Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-37482493-20190303051640

In 2014, June 25th, a virtual desktop assistant was launched called “PearPal”. PearPal was designed to look like a cartoon pear character, and was a type of Siri/Alexa assistant on computers. It blew up in 2015 and over 3,000 people had downloaded by the end of that year. But many rumors about the virtual friend had surfaced in 2016.

The first rumor that surfaced was about how the PearPal company was tracking downloaders every move. On the official website a customer review came up with a txt. file you could download. The file was awfully short but it red out: “Don’t download pearpal-It’s evil-They tracked me-2 weeks” and this caused controversy. Rumors say that this man was tracked for two weeks before being abducted by the owner. What fueled this idea was the fact that they almost immediately deleted the review.

The Second rumor was about when if you were to read the raw website data you would see a page in the site that was closed off to visitors of the site. It was titled “Eyes”. And later somebody hacked into the site and read the page. The eyes page talked about tracking downloaders every move for two weeks before abduction. It is unknown if that is what the page said but it is widely believed to be.

The third rumor was about a mothers son who found the assistant talking to him while he was passing by the computer while his mother was in the bathroom. It changed from being the cute avatar to a strange, demented character. A face appeared over its normal face. The face was red x’s for eyes and a great big smirk. The avatar said in two weeks his mom and he would get a surprise. The child then drew a picture of what the avatar looked like, this terrified the mother. She attempted to delete the assistant but PearPal already had her information.

The Fourth and final rumor was about the owners old best friend and how he refused to buy his product. Then the owner kidnapped his dog and said if he didn’t buy his product the dog would die. On the facts page of the website it said the owner was named Paul Redcap. Although according to the news nobody named Paul Redcap is real.

In 2018 the site was in ruins. You couldn’t even download PearPal anymore, most of the homepage was deleted, and the customer reviews page was empty. And the news confirmed that these rumors were real. The dog died with almost every person who downloaded the assistant. Some say somebody still has the file for PearPal even after it was deleted. 