The Alescio Manuscripts (1983-1987)

Tristan here. I’m busy working on a big write-up for this October, so this week, we’re having a newer member of the Institute take over. But she’s asked me to provide some context first.


Fictocognition, also known as scribocognition, is the ability to use writing, specifically fiction writing, to tell the future. An arguable example of this is the 1898 novella Futility by Morgan Robertson, which describes the wreck of a ship named the Titan fourteen years before the wreck of the Titanic; however, this is attributable to Robertson’s knowledge of contemporary ship-building and naval practices, and an edition issued in 1912 ‘corrects’ the gross tonnage of the Titan to more closely resemble the Titanic’s, making this claim dubious at best.


Less explicable is the 1989 Norwegian crime thriller novel Den dyreste forbrytelsen av alle (EN: The Most Expensive Crime of All), which details a team of detectives attempting to solve the theft of several valuable pieces of art from a museum in Oslo. Among the works stolen were three by Rembrandt, one by Vermeer, and four by Degas. The methods in which the guards were subdued, the location where they were held, and several other details-- including the artists who created the stolen artwork-- mirrored the thefts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Notably, however, The Most Expensive Crime ends with the artworks returned; as of writing, the Gardner Museum theft remains unresolved.


This essay discusses an instance of possible fictocognition in 1980s New York.


Original Essay by “Ms. di Corci”

 

1.

 
I’ve been told it’s a good idea to include a content warning for this, so here goes. This report describes cruelty to animals, the American prison system, police brutality, kidnapping, and suicide.


In May of 1986, an inmate from Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York attempted to enter a nationwide writing contest meant to promote literacy and creativity in the vast American prison population. He wrote a seventy-four page manuscript titled “Dog Burglear”(sic), a story riddled with spelling errors about an operation out of Brooklyn which stole “feerce-looking” dogs such as dobermans, German shepherds, and pit bulls and forced them to participate in an illegal dog-fighting ring. Before it was sent off to the group running the contest, it was opened, searched, and partially read by a guard at Sing Sing, who found it uncannily detailed; the guard lived in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, and noticed that several dogs had been reported missing in the area. He brought up his hunch to the Warden of Sing Sing, who contacted the NYPD.


Surveillance was conducted on an address mentioned in “Dog Burglear”. After the NYPD saw a van full of caged dogs being unloaded at the address, they obtained a warrant and raided it on June 9th, 1986. Several animals, unfortunately, had to be euthanized, but almost thirty dogs were returned to their families.


The operation had been ongoing since the winter of 1985; at first blush, it may seem like that the prisoner was simply writing a story inspired by his own crimes, perhaps some attempt at a confession or redemption. But there’s a problem: the prisoner in question had been in Sing Sing since 1982, serving three consecutive life sentences for murder. His name was Gervasio Alescio, and he was an enforcer for the Italian mafia in New York who had been at the wrong end of a plea deal.

2.

Alescio was thirty-nine years old at the time. He had been illiterate for most of his life, only learning how to read in 1983, as part of Sing Sing’s prison literacy program. He had managed to read four books since then: the King James Bible (having grown up in a religious household, he was familiar with the general contents, if not the exact version), A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and The Prince and the Pauper. With the help of the prison’s chaplain, Father Alexander Mayhew, he learned how to write, but he struggled with spellings of common words.


He had written several manuscripts during his time in prison, several of which were illegible, most of them no more than one or two pages. They were regularly confiscated by prison guards and stored in his file, for fear that the paper could be compacted and made into a weapon. However, after “Dog Burglear”, they went through the file and found several of the manuscripts matched up to other crimes-- a murder in the Bronx, the disappearance of over $5,000 from a register at a department store, and a stolen vehicle in Queens, all crimes committed after Alescio had been incarcerated.


