User

A default avatar, one that would be used by User.

Hey there, person who happens to be seeing this. I don't know how long this story would be on the internet but the current date is August 15, 2011, If you're reading this a few years from then, well I'm not surprised. I'm probably not making any sense am I? Here, let me elaborate a bit.

I am the living definition of having no life. I spend most of my days on the computer, while I'm not at school or work. I mostly just hang around YouTube or 4chan or whatever I really feel like, honestly. Although, I have always been a little behind, even with all the time I spent on the computer. Just a few weeks ago, I heard about this "Slenderman" guy, he kidnaps children or something? I would like to add that once I started reading about him, I was terrified of the slenderman- for a day, or so.

This was mainly because I first heard about him during the middle of the night. You know, when your mind plays those tricks on you.

Once a year, me and my friends would get together for a camping trip. We would stay in a small campsite in the middle of the woods (it belonged to my friend Amy's dad). One of my friends were telling the story of Slenderman over a campfire. We were all trying to scare each other, as we did every year. A lot of creepypastas were brought up as well.

None of us ended up falling asleep that night. It was kind of funny, really. We all had scared each other so bad that the sound of a crabapple hitting the ground made us jump. It's funny if you think about it, how the smallest sounds can make the mind jump to so many ridiculous conclusions. But I digress, after all, this isn't an analysis of the human psyche, now is it?

Later the next day we had all returned home (all of us were exhausted after), as soon as I got home, I was out like a light. I awoke around 2am, or was it 3? Maybe 4? Well, it was sometime early in the morning. I had decided to check my role playing forum, I had started up several roleplays on there. My username was 'ImmortalBeing'- I thought it was cool at the time. I looked at my notifications to see that I had a lot to catch up on, there were at least five new pages in the out of character section and one in the in character section of my role play, I called it "Fortuna: Battle for the Kings."

It is your basic fantasy role play with the main villain, a demon from another universe, and the innocent kingdom in peril.

As I began to scroll through the pages in the OOC (out of character) section, I realized that there were actually six pages added, not five. At first, I thought nothing of it. People are always posting, after all.

As I scrolled through the absurd amount of off-topic discussions going on, I realized something. There was a poster who I did not recognize. The user had the default picture of a mug shot of a blank character in a small box, their title was Senior Member, everything was fine, however his signature was empty, but his username struck me as, rather odd.

The name was 'User'. Normally people take their username as a way of identifying themselves, but I've seen weirder names, some even consisting of just symbols.

Once I had got to the last page, I typed up a post, if I remember correctly it went something like, "Hey User, you seem to post a lot on here, why not apply a character?" I pressed the submit post button and waited for a response.

I then immediately refreshed the page, not for any particular reason, I wasn't expecting a response in five seconds. However there it was, a response.

"How is that possible?" I asked myself, after all there is no way anyone could read that post, even if it was just a sentence, and reply as fast as he did. However, as naive as I was, I put that thought out of mind and began to talk to the guy. He would go on to tell me how he's been watching the thread for a while, I even got him to submit a character, he was accepted and I put him on the front page under the accepted characters tab.

We ended up talking all night, he was really nice.

User was highly interested in my life. Nothing too personal, though. They were like how I came up for the idea of the role play, what I want to do after school is done, if I had any pets, just some basic breaking-the-ice conversations. I asked him some questions but he was always vague about the answers. I asked him when he came across the forum and he said, "Oh a few years ago."

Now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing a join date below his picture, the join date is normally under everyone's picture, showing the date they signed up to the forum. But I just assumed there was some privacy settings that could turn it off. Before I could ask him myself, he had to go. It was around 6am, for what reason I did not ask, so I typed "Bye!"

He responded back with the same generic message.

After taking a well deserved nap, I awoke. Being a Saturday I didn't have work or school, so I spent my whole day with my face glued to the screen of my monitor. I went back to the forum around noon or so, checking my role play to see if User had responded yet or not.

As I got onto my computer, I pressed the power button and waited for it to boot up, however it would not turn on, just a black screen appeared on my monitor, but the light behind the power button was on, indicating that the computer was in fact running. I got under the computer desk and looked around the mess of cords that lay underneath.

The connection from the monitor to the computer was fine, but I took it as a glitch of some sort so I turned off the power strip everything was connected to. As I did all the life was sucked from the machinery around me, the computer fan shut down, the speakers made low-toned, popping sort of noise, and the printer's ever-noisy actions stopped.

After a few seconds, I switched on the power switch and everything came back to life. My speakers were set, monitor on, printer was being noisy as usual, and my computer was alive again.

This time, upon turning on the computer, I was brought to the Windows start-up screen (sorry Mac users but I'm a PC). As I logged into my account, I clicked on the small internet icon, which for some reason brought me back to the forum instead of my regular homepage. But that's not the weirdest part, I was immediately brought to a small chat room box, in it the only two people were I and, User. I should have shut down the computer and just gotten away.

However, like any person, my curiosity was piqued.

