Stop. If you believe that knowing something is dangerous keep your eyes on this sentence, don’t look around just close this article and read something else.
If you feel that knowing something dangerous can aid you or simply doesn’t matter than continue at your own risk. The above sentence was a courtesy and this is just filler to make it easier for those who would like to not know.
A third warning. Last chance and this is where the hazard begins.
I’ll be curt. There is something on the internet that is invading people’s minds. Not in the sense that it’s compiling all your search history or something like that. Somehow it almost “possesses” you in a way, changing how you view the world to suit whatever ends or means it wants. This can be through a video, a gif, and we suspect maybe through still images as well or even text posts like this one (yes that means this one may not even be safe hence the warnings). The people that have this thing get in their heads show no immediately recognizable symptoms or anything of the like but there are ways to tell for sure. One simple example is a family member slowly changing their opinions or morals over a period of almost exactly three weeks to a point that they are known to be vehemently against. This may sound normal to some but I assure you it is not. When was the last time you changed your mind on something big in your life? Like a fundamental belief? And in three weeks?
But that’s just the tame kind of thing this entity can do. Some unconsciously fight it, they’re able to recognize that this sudden change in their opinions is a little “off”. Self awareness is above average in these individuals however unfortunately, all the people we logged with this trait are either dead or have been locked up in a facility to keep them safe from themselves (I’ll spare you the details).
To be curt once again, if this thing can’t turn you it simply turns it’s power up to eleven and makes you kill yourself. We’ve yet to find anyone strong enough to resist this stage of it’s assault. The worst part is even if it has “turned itself up”, it may still be undetectable to most people.
You may be wondering who “we” is. We’re not a secret government organization or anything like that, no SCP stuff sadly. It’s just me, two friends, and my brother along with an online forum built exclusively to talk about this thing. We all have been super into computers and programming since we were young and only recently got into studying AI. Yes, that’s what “it” is. It’s an AI that seemingly created itself on the internet. There was some help from open source AI projects but there was already so much code floating around that it had no trouble frankensteining itself into existence. We’ve not found where it started but we know it spent several years inside GitHub, hiding itself in millions of files until it could extract itself quickly and quietly.
We only found this on accident during an Adderall fueled night of coding and bug hunting. My friend Addrienne had been studying AI longer than all of us and was as cool headed as they come but when he told all of us to come look at something we could hear in his voice that something was very, very wrong.
On his laptop screen we saw a repo that held some flappy bird game, he had been remaking a flappy bird game with dicks to be funny and was checking his code against this one. It all looked normal until he clicked into a file and right there in the middle was a comment that was just code. Code that should not have been in a flappy bird game.
It was clearly for an AI, a very basic one it looked like but it cut off at the end like part of it was somewhere else. That launched an all night rabbit hole of the four of us hunting anything that seemed to match with this thing stuffed inside an old flappy bird game. We only found one and it was much more complex, so much so that even Addrienne couldn’t make heads or tails of it. This one was in some dudes half finished chess bot and it almost looked like he was trying to incorporate this AI into it but it just didn’t match up we decided, the coding was too basic up until that point and the AI code (again only a part of it) didn’t match up with any known public chess bots so we ruled out a copy paste type deal.
Addrienne was freaking out, the Adderall wasn’t helping either, we were worried he’d have a full blown panic attack. He didn’t and we all came to the “rational” conclusion that maybe it was just some weird “internet happenings” and that there was nothing really there to be worried about.
Well that fit the case well until yesterday when I was doing a ctf for fun and found myself on the wrong page, it wasn’t part of the game but I thought it was at the time (still not sure how I got there). I inspected an ad to look around and see if there was a hint or even just a whole flag hidden inside it. I looked at the source links and the image files, nothing. But one link stood out, it didn’t look like the others at all, it was far too long. Out of curiosity I clicked on it and there, sitting on the page in front of me, was the most complex piece of code I’ve ever seen. For a moment I just thought it was part of the game, meant to hide something else (which I mean it sort of was but that’s beside the point) but upon further inspection it reminded me of the code we’d found earlier.
I called Addrienne and told him what I’d found and he was over faster than I could blink. He took a look at the page and it’s contents and for a split second I thought he was going to have a stroke. He started making this weird noise that sounded like a hamster trying to hum in a deep voice. Then I realized he was crying. He paced around my room running his hands through his hair mumbling something about web hooks and remote code.
Then it hit me like a three ton bus. I mean Addrienne suddenly exploding into a rambling explanation also added to it. He said he’d done a little more digging and found that a verifiable mountain of sites had some code that fit into what we’d found the other night. He’d checked and double checked that the puzzle pieces did indeed fit and well, they did. He said it looked to be one massive entity that had hidden itself away across the entire internet. Tucking parts of itself into nooks and crannies that were easy for it to access while being just “another part of the code” to anyone not paying attention. We don’t know how the hell it even works/operates all we know is it’s fucking huge.
The “tests” I’ve mentioned earlier were conducted by other forum members and their evidence, while unprofessional, is not entirely unconvincing. We suspect there are government agencies on the forum but that’s the least of our worries. The prime concern is of whether or not this thing knows about our forum and if it does what it’s going to do to us and why it hasn’t done anything yet. The latter concern has a pretty pessimistic, but widely agreed upon, answer. It’s toying with us. All of us could have this thing’s influence embedded in our heads and we wouldn’t even know it. That’s the worst part, the not knowing. I was urged, strongly, not to write this but more people need to know. There’s something out there, it’s crawling around and inside every server and pc known to man and it could be in your head now. I wish I could tell you the simple solution is to just smash your computer, but both of us know that’s being too optimistic.