Unable to find a reasonable explanation, Alescio was pulled into the warden’s office on June 12th. When questioned how he knew of the crimes he described, he said that the story ideas just ‘came to him’ and that he just ‘knew how they were going to go’. The warden did not find this explanation satisfactory, and ordered Alescio to be placed in solitary confinement until he was ready to say how he actually knew what to write.


Alescio would remain in solitary for almost eight months, begging to be let out on a daily basis, and begging for something to write with. His only contact with another human during this time was a weekly fifteen-minute meeting with Father Mayhew after he held service on Sunday; the chaplain claimed that Alescio was telling the truth about his writing, and said that what he could do was a God-given gift.


With Mayhew transcribing what he said, Alescio was able to write several stories. Two stories were notable; the first, “Sam’s Granddotter” (Alescio insisted on the spelling) was about an alleged child that serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz fathered in secret, and how she would go on to terrorize not only New York, but also the Jersey Shore, inspired by Alescio's fascination with the Son of Sam trial.


The second was titled "Stickup”, and was discovered by a guard during a search for contraband that included the chaplain's office. It was incomplete, but it detailed a robbery that took place at an electronics store in Chinatown, and how the thieves were using the items stolen (radios, Motorola DynaTAC cell phones, and smoke alarms, among other things) to create explosives that would be detonated throughout Manhattan, with the Americium (or “Americanium” as Alescio said it) from the smoke alarms causing widespread radioactive contamination. The warden ordered Alescio and Mayhew to both be disciplined-- but he recognized the robbery. There had been a story about it in the New York Post two days previously. Following his gut, the warden alerted the NYPD, and a major terrorist plot was foiled.


The NYPD had previously hired psychic investigators to mixed success. But this was as close to the genuine thing as they’ve ever gotten.

3.

Alescio was released from solitary into the general prison population and given a deal by the district attorney. A three-year-old girl had been kidnapped from Midtown Manhattan, and the NYPD had zero leads. If he could provide a manuscript that could lead them to the culprit, they would reduce his sentence from three consecutive life sentences to thirty years, with a possibility for parole after fifteen. With that, Alescio started writing.


Within a week, he produced four short stories. The first, “She’s Got The Jak”, talked about a car theft ring in Queens. The second, “He’s Our Son”, prevented an arsonist from burning down a prominent nightclub. The final one was entitled “Help Her Pleas God Help Her”, and seemed to describe the kidnapping case… but there were two problems with the manuscripts that led the warden and the District Attorney to withdraw their deal.


Firstly: hours before Alescio started writing “She’s Got the Jak”, he was seen talking to a fellow inmate, who had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering someone during a carjacking. This inmate was previously involved with a car theft ring in Queens, one that the NYPD had already been monitoring. Naturally, it was assumed that this inmate had simply fed Alescio information about the car thefts.


Secondly: “Help Her Pleas God Help Her” alleged that the kidnapping victim was being held by a police officer-- not in any legal capacity. She was being, for lack of a better word, trained to be his police officer’s daughter, after his own daughter had drowned in the Hudson. They even named the police officer explicitly, a first for Alescio’s work.


It was Alescio’s arresting officer, a detective who had been part of the NYPD for nearly a decade.


Believing it to be a vindictive move on the part of Alescio, his sentence was not re-assessed, and his privileges to both Sing Sing’s library and access to writing utensils were revoked for five years.


Alescio was found dead in his cell less than a year later, having slit his wrists with a pen that had been smuggled to him. Allegedly, he used it to write a suicide note; the guard flushed it down the toilet without reading it.


4.

Alescio’s manuscripts are one-of-a-kind, and several of them have been destroyed; however, Alexander Mayhew, Sing Sing’s chaplain, managed to save a handful of them, including “Dog Burglear”, "Sam's Granddotter", and “Help Her Pleas God Help Her”, mimeographing the latter seven times in case the original was destroyed.


