Authors: Jackie McMahon
"Dear Victoria
Remmy," she spoke aloud as she typed. "Very funny. Why don't you go fuck yourself and leave me alone? Sincerely, Victoria Remmy.” She added a nice closing remark to her very blunt email before closing everything down.
The ping went off again; Victoria
scowled, but brought up the inbox and another message from her evil internet clone stated:
Subject:
Re: Re: Re: Re: READ ME
THE NEIGHBOR
ACROSS THE HALL LET’S HIS DOG LICK PEANUT BUTTER OFF HIS BALLS
Victoria
thought about it, but everybody in a five block radius knows that. Maybe. But how did this person know it's my neighbor? She powered down the laptop and flipped down the screen and wandered back into her bedroom where Ethan still laid sound asleep. She laid next to his naked body and considered the email. What if it was true? But that also meant that someone was watching her and whoever it was wanted her to know it.
Maybe it’
s the downstairs neighbor’s son,
Victoria thought. That little prick had hacked her WEP key and IP Address to gain access to her internet connection once before and he also knew about peanut butter balls. Maybe he hacked into the Internet Message Access Protocol System to try to pull a prank off on Victoria, but then again it could be any number of people playing a joke on her. Then she started to think about all those ‘special interest’ internet groups that she so happily pissed off on her blog a few months back. She pushed the thoughts out of her mind as she cuddled up next to Ethan. She placed her hand onto his chest and he began to wake up from his little power nap.
“Hey there sexy,” he said,
as he reached over and planted a soft kiss on her lips. “I was thinking…” Victoria eyed him cautiously. “Maybe I can stay the night?”
Holy fucking shit fuck! This can’t possibly
be happening?
The email she’d received was right about Ethan. She closed her eyes and let out a heavy sigh. Victoria thought about the email and also thought about Ethan; maybe having him around would calm her nerves with all this freaky shit that had been happening today.
“Okay, I’d like that.”
Ethan pulled her closer to him as she rested her head on his chest while listening to the traffic from outside swish with a steadily flow. A few kids were walking by talking amongst themselves on their way to school. Victoria tried to let the noises from outside drown out her subconscious thoughts. She decided it would be best if she forgot the whole thing and let Ethan’s hotness distract her while getting on with her day.
After a nice refreshing hot shower, Ethan asked her to
accompany him for lunch and she agreed to it without an argument. As they left the apartment, Victoria locked the door behind her, as she locked the door she was certain she heard the all too familiar ping of her email going off. Of course she let her imagination run away with itself with all the strange things that had been happening.
Conspiracy or not, a
few times throughout lunch she thought she heard her cell phone ring when it was sitting safely tucked inside her purse. When she checked her phone there were no missed call notifications. So being reasonable she placed her cell phone in the butt pocket of her jeans, but even then she got that weird sensation that it was vibrating in her pocket. Glancing at her phone she found no one had sent her a text message.
Lunch was great with Ethan besides when she thought about getting
the mysterious alerts. Ethan noticed that she seemed a little jumping so he convinced her to take a stroll down to the park. She complied, while walking Ethan slipped his arm around her waist. At any other day she would have snaked her way out of his grasp, but instead she welcomed it. The further they walked, the more and more the whole situation started to drift from her mind.
The walk through the park seemed to relax Victoria until an old man shoulder bumped her. It wasn’t a
‘sorry I didn’t see you bump’ it was more like an aggressive attempt to hurt her. Ethan noticed the old man’s demeanor and spat out a couple of not so polite words while flipping him the bird. Victoria then began to eye everything more cautiously through her sunglasses. While exiting the park Ethan took a call from his sister asking him to house sit her dog. He looked at Victoria hoping to get something to say out of her to cancel his sister’s request. Victoria smiled to herself, satisfied that the hacker/spammer's prediction of Ethan turned out to be false until he told his sister he had dinner plans with an old friend and that he wouldn’t be able to watch the dog tonight.
The hacker/spammer was right, Ethan was staying the night.
If it was a sheer luck of coincidence, then there had to be something wrong with Victoria’s computer. They walked back to Victoria’s apartment and they both headed in. Ethan was the first to flop onto the couch as Victoria followed suit right after him. She then sat up and pulled her laptop closer and flipped it open.
“Why do you have to check this shit every second?” Ethan asked.
“Because it’s my job to find out crazy shit and post it,” Victoria replied back.
Ethan squeezed her thigh before getting up and heading toward the kitchen and into the fridge for a drink.
Victoria then opened her email up and spotted a new email from the hacker/spammer prick.
Subject: READ ME
WHY DO YOU HAVE THE SAME DREAM ABOUT ETHAN?
Victoria
's heart suddenly dropped into her stomach while the hair on her neck started to stick straight up. How did this asshole know? How could he or she possibly know such an intimate detail? This was now far beyond fucked up and much more than a simple coincidence.
She had never spoken or
written about any of her dreams, especially ones about Ethan. She’d always been a very private person and she highly believed that dreams were the one thing no one else could share. Her opinions and fears she would share whenever possible, but her dreams...they were locked up tight in the dark vault in the back of her subconscious mind.
