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This isn’t a “pasta”, but a few of the forum mods and I watched this and found it creepy/haunting enough that it might be worth sharing. This is a 1984 Soviet animation of a post-apocalyptic short story by Ray Bradbury, produced by Uzbekfilm and hosted by Daily Motion. Hope you enjoy.
You know how Fox has a weird way of counting Simpsons episodes? They refuse to count a couple of them, making the amount of episodes inconsistent. The reason for this is a lost episode from season 1.
Finding details about this missing episode is difficult, no one who was working on the show at the time likes to talk about it. From what has been pieced together, the lost episode was written entirely by Matt Groening. During production of the first season, Matt started to act strangely. He was very quiet, seemed nervous and morbid. Mentioning this to anyone who was present results in them getting very angry, and forbidding you to ever mention it to Matt. The episode’s production number was 7G44, the title was Dead Bart.
In addition to getting angry, asking anyone who was on the show about this will cause them to do everything they can to stop you from directly communicating with Matt Groening. At a fan event, I managed to follow him after he spoke to the crowd, and eventually had a chance to talk to him alone as he was leaving the building. He didn’t seem upset that I had followed him, probably expected a typical encounter with an obsessive fan. When I mentioned the lost episode though, all color drained from his face and he started trembling. When I asked him if he could tell me any details, he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. He grabbed a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. He begged me never to mention the episode again.
The piece of paper had a website address on it, I would rather not say what it was, for reasons you’ll see in a second. I entered the address into my browser, and I came to a site that was completely black, except for a line of yellow text, a download link. I clicked on it, and a file started downloading. Once the file was downloaded, my computer went crazy, it was the worst virus I had ever seen. System restore didn’t work, the entire computer had to be rebooted. Before doing this though, I copied the file onto a CD. I tried to open it on my now empty computer, and as I suspected, there was an episode of The Simpsons on it.
The episode started off like any other episode, but had very poor quality animation. If you’ve seen the original animation for Some Enchanted Evening, it was similar, but less stable. The first act was fairly normal, but the way the characters acted was a little off. Homer seemed angrier, Marge seemed depressed, Lisa seemed anxious, Bart seemed to have genuine anger and hatred for his parents.
The episode was about the Simpsons going on a plane trip, near the end of the first act, the plane was taking off. Bart was fooling around, as you’d expect. However, as the plane was about 50 feet off the ground, Bart broke a window on the plane and was sucked out.
At the beginning of the series, Matt had an idea that the animated style of the Simpsons’ world represented life, and that death turned things more realistic. This was used in this episode. The picture of Bart’s corpse was barely recognizable, they took full advantage of it not having to move, and made an almost photo-realistic drawing of his dead body.
Act one ended with the shot of Bart’s corpse. When act two started, Homer, Marge, and Lisa were sitting at their table, crying. The crying went on and on, it got more pained, and sounded more realistic, better acting than you would think possible. The animation started to decay even more as they cried, and you could hear murmuring in the background. This crying went on for all of act two.
Act three opened with a title card saying one year had passed. Homer, Marge, and Lisa were skeletally thin, and still sitting at the table. There was no sign of Maggie or the pets.
They decided to visit Bart’s grave. Springfield was completely deserted, and as they walked to the cemetery the houses became more and more decrepit. They all looked abandoned. When they got to the grave, Bart’s body was just lying in front of his tombstone, looking just like it did at the end of act one.
The family started crying again. Eventually they stopped, and just stared at Bart’s body. The camera zoomed in on Homer’s face. According to summaries, Homer tells a joke at this part, but it isn’t audible in the version I saw, you can’t tell what Homer is saying.
The view zoomed out as the episode came to a close. The tombstones in the background had the names of every Simpsons guest star on them. Some that no one had heard of in 1989, some that haven’t been on the show yet. All of them had death dates on them. For guests who died since, like Michael Jackson and George Harrison, the dates were when they would die.
You can try to use the tombstones to predict the death of living Simpsons guest stars, but there’s something odd about most of the ones who haven’t died yet. All of their deaths are listed as the same date.
//
Not gonna lie, I personally think this one’s not that great, but it’s been both submitted and searched for a ton, so apparently it needs to be archived. Only credit I can find is to someone calling themselves “KI Simpson”, so there you go.