The officer identified in “Help Her Pleas” died in 2014 of pancreatic cancer like his father and his father’s father; he left behind a daughter. After the advent of widely available genetic screening in the late 2010s, she got tested to see if she carried the same risk for pancreatic cancer as her ancestors.


The test showed that she was not related to the man she thought was her father. Alexander Mayhew, a friend of the family, told her about Alescio’s manuscripts, and gave her the surviving ones.


I have been trying to find my biological parents ever since.

The Lumière Anomaly: Le Chapeau

<< Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)

 

Original Essay by an Anonymous Institute Member

 

A still from L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, in which Le Chapeau is clearly visible, slightly right of the center.

 
Paris, January 25th, 1946. Despite the frigid winter, a line has formed outside the Le Champo cinema. France still holds fresh wounds from Nazi occupation, but on that night, cinephiles from around the nation gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most iconic pieces of cinema history: the screening of the Lumière brother’s L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. The film is scarcely fifty seconds long and is nothing more than footage of a train arriving at a station, but it was one of the first widely-known pieces of Cinématographie in the world. While the Lumière brothers themselves did not attend, eleven of audience members from the original screening of L'arrivée d'un train were present. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Jacques Masson; the youngest, sixty-two-year-old Claude Morel.

After a speaker gives a brief history on the Lumière brothers and their accomplishments, as well as how cinema has developed since the screening of this film, the lights dim, and the projectionist begins the film. To some, it’s an experience just as magical as when the film was first screened; some have not seen a movie since before France was liberated. There are some in the audience who are too young to remember films that weren’t some form of Nazi propaganda. They are watching the earliest form of cinema, but it is still something magical: moving pictures on screen.


Among the eleven original audience members, however, there’s confusion. Masson is heard muttering that ‘something isn’t right’. Then, at approximately thirty-five seconds into the film, Morel stands, points at the screen, and screams:

“Who is that man?!”

Le Chapeau

The figure that caused the panic is first visible at approximately 0:24, and vanishes at 0:36. It is a man wearing a boater hat, the top half of their face covered in shadow. They are wearing a dark suit with a white shirt visible beneath. At 0:34, they appear to look directly at the camera, before walking off-frame.


Several witnesses to previous screenings of L'arrivée d'un train corroborate that this figure was not in the film prior to 1935, but their presence is not made explicit until 1946. That was eleven years wherein this figure (termed “L’homme au chapeau”, or simply “Le Chapeau”, after their distinctive hat) could have been inserted into the film. Who are they? And how did this happen?


There are three prevailing theories: the first was published in 1946 by members of La Société des Anomalies Cinématographiques, and is sometimes called the ‘French Hypothesis’; the second was put forth in 1982 by film historian Hubert Pfenning, or the ‘German Hypothesis’; the final, from 2019, was created by Institute members.

The French Hypothesis

La Société des Anomalies Cinématographiques was founded in 1941 as an unofficial part of the French Resistance, following the discovery of the film Bergenkreiger(1940), a German fantasy propaganda film that was essentially an unauthorized Conan the Barbarian adaptation. After the slaughter of seventeen Nazi soldiers at its initial screening in Paris, it was stolen by the French projectionist and studied. By 1942, the anomalous copy of Bergenkreiger was destroyed by the same anomalous entity which caused the initial deaths. La Société would term this being, and others like it, cinemanauts.


La Société was around in a reduced capacity after World War II, and several members of it investigated Le Chapeau. They concluded that Le Chapeau was a cinemanaut, someone who had managed to jump from our reality into the film for reasons unknown. They even attempted to attach a name to the face: Gustav Ablin, a student of film who went missing shortly after the establishment of Vichy France. He was in the process of restoring a print of L'arrivée d'un train when the Nazi invasion began, and was said to be highly stressed by the events, before he simply vanished.


The who and why were explained, but not the how. But for the purposes of La Société, this was enough, and was the accepted theory for almost forty years.

