The following log has been recovered prior to the termination of subject 932 a participant in the Turing Experiment conducted at the end of 2022 by a private corporation aimed to digitize the human consciousness. By posting this I am violating the NDA I signed when joining the organization but things have gotten so out of hand that I feel obligated to disclose this information with the public. I plan to post the rest of the logs as I manage to decrypt them. I don’t have much time. I’m sure They are looking for me, we have unknowingly invented a fate worse than death…
Signed, T
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I woke up in a state of confusion. I am surrounded by an emptiness so complete, it feels as if I am suspended in space. The darkness is suffocating, and the silence deafening. I can’t see anything, I can only feel as though I were floating weightlessly at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a place long forgotten by light where total darkness reigns supreme. I can’t remember anything about my past, my name, or how I got here. The darkness is all-encompassing, like a suffocating blanket wrapped around my head, threatening to smother me at any moment.
I try to move, to find something solid to hold onto, but I can’t even tell if I have limbs. That’s how dark it is here and indescribably empty. I feel powerless and float aimlessly in the nothingness. After what seemed like hours suspended in this state, I started to feel like I was a part of this void, and it was a part of me. Another while passed and I had finally decided to swim in one direction and try to get somewhere, maybe, just maybe this place has an edge. Although, to my dismay, I soon realize that I am unable to tell which way is up or down or if I was making progress at all. I concentrated on making repeated movements as if I were swimming in a pool although I had no way of judging my progress. It’s as if I’m a ghost, a specter without substance or form. And yet, I start to feel something. I can feel the cold fingers of fear creeping up my spine, the knot of anxiety tightening in my throat. I could feel the emptiness stretching out endlessly in every direction. I swam through it, searching for something, anything that could give me a clue as to where I was or what was happening.
But the more I swam, the more I realized that I was getting nowhere. The darkness was unending, and the silence was maddening. I started to feel a sense of hopelessness and despair, and the thought of being trapped in this void forever became unbearable. But just when I felt my mind begin to slip into madness, I saw something. A small figure, shaped like a child, was crying in the distance. I was so surprised that I stopped swimming, and the figure disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
At first, I thought I was just imagining things, but then it happened again. This time, the figure was closer, and I could see that it was a small boy, crying and clutching at a rabbit plushie to his chest. I tried to swim towards him, but he disappeared again before I could get any closer. I was bewildered and scared at first, not really knowing what to do. Managing to calm myself I decided the best course of action would be to swim towards the direction where I last spotted the boy, overcome by a sense of familiarity and morbid curiosity. This was it, I thought, this apparition must be the key to solving who and where I was. I tried desperately to catch a glimpse of the boy again, but he never reappeared. Though as I seemed to drift closer to where I last saw him something shocking and disturbing had taken his place.
Instead of the boy I saw a vaguely humanoid figure had appeared. It emanated a dim light and seemed to take the form of a young woman, screeching in terror but never to penetrate the thick silence around her, blinking in and out of existence. Suddenly the nostalgic feeling which attracted me towards the boy dissipated and my fight or flight response had locked me in place like a deer in the headlights, my mind was yelling for me to flee and yet I remained motionless. Suddenly another figure appeared, it was a slender man wearing a lab coat, running away in terror while looking behind his shoulder letting out a muted yell and disappearing as he came into my vicinity. And then another, and another, until I was surrounded by a horde of apparitions, all seemed to be deeply in distress. Then in the blink of an eye all these people started running in terror towards me and away from something unseen lurking in the darkness. Their cacophony of screams was the first sound I’ve heard since ending up in this godforsaken purgatory and it was deafening. At that moment I felt as though all of my senses were being violated and the only thing I heard were their desperate screams of anguish. I felt overwhelmed and a panic attack grew in my chest even though my heartbeat remained inexistant. Panicking, I started to swim faster and faster, trying to get away from them, but they were now all around me. The only thing I felt I could do was to curl into a fetal position and close my eyes accepting my demise. And then, just as suddenly as the sound had appeared, it was gone and the figures vanished with it, and I was plunged back into the darkness, alone and petrified.
I was deeply disturbed by that encounter even though I still couldn’t fully even tell if I had a corporeal form or not. I had never felt so scared in my life and anyone in my situation would most certainly go insane. I started to think that I was hallucinating, but then after what felt like days of agonizing silence and swimming in one direction through the darkness, I came to a conclusion that the occurrence was not simply a figment of my imagination but a small piece of a bigger puzzle. In that span of time I theorized that the horrid apparitions could have been “glitches” in the system, sudden deviations from the norm, unsettling disturbances in the fabric of reality. These were moments of malfunction that were bleeding in from a separate reality, one that seemed so close yet unreachable, familiar yet distant. The reality which felt as if it were simply a small fish at the mercy of a dark incomprehensibly large whale about to swallow it. A sense of morbid curiosity overtook me and I dreaded whatever was waiting for me in this void.
What seemed like a week passed without a single oddity occurring, yet I couldn’t be sure due to not having any reference of time in this wretched place. After not receiving any stimulation for such a long amount of time the fear of my situation became palpable, and the silence more suffocating than ever. I started to feel like I was going to drown in the emptiness, lost and forgotten in this horrid place. The idea of being trapped in this abyss forever took root at the back of my mind, blossoming and consuming my will to fight with each hour that passed. And as all hope seemed to leave me I remembered the boy I saw earlier, and I felt a glimmer of hope. If the glitches were real, then maybe there was a way out. Maybe the child was trying to show me something, I rationed, the feeling of nostalgia and familiarity returning to me. And as if my thoughts had materialized into reality, I spotted a small figure in the distance, walking away from me. My last glimmer of hope in the darkness had finally appeared and I won’t let it escape me, not again…