Now i
t wasn't a mechanical glitch in her computer. Whoever this individual was…or whatever, these were unforeseen prophecies and unwelcome truths that somehow were able to read her mind. The ping of the email went off again. Now what? She ignored it, but began to get curious, if not a little terrified. There were no in-betweens, she was terrified. Then three more new messages came in simultaneous bursts, ping…ping…ping! Then another four in a row, they came in one after another filling up her inbox, flashing on the screen while blending into one another until they became one long white rectangular blur of what the fuck? She became startled when Ethan began to hear the pinging.
“What the hell is going on? Are you tryi
ng one of those dating sites?” he asked in a joking manner.
“I don’t know what’s happening!
” Victoria replied and all signs of humor stripped off Ethan’s face as he noticed the terror all over her face.
Suddenly the alerts stopped. Two
hundred and ninety seven new messages awaited in Victoria’s email inbox. Victoria glanced over her laptop and into Ethan’s curious eyes, looking for some answers from him on what to do. All he could do was shrug his shoulders. Taking a deep breath she moved the mouse cursor at the bottom of the screen and clicked one of the messages.
Subject: READ ME
WHY DO YOU DREAM ABOUT MAKING LOVE TO ETHAN, WHEN ALL YOU DO IS PUSH HIM AWAY?
Victoria quickly deleted the emails as Ethan stood there and gazed at her with a questionable look. She ignored him as she opened and then deleted email after email.
Subject: READ ME
YOU'RE AFRAID TO OPEN YOUR HEART
Subject: READ ME
WHY CHOOSE RANDOM MEN WHEN THE MAN YOU SEEK IS RIGHT IN FRONT YOU
Subject: READ ME
ALIENS AND SHAPE SHIFTERS DO EXIST
Subject: READ ME
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO JACKSON CAMBRIGDE?
Subject: READ ME
DO YOU BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACIES JUST SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO CONSIDER YOUR OWN PROBLEMS?
Subject: READ ME
PARANOIA IS AN EXCESSIVE SUSPICION OF THE MOTIVES OF OTHERS
Victoria deleted the rest of the emails without even looking at them until she reached the last and final message. This one was different as it showed it had an attachment to it. Victoria was at the point losing her mind. The day had started off good then turned bad in a matter of seconds. She opened the attachment of the email and when it opened it was another hyperlink that read TRUTH.
Victoria
didn’t want to see what this person or persons had to show her, but curiosity trumped logic in Ethan’s mind and he took her laptop from her. Sad for Victoria as logic wasn’t having a very good day with her. Victoria squeezed her eyes shut as Ethan clicked on the link.
When the linked open into a new window
, Ethan gasped at the picture, Victoria quickly opened her eyes to the sound of Ethan’s gasp and she too gasped. The picture was the old man who’d bumped Victoria in the park, but what made them gasp was that it was a close up shot of his face. When the old man tried to knock Victoria out of his way, he’d had his head down and kept moving, in this picture he had his head up. Victoria jumped off the couch and ran into her bedroom to look for a book she had about reptilians. When she found it she ran back into the living, held it out to Ethan and quickly pointed to a close up picture of a reptilian.
“Holy shit,” h
e whispered as he stared back from the computer screen to the book.
Reptilians
also known as draconian, are purported reptilian humanoids. The idea of reptilians on Earth was popularized by a conspiracy theorist who said shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gain information to manipulate our societies. Reptilians are described as having crocodilian skin that is usually greenish-brown in color. Their heads are slightly conical in shape and have two bony ridges riding from their brow, across their back sloping skull, toward the back of their head, almost horn like. They appear to have no bridge between their eyes while their nasal openings are at the end of a small, flattened nose that looks like two small slits that slant upward in a V formation. They have wide lipless mouths which contain fangs and large black eyes with vertical slit pupils. From a distance, these physical features are often misidentified. It’s was like the spammer wanted us to see these for a reason.
“
This is not happening,” Victoria said as she paced the room.
Ethan just stared at the picture of the old man
until a message popped up with a cheerful ping.
Subject: READ ME
AREA 51 IS A VAST NETWORK OF SUPPOSED GOVERNMENT COVER UPS OF ALIEN CONTACTS
Ethan gave Victoria an anxious glance as Victoria gazed at the computer screen. She was afraid to find another cryptic message. Yet another faint ping notified them that there was an email message, but this message was different from the others as it had a three line poem look to it, almost like a haiku. Both of their eyes were fixated on the screen.
Subject: READ ME
NO NEED TO WORRY.
NO ONE IS WATCHING YOU.
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
Ethan and Victoria eyed each other, but Ethan was the first to speak.
“
What the fuck does all this mean? The beginning of what?”
Ping!
Ethan turned back to the screen as a video player opened and Victoria let her head fall into her hands. The video was a static shot from an old video camera with no sound, a dark smudge obscuring some of the frame at the top as if the videographer had hidden it under something, maybe a blanket or some article of clothing. The room had a familiar look to it.
“Victoria, isn’t that your bedroom?” Ethan said.
When Victoria peered at the video every last breath escaped her lungs, it was her bedroom. "Oh no,” Ethan said aloud and Victoria looked at him.
“What?” s
he asked franticly.
“This was taking earlier today,” h
e stated and Victoria had a chill run up her spine.
“How can you tell?” s
he asked.
“Because those are my sne
akers on the floor,” he said as he pointed on the screen from the video feed.