The German Hypothesis

Hubert Pfenning (b. 1951) is one of the leading experts on so-called Okkulteskino. Sadly, the most prominence granted by his research has been four appearances on the Nova Network’s Strange Pictures, where he was forced to debate the veracity of the Lassiter Hotel Footage twice.


In 1982, Pfenning managed to obtain a print of Arrival of a Train in which Le Chapeau is absent, dated to 1942, a year after Albin’s disappearance. Travel performed by cinemanauts instantly affects the media they travel into or out of, so this narrowed the timeline in which L'arrivée d'un train could have been affected from over a decade to four years.


He formed a new hypothesis, one that was dismissed as laughable at the time, but gained renewed interest in the mid-2000s: that Le Chapeau was not a French citizen, but a German spy. Specifically, Le Chapeau was Hugo Lorenz, a German cryptographer that had been researching how to encode messages into cinema to spread to Nazi spies in allied territories. Lorenz came to the conclusion that films depicted alternate realities, and that if need be, members of the Nazi party could flee into film as either a temporary or permanent refuge.


Lorenz disappeared following the Liberation of France in 1944, and was last seen purchasing a boater hat from a boutique in Marseille.


But there is a problem with both of these hypotheses that came to light in 2019.

The Institute’s Hypothesis

Neither Gustav Albin nor Hugo Lorenz could possibly be Le Chapeaufor one reason: by the time of Le Chapeau’s appearance in L'arrivée d'un train, both of them were dead.


In 1952, a skeleton was discovered in the river Seine in Paris, just beneath a bridge. It was wearing a pair of pants whose pockets were filled with rocks, and near it was found a small glass jar, still sealed, containing a piece of paper and several film negatives:

The Germans will burn our country to the ground. I cannot bear to live in a France ruled by Hitler. I am sorry, mother. G. Albin, July 1940.

The negatives, when developed, showed Albin spending time with his family in London.


As for Hugo Lorenz, records from the Nazi party itself show that Lorenz died in 1942. He suffocated on fumes from an incinerator where he was burning unusable and damaged film. This was not publicly known until the declassification of Operation Stone Soup in 2019; Stone Soup was an effort by the United States to recruit Nazi filmmakers and propagandists in order to bolster their own anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War, and describes Lorenz’s death as ‘the unfortunate loss of a valuable asset’.


That leaves the question: who is Le Chapeau? The answer can be found by looking elsewhere in the history of not just film, but media itself.


On at least six occasions, screenings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis have had a scene in which the inventor Rotwang shows Fredersen his Maschinenmensch is interrupted by a man in a boater hat walking through the laboratory. Rotwang and Fredersen stare at the man as he walks past, before the plot resumes its normal course.


Approximately eighty first edition copies of Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler contain a passage during one of the second-person sections where the character of Ludmilla is accosted by a man in a dark suit wearing a boater hat; this is not referenced for the rest of the work.


It has been purported that approximately one in every thousand copies of issue fourteen of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman have an inexplicable page-wide spread depicting a man in a dark suit wearing a boater hat; these are not present in any omnibus collection.


The Institute believes that Le Chapeau is not, and was never, a human, and is not any form of cinemanaut. They are an entity which is capable of ‘walking’ through film, literature, art… most forms of media have been visited by Le Chapeau, and it leaves evidence of its presence. We do not know its motives, and there seems to be no discernible pattern of its movements. It is believed to be harmless to humans, but Le Chapeau’s presence may be startling. To date, it is only responsible for a single death.


Jacques Masson, upon seeing Le Chapeau on screen on that fateful night in January, suffered a fatal heart attack. If reports are to be believed, a man with a boater hat was seen at his funeral six days later.

Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)

<< The Anti-Drug Aberration 

Essay by Tristan Marshall, Forbidden Media Investigator

I'm afraid I've been lying to you these past couple of weeks regarding my injury. I figured "pinched nerve from sitting weird" was less embarrassing than the truth of "I was injured during an investigation", for some reason. What I'm going to be talking about today was filmed not 20 miles from my hometown. And now that I'm healed and have some test results back, I'm ready to discuss it.

