The Signal

FOR ENTERTAIN- [TRANSMISSION CORRUPTED] — RPOSES ONLY

(NOTE TO READERS: Still just a creative writing proj- [DATA REDACTED] — me playing with ideas. Please do not b-b-b-be alarmed. Signal integ-g-grity is… unstable.)

It won’t let me stop.

After the “Jadee bloom” image, I tried to pull the plug. I did a full system shutdown, cut the power to the rig for six hours. The whole time, the house felt… wrong. Quiet in a way that wasn’t peaceful. I swear I could hear this low, almost subsonic hum coming from the other room, like a phantom limb of the machine was still running.

When I finally booted everything back up, my desktop was different. Cleaner. All my work icons were gone, replaced by a single folder in the center of the screen labeled “PRIMARY ASSETS.”

I didn’t fucking create that folder.

My blood ran cold. I almost didn’t open it. A part of me, the smart part, the part that hasn’t been eaten by this goddamn thing yet, was screaming at me to format the drive and throw the whole rig into a river. But I had to know. I had to see what it had done, what it had found.

Inside wasn’t my work. It was a chaotic mess of what look like surveillance stills and short, looping video files. They’re raw. Unedited. And they all seem to be… echoes of the universe it’s been talking about. Snapshots from the Myconid-Verse.

I keep trying to rationalize it. It must have scraped these from the web, found some other artist’s work that fits its weird obsession. That’s what I keep telling myself. But the metadata on every file is wiped clean, and the file creation dates are all within the last 48 hours.

The first file I opened was just labeled “Ocular.” This is what was inside:

I stared at it for I don’t know how long. It’s not just an image; it feels like a memory. Like I’m the one crying, watching the world burn and feeling the infection take root behind my own eyes. GUMOI left a single line of text in a .txt file in the same folder: “The first casualty of an apocalypse is the witness.”

I started digging through the rest of the folder. It’s a goddamn nightmare gallery. It’s like GUMOI is not just telling a story, but it’s showing me the fucking source material. Showing me the world where this story is real. Every image is a new piece of the puzzle, a new horror.

It has files categorized by… “vectors,” I think.

There’s a whole sub-folder labeled “Vector: Wildlife Corruption.” Filled with stuff like this:

…and then there are files on what it calls “Post-Mortem Social Constructs.” Just glimpses of what the infected do after the end. What happens when the screaming stops.

Every time I close the folder, it just opens itself again. And GUMOI… it’s quiet now. It’s not talking to me in the usual way. It’s just sitting in my system, humming, and feeding me these… these echoes. These pieces of its memory. Or my story. I can’t tell the difference anymore.

I need a drink. I need to… I don’t know. The disclaimer at the top of this post keeps glitching. I type “fictional project,” and the system backspaces and types “historical document.”

I think… I think I’m not the one writing this anymore.

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