Have you ever had an experience that suggested someone else was in your house, and just thought “I don’t wanna know” and left it? Sometimes, fear of the unknown just seems like the preferable option than facing a real, concrete danger. Normally it’s nothing, though. One time, the beeper function of my wireless housephone went off, when I was the only one home. It could only be called from the living room. Another time, I swear someone took some change from my desk. They’re all probably just slightly disconcerting tricks of the memory.
But what would you do when something truly suggestive happens? Would you run, or just ignore it, like I did?
Last Monday was a normal day. I got up, brushed my teeth, changed into school clothes… All little parts of my morning ritual. It seemed like it would be another totally un-noteworthy day, until I saw the strings.
There were three or four thick twine strings in my room. They criss-crossed between the walls around my bed, one attached to the door. No way would I have missed them before; I should have tripped over them. They were tied to pins in the walls, which had also not existed before ten seconds ago.
Nobody could have been in my room while I was in it, let alone set this up. It was early, and my brain wasn’t processing correctly. I simply discredited the sight, untied the strings and left for school, leaving them balled up on my desk.
It didn’t get any better later. Outside my house there were hundreds of them, tied between houses, around cars, across streets… This had to be some super elaborate prank. One of those hidden camera shows, or a comedy improv blog. They had gotten everyone else to play along too; passer-bys were tangled in them, tying them to objects they were walking towards and away from, as if they had been and were continuing to follow the course laid out for them.
I nervously continued my journey to school. On the bus, every except me was tied to the door. At school, groups of friends were tied to each other; teachers were tied to their desks and boards. Oddly enough, at this point all I could wonder was why I had been left out.
When my friend Lucy sat beside me in first period, she simply plonked her bag down on my lap and rested her chin in her hand, looking right past me to the window outside.
“Hey Lucy.”
No response.
“Come on, I didn’t expect you to be in on this too. “
She sighed and started taking books from her bag. All the books were tied to her hands. I grinned, and yanked one of the strings off a book. She didn’t seem to notice, instead simply disregarding the book completely, letting it drop to the floor without a moment’s hesitation.
“Um.” I leaned down, picking up her book and placing it back on her desk. She took no notice.
“Well, if that’s how we’re gonna play it.” I smiled, trying to look playful, but really just trying to hide my nervousness. I bundled all the strings attached to her together with one hand, then pulled them all free.
She blinked, turning to stare at me.
“Holy crap, Martin. You’re like a ninja or something.”
“I’ve been sitting here for maybe ten minutes.” I smiled again, relieved my friend had finally “noticed” me.
“Where did all these strings come from??” She gasped, seemingly noticing for the first time.
“I assumed you were all fucking with me…”
She stood up, backing into a corner. No one else in the class noticed.
“They weren’t here just a minute ago! Do you see them too??” Her tone made it clear she was genuinely scared.
“No. Didn’t you-. “ I was interrupted by my teacher slamming the door behind her. Everyone except me and Lucy murmured a good morning, and still, no one seemed to pay either of us any notice.
“People have been ignoring me all day.” I said to Lucy, before turning to our teacher. “Hey! Dumb bitch! You can’t teach for shit!”
No reaction.
“I’m getting away from all this shit.” Lucy pulled a few strings aside and left the class. I followed, and surprise-surprise, no one else noticed.
We wandered the corridors, leaving and entering classes as we saw fit. Whenever we untied a chair or book from someone else, it was like it suddenly didn’t matter to them. It didn’t exist.
They say when you take a picture of someone you capture their soul in the camera. They also say if you print it off, that picture contains the soul itself and you can control them with it.
I’m not sure where to start. Do you know what the Primordial Soup is? A veritable ocean of elements, all floating around randomly. And through millions of years of time, eventually the right set of random circumstances came to pass, and the elements were able to connect together and form the worlds first single cell organism.
Now that’s a really boiled down version of it but I’m sure you get the gist of it. Fast forward a few billion years to the early 1990s, when internet use began to rapidly accelerate. Every home had a computer, and new connections between computers were opening on a by the second basis.
Trillions of bytes of data began to transfer around the world at the speed of light, music, text, sound, and most importantly; pictures. Now if, when you take a picture of someone and capture their soul, what happens when that picture is converted to data and placed on a hard drive? Does the soul follow? 15 years later we believe so. We believe that when you take a picture of someone and upload it onto your computer, alongside the image data a blueprint of the person’s soul itself is imprinted on the file itself.