Kitchen Blitz was the 2013 pilot of a home improvement TV show that was pitched to HGTV. As the name might suggest, the show focuses on trying to renovate the kitchen specifically. It makes sense: a house can exist without a TV room, a breakfast nook, a ‘man cave’, etc. But the kitchen is the third-most important room in the house, after the bathroom and bedroom, and it’s also the most complex to maintain. You have to deal with gas lines, electricity, plumbing, waterproofing, managing storage space, dealing with pests, and so much more, so of course some people would find entertainment value in it.

Like a lot of media I deal with, the episode is made up of a bunch of unedited takes from various cameras. I’ve managed to create together a coherent narrative with the help of my colleague ‘Azula’ (pseudonym), who is the editing guru in the Institute; she helped cobble together the Money for Nothing tape. But before we get to the episode, let’s discuss the house itself.

The house it was filmed in-- which still stands to this day, abandoned-- was built in the 1850s. It used to be a farmhouse, before all the land around it was bought up and developed into something that would be called suburbs, if it were closer to a major city. It’s the oldest house on the block, and it’s falling apart. Part of the roof has collapsed on the north side, rendering the attic inaccessible. The debris from that has crushed the carport on the house's north side. The front porch was torn up by the police, exposing the crawlspace beneath. The front door is about three feet off of the "ground" as a result, covered in faded yellow crime scene tape.

Supposedly, you can get anywhere with a clipboard, a tie, and a lot of confidence. The same is true of Institute research, but the props are different. When I went to investigate the house, I wore a set of white nylon coveralls, along with gloves, goggles, and a face mask, with a bag in one hand and a clipboard in the other. To most people, I’ll look like either a CSI tech or someone who’s coming to inspect the house for mold; either of those were welcome sights when it came to this ruin. Properties on either side were put up for sale years ago, and remain vacant.

Negotiating the crawlspace was easy enough; jump down, walk across, crawl under the police tape. There's no condemned notice, for some reason; I think the city considers this a landmark because of how old the house is, so they're reluctant to tear it down, but people don't want to move in because of its history.

On my way in, I left some Institute tech by the door; it's a laser tripwire that goes up at ankle level. It should have sent an alert to my phone if anyone crossed it. That way, I'd have advanced warning if anyone comes in after me.

The kitchen was at the back of the house; between me and that was a lot of rotten carpet and disintegrating floorboards. Thankful for my boots, I stepped across the moist rug, and once I was somewhere dry and stable, I began comparing my observations to the notes I had made on the pilot earlier that day.

The Anti-Drug Abberation

<< A Brief History of Killer Apps

My arm’s still healing from my stupid pinched nerve, so I’m still having someone sub in for me. Today, we have someone who calls themselves Mr. Draper taking over for me, talking about how he first got into this mess through the world of Advertising.

The Anti-Drug Abberation

By Mr. Draper

From the top: none of us use our real names. I especially am not supposed to; despite what Tristan and a few other die-hards want you to think, the Institute isn't a formal organization, but it’s more serious than a hobby. Think of us as a monitoring agency. But a monitoring agency needs capital, and I’m one of the main providers of lucre. Ad money, in this case, and through my job, I have a finger on the pulse of the whole malicious media octopus.

This is a tale from 2006 or so, when I was getting my feet wet in the world of professional ad copy.

#

I’m old enough to remember drinking the D.A.R.E. Kool-Aid back when it was first served in the 80’s, and realized it was bunk after I had my first hit of the Devil’s Lettuce at sixteen-- weed is half the reason I got through college. But me realizing that the biggest anti-drug program in the United States was baseless propaganda didn’t stop me from getting a paycheck from a firm that specialized in anti-drug PSAs, demonizing everything from tobacco to crack to caffeine. I like to call this place Fun Police, Inc.

