started she said ‘One’ in perfect, unaccented English… making me think this was filmed somewhere here in the USA. ‘Two’. She said, and something squirmed in my stomach. ‘Three’ and the gamer girls arm twitched hard, startling all of us. It was like a spasm moved through us like a wave. Despite the booze or pills or weed, I did not feel numb at all. I felt tense, exposed and raw. Transfixed.
‘Four’ and I realized only 4 seconds have gone by but I wanted to leave, more than anything I wanted to leave. ‘Five’ she counted and her skin glitched. Not like she was a 3D model, instead it looked like flesh and bone spiked a little in random directions and returned to normal. One of the guys yelled ‘Nope’ and ran out of the room, although I felt trapped, not even my gaze could follow him. We did not taunt him for chickening out, we just sat there. I think somebody in the room was sobbing softly but I could not turn to see who it was. And nothing bad had started yet, it was just a vibe being pumped into the room through the monitor, like some sort of gas.
It would not get really bad until she hit the first minute, by then her skin and bones regularly glitched and spiked and moved like an equalizer. I tried putting my hand between myself and the twisting chaos that was that monotone girl, but when I looked at the back of my hand the skin was rippling, like a wet surface that a drop of water had fallen into. I felt my joints grinding a little, as the girl counted ‘Seventy Three’ and started to slightly bend sideways in an unnatural way. She continued to do so through ‘Seventy Four’, ‘Seventy Five’ and ‘Seventy Six’. She kept bending like some sort of snake, and I felt my joints start to strain and move in weird ways. I was not moving a single muscle but it felt like my bones were doing their own thing. Another customer service associate started to run, but he fell over. ‘Eighty four’ and he got up. ‘Eighty five’ and he fell again. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his flesh moving like waves, his limbs curbing in strange ways. It took a few tries but he was out of the room before she declared ‘One Hundred’.
It was no longer a challenge, it had stopped being one long ago. At this point I was trapped, watching the girl on the screen spiral into herself. The gamer girl was having spasms, making loud wet breathing noises beside me. I heard that the other guy was still behind me, knocking on the ground at a very fast rate, like he was vibrating. I guess there were three of us left in the room. I figured I would focus on him, and as she declared ‘One Hundred and Twelve’ I was slowly turning my head away from her hypnotizing gaze, which peered at me from from the core of a small slow whirlpool of flesh, bone and hair. She was like a liquid that pulsed with every number. ‘One Hundred and Seventeen’ and the flesh pulsed. ‘One Hundred and Eighteen’. It was like a visualizer of dread, spiking and shifting with my terror. But little by little I turned my head away, past what felt natural. By the time she said ‘One Hundred and Twenty Two’ I was looking at the guy behind me, I do not know what was more horrifying, the fact that my neck must have been turning a full 180 degrees, or that he was pulsating and warping, glitching even more violently than the gamer girl. One of his fists was jack hammering at the floor, making a very rapid thudding sound, with blood starting to pool in that spot.
At ‘One Hundred and Thirty Six’ I was granted a distraction. The people outside were screaming, yelling to us to get out but they dared not come in for us. I started to roll, to slither, in ways I’m not sure I can describe. I felt loose, rubbery, like I was melting. Like some sort of trip or nightmare except I had never felt more sober. By ‘One Hundred and Forty Nine’ I made it to the door. Somebody opened it and dragged me out, while screaming ‘look at him, oh my god, oh my god!’.
Once outside the room and with the door closed, I could feel the dread still thick in my head, but with the voice muffled it was starting to subside. It was being replaced by a sort of stiffness and excruciating pain, like I had fallen down two flights of stairs to get away from that computer monitor. The people in the room with me were counting, but it was something else… ‘One…’ and they got into position. ‘Two…’ and I realize they had pillows duct taped over their ears. ‘Three!’ and they ran into the room, emerging several moments later with the gamer girl. She looked big, uncomfortably and painfully big and bloated for a second, and she started to deflate into what I normally associated with her scrawny emo self. There was a little blood on the corner of her mouth, but she was breathing. Her bloodshot eyes darted side to side and finally rested in the middle. I think she was experiencing the same euphoria I was, meaning the pain was excruciating but it was no longer spiraling out of control.
They pulled the tape off and said ‘she was the only one in there, we even checked the bathroom and the closet, he got out somehow’. When the transmission stopped and so did our nausea, we stumbled back into the room. The screen was black and bloody hand prints were covering the floor, walls and ceiling. But terrifyingly, or mercifully, there was no sign of the guy we left behind. We did check out the video we had recorded, but thankfully there was nothing there. It was just solid black, as though some spyware protected it from being duplicated. All we know is that it lasted exactly 11 minutes and 6 seconds before the transmission stopped, and it was a few minutes after that before we had worked up the nerve to enter the room looking for our missing friend and stop the recording app. After that we spent a week working together but never talking or seeing each other after work. Our customer service scores dropped and HR asked us what happened to our co-worker after his third no call no show, but we did not have any answers for HR. We did not have any answers for ourselves.
A few weeks later we all got laid off when the second shift was eliminated and it became a regular 8 to 5 call center. I was not offered to move to another shift, I mean most evenings I would just stare at the ringing phone and ignore it so I see why they wanted to get rid of me. It was better that way, if I had been fired I would not been able to collect unemployment and seek help. I saw a therapist to help me cope, and a dermatologist to treat the stretch marks and scars on my limbs. I know one of the guys never got help, instead he got a shotgun and ended up in the newspaper after a gruesome murder-suicide involving a bunch of strangers. The other guy is actually OK, probably because he left the room first. I see him about town, but we never say hi. We lost track of the gamer girl, she got evicted and has not updated her facebook since that night. And the person we left behind in that room, who watched the whole transmission, I do not think of him anymore. Like sometimes I start to picture him in my head, twisting and shaking and snarling, and I stop myself. If I think of him I’ll just make myself sick so I try not to. Nope.