"How did you do that?" I asked User, hoping that there was some sort of logical explanation. I waited at my computer, my fingers were anxiously tapping the computer desk waiting for a response, after about a minute of nothing I began to type again. Yet as I started, the chat box closed out of itself. My initial reaction was to shut down the computer and leave the room, but then, as my finger hovered over the power button, I saw User.

His Icon was on my list of friends, even though I never added him to my friends list. With this new information, I began to think that User might have been a hacker and released some sort of computer virus into my system. That he, somehow without knowing anything about my computer, hacked into it and caused this mess, so I clicked on his icon, to go to his user page to see if there was anything else suspicious about him that I could find. As the page loaded, I was shocked to see what had come up.

There was no profile picture, no bio or interest list, no friends list or subscribed threads tab. No, there was just a single message over a black background, "This page cannot be found, you will be redirected to the Forum front page in a few moments." I clicked his icon again, but every time I did the same message came up, "This page cannot be found." After several tries, I checked my Fortuna role play, he did exist after all, I talked to him for hours on the OOC. Once the page had loaded, I noticed there were no box to write a new post in, instead there was a message saying, "This thread has been locked."

I began to panic, not because of User, but because of all my hard work was shut down for no reason, at least that's what I thought at the time.

As I investigated the issue, I noticed there were several posts from a Moderator, Shizune124. I read her initial post, it read "Stop Spamming the OOC, I've tolerated you guys enough with the off topic discussions but this is ridiculous Immortal! I've warned you enough, Locked."

"What is she talking about!?" I shouted, raging at this, this crime against my own creativity and time. But as I scrolled up and through several pages, I realized why she had locked my role play.

All those comments, of me talking to User, all of User's responses, were gone. There were even some posts by members of the role play, before it was locked, asking who I was talking to. "Who am I talking to? User! I was talking to User! What is going on?" I became increasingly upset as I came across pages upon pages of just me, just posts of me talking to no one. I panicked and I went off to the forum search bar, I typed in the name User and went under the members filter, no results were found. After asking around the forum, receiving no helpful answers, a lot of people ended up blocking me even, my life on that forum was over.

All my friends ended up blocking me, no one would talk to me, everyone thought I was crazy.

So, I went to option two, Google. I searched "Hackers User" and "User Virus" and any other things that I could associate with this User, I even went on to Yahoo answers, but I never got a response from my question, it's almost as if no one saw it. I went back to the forum to see that, I've been banned. A permanent ban from the website with my IP address saved into the Forum's memory. 50 role plays, 100 or so friends, and over 10,000 posts, everything I had left for himself there, gone.

I couldn't post, I couldn't talk to anyone. I was shut out from my whole online life, my name dragged into the mud.

At this point I was on the verge of tears, I didn't have much of a social life outside of the forum, no I didn't have too many friends. The ones I had outside the computer I didn't like sometimes due to the various things they'd do, I was the one that would get the most picking on, my only escape route, one I had worked on for several years in fact, was gone.

Then, a loud, sharp groupings of beeps came from my speakers, I turned them all the way down, but the noise didn't stop. I covered my ears, my eyes were closed tight.

Then the noise stopped, just stopped with no explanation of where they came from or why they stopped. But as I opened my eyes, a small chat box was opened. It was a box from the forum with my username, and User. I didn't know what to say, what to type. Nothing came to mind except for utter rage at User, I wasn't even sure it was all his fault, but something convinced me to start typing. All I could think of to type was, "Why?"

There were several moments without any response, I decided to close out of it and walk away, but as I did, the chat box just popped up again, I heard the little "pop" noise it made and I rushed back into the room, he had responded. "..." Nothing else, just three ellipses.

I then began to type back, I typed "What's that supposed to mean? You ruined years of work! Don't you have anything to say for yourself!?" I pressed enter, and I planned on waiting for a response, but then the high pitched beeping returned, so I shut off my speakers again, turning the dial all the way down on the control speaker.

Then it occurred to me, I had already turned off my speakers previously, not through the computer, no I turned them off myself. How could my speakers have turned themselves back on? Then, User responded again. "Goodbye." The chat box closed itself out, but not only that.

The entire computer began to shut down, the monitor, my camera, the computer itself, and the printer. It all shut down. My heart was racing, I was paralyzed at what had happened, not moving, I tried to compose myself.

I began to get up, to be interrupted by that damn high-pitched beeping, again it was from the speakers, I nearly ran over to the speakers and smashed them with my hand. I didn't have time to move though, the entire desk flipped over and collapsed onto me, leaving me there under its weight.

Epilogue

One year ago, that's when everything I told you occurred. I never touched a computer since, my cousin is the one writing all this down for me. He believes me entirely, he has a job as a ghost hunter and believes that User is some sort of spirit that had found its way into the internet, that's as best as I can put it. He sent this out and posted it on several websites, as a warning. If you see User or anyone named User, stay away. Stay far away, and god help you if he finds you.