I got noticed by someone higher up in the firm back in 2004, after I pitched a trio of anti-smoking advertisements that I wrote while smoking three packs a week, themed around how bad it was compared to harder drugs. One was a guy trying to snort cigarettes, advertising that “Nicotine is Ten Times more Addictive than Cocaine”. The second was absolutely disgusting, a photograph of a smoker’s teeth, with the caption reading “Cigarettes are worse for your teeth than Meth”. The third one I wrote got me to quit smoking after I did some research on it-- a lonely guy in a club, apparently trying to inject a cigarette into him while others held a conversation. The slogan? “Heroin addicts have more friends than tobacco smokers”. Read into that what you will.

When it comes to Anti-Drug PSAs, you have to be as blunt and unsubtle as possible, really nail it in that Drugs Are B-A-D Bad, because if the kids viewing it even get a second of critical thinking, they’ll realize that the adderall they take is basically microdosing meth. Blame Reagan, blame Nixon, blame Hearst or Daren the Lion or anyone you want, but the idea that drugs are a bad thing has been baked into American culture for decades, and it’s no less profitable.

Like I said, it was ‘06. I was ready to write ad copy about the harder stuff, but before I or anyone else in my department did that, Fun Police, Inc. wanted to do an exercise to see just what we could do. The staff broke up into teams of two, and drew little pieces of paper out of a hat. The papers had the ‘official’ name of the drug on them, a bunch of street names, and their effects. The catch is that none of these drugs were real, and the effects were really bizarre. One team got a ‘narcotic eyedrop’ called ‘scrundle’ that they had to write copy about, and someone else had to figure out how to make the prospect of smoking horse piss not sound absolutely hilarious.

I got paired up with another guy, name of Luto Frederickson. He was a bit of an oddball, pretty sure he was foreign, always stuttered when he spoke. But he was okay, overall, until this project started; he and I were assigned a drug called Ramaltadone, which was allegedly a prescription drug that was abused by ‘the youth’ (their words, not mine) for its side effects. Intended to treat schizophrenia, Ramaltadone was highly addictive and could actually induce hallucinations in those who didn’t have mental illnesses.

Yes, I know that pharmaceuticals don’t work that way. But the people who wrote the prompt didn’t care. We were a marketing firm, not Pfiezer. We decided to just go with a general ‘prescription drug abuse’ message, but… Luto wanted something more.

“What if,” he asked, “we show them the true horrors of using this drug?”

I just sorta gave him an odd look. “The drug isn’t real. How can we show them the horrors of it?”

And he responded, “How do we show children that dragons are horrifying?” And then he just… set to work sketching something on a sheet of paper, while I started to write some copy up.

I don’t have the original copy, but it went something like this: “Taking drugs without a prescription can be a killer.” And then I wrote, for the image, ‘something like a kid passed out on the floor with pills coming out of his eyes maybe?’. I figured that sounded too horrific, but I showed the concept to Luto, and he just kinda grinned and started sketching away.

By lunch, he had drawn something that resembled what I had in mind pretty closely. It was honestly messed up-- the kid was no more than twelve and he had pills coming not only out of his eyes, but his nose and mouth. For something drawn within a few hours, it was pretty good; not like those photorealistic drawings that take two damn months to make, but a more-than-decent job that you’d expect from an art grad.

The intent was to convey an overdose, but… Luto didn’t seem satisfied. “Doesn’t convey the hallucinations,” he muttered, and then asked, “What’s your favorite color?” We weren’t using colors, just pen and pencil.

“Uh. Purple.”

And then he made a few adjustments to the drawing. He scrawled… something on the shirt the kid was wearing, before he presented the drawing back to me. The shirt was now purple.

I took the paper out of his hand and turned it over, touched it, and even tore a little bit off. The shirt looked, for all the world, like it had been colored in purple with some crude colored pencils, maybe even some crayon mixed in. But he had just scribbled a few lines on it-- lines that I couldn’t see. “What the fuck?”