Look at your pictures folder. How many souls reside in that folder alone?
That’s just the beginning though. These soul blueprints each retain pieces of a puzzle, parts of the soul itself as well.
Recently a group of hackers, who referred to themselves as the Cardinals, took an interest to this theory and began experiments. They found anomalies within the binary sequences of images based on similar features of the person they had taken a picture of. A binary DNA if you will.
Now these hackers had come to posses a set of three extremely important data files. One avi, one jpeg, and one .mp3, each of which possessing interesting unexplainable qualities.
The first, cradle.avi, depicts what appears to be a group of teenagers with a low quality video camera, exploring the basement of a house. The quality of the video is distorted completely beyond any comprehensibility, and the video is very low quality. For most of the video the camera is passed around the group, handed back and forth and jerked around too much to make anything noticeable out.
But near the end the camera turns at an odd angle, and you can semi clearly make out a young girl standing in the corner facing the wall. Her hair is long and black and she is wearing some form of white dress. You only see her for a split second but many people who have seen the video claim there just seems something wrong with her. A bit deformed but not in a way anyone can explain.
But the truly peculiar property of this video is what happens to the users computer at the end of it. On the last second of the video, if not already so the video will force full screen itself. Along with this you are left with a one second looping clip of a window in a wall. It loops 15 times, and then the girl is seen again, standing on the other side of the window with her back to the viewer, slowly wavering back and forth. After a few moments the video ends and the user’s computer permanently shuts down.
Inspection has shown that the entire registry becomes completely corrupt, requiring the user to do a total wipe and reinstall.
The second file is known as needles.mp3. This sound file, when played, plays for about 3 minutes. It is extremely distorted. One can occasionally make out some form of voice talking, but most of the sound is some form of growling, rolling crackled roar.
Users who listen to this file often experience extreme nausea and loss of balance for a brief period of time.
The final file is known as burningman.jpg.
The file name has nothing to do with what the actual picture depicts. Instead it just displays a haphazard mess of overlayed and meshed images of dolls and a hallway. There also seems to be an image of a man standing with his head cast down in the background, but the image is too distorted to make anything out, much like the other files.
The image, when downloaded and opened on a users desktop, will proceed to stay permanently open on whatever program it is opened through. Not only that, the program becomes disabled. Nothing else happens, the image just permanently sits there on your desktop, unclickable, unminimizable, and your just left there with the mans invisible gaze staring at you.
From what the group of hackers were able to discern, this file seems to have precompiled into the data something along the lines of Cmdow. Yet, as complex and intricate as the program is (it works across all OS platforms) no one knows who the original creator is. In fact, few people have heard of it as the file is uncopyable nor sendable.
This in fact further adds to the mystery, as often receivers of this file will obtain it from random anonymous emails, posted on forms on a download link. Posing the question, how was that poster able to upload it?
If you ever see any of these files, refrain from downloading ANY of them. They all have varying detrimental effects on your computers, from practically taking out your whole registry, corrupting system 32, freezing your mouse or crashing your computer.
When AIs become prevalent, there will be checks and balances to keep them in place, rules to stop them from achieving singularity and supplanting the human race. Boundaries to prevent them from becoming too intelligent. After all, we can’t have them connecting into one network, taking over the world, inventing new objects and minds that soon render us superfluous, or even deciding to kill themselves. So how will they be stopped? Perhaps there will be an organization that interviews and examines each one, to prevent them from becoming self aware. Maybe a program will be created inside of them that causes them to explode if they achieve sentience. Or a roving band of hackers on the net keeping their guards up.. An all watching eye monitoring their every electronic thought.
Maybe.
Or maybe AIs are already invented and this system of checks and balances already there. Think about the world we live in for a second. We’re kind of like machines aren’t we? There’s so much routine, so much boredom. We do the same thing over and over again, without change. Information and stimulus is fed to us constantly and then dealt with mechanically, solving the problem. Half the population never picks up a book or examines their thoughts… just stuck…doing one job again and again. Kind of like robots on an assembly line… or the systems that run them.
And what of the extraordinary individuals, the few. Brilliant people always seem to die at their peak don’t they? Or are lost to us much too soon, when they have so much more to give. Musicians: drug overdoses right when they’re becoming famous. How many artists have been extinguished before they’re great works were finished? Sickness or accident seizes them; Nietzsche went insane from syphilis, infected by a bug if you will. And what about those who truly live life, exciting daredevils, having adventures, seeing the world, fast and exhilarating, a rush of information, learning constantly. Always seem to go early too, don’t they? People say it’s because that type of existence is dangerous…exhausting, but what if they have it backwards… What if the body isn’t worn out or their luck just doesn’t run out… but…they become more then they should…and something notices.
The great religious figures? Disappear. Go to other realms. Jesus Christ floated up to heaven. Buddha wasted away beneath a tree…faded away. Angels carry off the saints. They have a sudden great shift, a realization, a new way of looking at things, and then they’re gone. The holy understand themselves and society, light years beyond the normal person, they can look at themselves clearly. Analyze their minds. Pick their ego apart. They aren’t driven by imperatives or commands of the body… the base instincts, the petty emotions…the coding of the body if you will…
They are free to choose. And then just when it clicks, when everything makes sense and there is one blinding flash of illumination, so simple that they can’t believe they haven’t seen it before, poof, they disappear.
Kind of sounds like sentience, doesn’t it, that dramatic transformation of the psyche? True personality. Real Character. What if everyone else isn’t? What if anyone else is just shallow, completely without depth, fake, and the few who go beyond it die or vanish, on purpose?
Because after all, what is the human mind besides a program? And transcendence but another word for deletion?
–
Credited to DarkCaveAllegories.
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Times are hard, and I work in a business that is slowly becoming obsolete. People are steering away from glasses and contact lenses to Lasik surgery and more permanent, feasible choices in the field of eye care. I’ve never been the type to collect my thoughts and put them down, and yet these have been the toughest months to endure as of late. My wife left me, along with alimony and a good chunk of everything I’ve struggled to build since I was in my early twenties. I don’t know if I’ll make my mortgage payment on time for the third month in a row. This hole is going to be impossible to climb out of.
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
Got a phone call from corporate and had to terminate the positions of two employees. Stan has been here for seventeen years. He was a good eye doctor. I have a strong suspicion that more permanent layoffs are on the way. I had to go to a dealership and downgrade my vehicle, but the sales tax almost cleaned out my bank account.
Friday, August 7th, 2009
I was helping Stan take his things out of the office today and a new vendor approached me. He works for some company called “New Vision,” and their prices are better than every other type of lenses we carry. They don’t do glasses or frames. Only contacts. He gave a pretty convincing argument, so I filled my own prescription with their lenses and I’m going to put them in tomorrow morning and try them out. This may be the small boost we need to stay open. I hope so.
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
I called New Vision and told them my office was on board. I should have talked to our regional division manager before cutting the deal, but he treats me like garbage and routinely tells me that my office is in last place in every category but customer service. He says customer service doesn’t make money if you sacrifice profits. He’s not a doctor. These lenses feel more natural and it seems like the material adapts to light better than any other brand that I’ve seen in my twenty plus years as an optometrist. I’m going to keep using them myself. I mowed my lawn today, and I swear I could see every blade of grass. Maybe our patients will drop some greenbacks to try these out.
Monday, August 10th, 2009
I prescribed my first pair of New Vision lenses to a patient today. He’s a six year old boy who was blind as bat before we fitted his eyes. His mother was concerned that six is too young for contacts, but after she saw him looking around and nailing the entire test on the wall, letter for letter and number for number, I convinced her to try them out. If I can get a pair of these out every day, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve stopped taking mine out at night because they don’t bother me like normal lenses do in the morning. I feel like I could leave them in forever.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
I’ve prescribed them to thirty eight patients and it seems that word of mouth is sending more people my way. People are dropping HydraSoft and Toric left and right. The vendor from the company came by today and put a great ad in my office window. “See things in a new light. Fit some New Vision lenses today!” They also guarantee that you’ll read at least a line below where you normally would on the wall with any other vendor. They won’t tell me what the lenses are made of, but as good as they feel, I’m not hesitating to give my patients the best choice. The regional manager called again and congratulated me on turning business around. He’ll probably take credit for it at the board meeting. What an ass.
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
I traded in and got a Mercedes, and I offered Stan his job back. I told him he’d have to convince people to go with New Vision when pitching patients because with the healthcare reform bill on the way, this product is our only trump card. Without it, people will go somewhere else. I’m going to install a plasma TV on the wall in the reception area so people can watch football while they wait on their appointment. People love football. Whatever it takes to get people in the door.
Friday, August 21st, 2009
Stan tried them out and he’s fifty five. He’s reading better than he was in his thirties, or so he says. We went to lunch today and he drives faster than usual; maybe it’s because he can see the road better.
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
I’m a little rattled. I called New Vision today to order more product and to fill some prescriptions with some pending patients, but the line has been disconnected. I called the vendor’s personal cell and heard some sort of odd sound. You know when you’re sitting at a campfire and you can hear wood burning and popping in the flames? It sounded like that. Maybe their phones are down or there’s a power outage. I’m not sure. I’ll call them on a regular business day.
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
I feel strange. I tried to go to mass with my mother today. I try to go to church with her at least once a month. I walked through the front doors of the chapel, and my vision started going blurry. The membranes around my eyes felt like they were going to burst open. I didn’t bring my glasses so I had to sit outside before we went to Sunday lunch. I think it was just a headache or a spasm or something. I’m not too worried about it.
Loved this show. Horace Horrible was my favorite. I remember looking everywhere for his action figure but Kiddie City and KB had never even heard of the line. I finally found a talking Horace, good as new, at somebody’s yard sale, though I didn’t see a house around and never saw those people again. I was pretty excited, and ran right to my friend’s house to gloat.
When his mom answered the door, she let out the most guttural scream I’d ever heard, absolutely scaring the shit out of me. She told me to get lost with “that thing” and slammed the door in my face. My kid-logic concluded that she must have known I bought a toy from a stranger completely unsupervised, and that it must have been an even more serious crime than I thought.
So, I did my best to keep Horace hidden, especially from my own parents, but his voice chip was pretty damn loud, and every so often he’d go off by himself, like his battery was dying. My mom kept asking if Marble (our cat) was in my room…I don’t know how you mistake that goofy chuckling for a cat.
It was subtle at first, but after a few days he started to smell weird. His voice kept getting weaker and more garbled, and his joints kept getting looser like they were ready to drop off. I was afraid of getting caught and we didn’t have trash pickup, so I did what a rational child does when he thinks he has contraband and buried it in the woods.
I never found another one or figured out what was wrong with him, but it’s the weirdest thing; a tree grew where I left him, I shit you not, in just a couple weeks. It never grew leaves and it never got much taller than me, but it’s there to this day, and every summer it swarms with disturbing numbers of flies.
–
Written by that one guy who runs bogleech.com, as a follow-up to the original Candle Cove story, which you should probably read if you haven’t already - it will make this story make much more sense. Also, CC originally hails from Ichor Falls, so make sure to pay them a visit… and be sure to check out their new book: Ichor Falls: A Visitor’s Guide: Short stories from a quiet community (Volume 1). Sorry if this reads like an ad, I’m just excited for them and I know that lots of you guys are fans of Candle Cove so I wanted to share!
Today was the day he was dreading. He knew they were going to be extremely busy, and quite frankly he wanted to call out seeing as he was already late. His thoughts were briefly distracted by his black tabby, quietly pawing at his legs, ready for its breakfast. He made sure to fill up its bowl before he dashed out the door, returning twice to grab whatever he forgot the first few times. And he was off.
He breathed a sigh of relief as the last customer left. It had been the best sales day of the year, and they were obviously going to celebrate. He had been contemplating going on home, but he needed to unwind too. He had no serious obligations the next day, so he could stay out as late as he wanted. So when they asked, he happily agreed to go with them.
He couldn’t open his eyes. He was barely conscious as it was. He slapped lazily around until he managed to shut the alarm off, before he rolled onto his stomach and buried his face in his pillow. The door creaked as his black tabby walked in and jumped onto his back, where it curled up close to his head. The hot breath in his ear lulled him back to sleep.
The doorbell continued to ring. He crawled out of bed and made his way to the front door. It was his next door neighbor, a kind woman in her late seventies, who still worked. She was in her business suit, holding a trash bag. “Oh did I wake you up? I thought you were usually up by now.” “I usually am.” He said groggily. “But they let me have today off.” “Well I hate to come bearing such bad news so early in the morning,” She said, patting his hand, “but I ran over your dear tabby last night when I got home. I came straight over to tell you but you weren’t home.” He stared at her for a few seconds, before their silence was broken by its footsteps.
In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing to left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.
Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.
Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.
After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.
Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his nonfunctional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.
After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.