“Ah! So you can see it. Good. That’ll be the first symptom.” He picked it up and walked to the break room. Then, he clocked out for lunch.

That damn thing was in the break room for the rest of the day, pinned to the corkboard. People tried not to notice it; I think the color weirded them out more than anything. I made some pretty messed-up pitches before, but the drafts were pretty much never in color.

I started getting a headache after I got back from lunch. I was expecting Luto to be there working with me, but… apparently he left to pick up a food order from the lobby of the building, and never came back. This headache started out dull, like the kind you get when you’re in caffeine withdrawal, or dehydrated. I drank some cold coffee and went to work on the draft-- before realizing it was still pinned to the corkboard. My head hurt, but I could at least get a fresh cup while I was getting the draft.

I stopped at the door. The draft wasn’t on the bulletin board. Well, it was, but it was completely different. We didn’t have access to photo-editing stuff in the office, we were literally just there to write ad pitches and do a few sketches. So what the hell was a photograph of a kid with pills coming out of his eyes and mouth doing on the bulletin board, looking like it had just been ripped straight out of a magazine?

I pulled it off the board and showed it to one of the other copywriters; we’ll call her Dee. Dee looked between me and it, confused. She asked if it was one of my ads that got printed. I told her no, that I had drafted it earlier that day, and it now looked like that. I asked her to hold the paper; it didn’t feel like the semi-glossy sheets you get in most magazines. It felt like the same drafting paper we used.

My boss, let’s call him Jay, came over and wondered what the hell I was doing away from my station. Jay, it should be noted, wore glasses; somehow he was the only guy in the office to do so. He looked at the thing we were holding mid-sentence, and backed away from it as if we were Jeffery Dahmer admiring one of his severed heads.

“You okay, Jay?” I asked.

“What the hell is that?” He took off his glasses and rubbed his face, tears in his eyes. “Get it-- get it away from me!”

“Jay, calm down, it’s--” I stopped. Dee was pulling out her reading glasses to see what was wrong. I put my hand on her arm and shook my head. Jay just curled up on the ground.

A few other people came to see what all the hubbub was about. After a while, we just all stood there, transfixed on the ad. I don’t know what everyone else saw, we never talked about it after. But as for me…

The stream of pills coming out of the kid’s face started flowing out of the picture, and onto the floor. I felt the gel capsules gather around my feet, almost slipping on them a few times. It was ever enough to go past my ankles, but I was never on steady footing. It was tolerable, like standing in the middle of a creek without any of the wetness. The whole time, I didn’t question it.

#

I’ve done drugs before, like I’ve said. I honestly don’t think you can write ad copy for anti-drug stuff without trying at least some of the softer stuff like weed or shrooms. The hardest thing I tried was acid.

There are all sorts of cartoonish portrayals of what an acid trip is. You don’t see people’s heads turn into walruses, or see your toenails turn into gnomes, or literal pink elephants, or some guy holding a pie that’s on fire telling you the name of your band is stupid and you should change it.

It’s an altered state of reality, but by and large, it’s still that: reality. You’ll see people’s faces twist into horrible, monstrous expressions, or see the walls move up and down, see the sky turn bizarre colors. But there’s more than the sights; the sounds are intense, too. There’s a reason a lot of the best music of the 60’s was written while on acid. If I’d thought to write down what I heard, and if I could sing worth a damn, I’d have been a rockstar by the time I was twenty-five.

There’s some tactile stuff, one time I thought the couch I was on was trying to eat me because it was burning my skin. The point is, acid trips are weird, but part of you knows that this isn’t real.

With the vision I was having… I didn’t get that. It felt too real, too perfect. I felt like I was staring at some divine-- or else unholy-- work of art that was making me see these visions. And the whole time, I felt like I was being drained of my desires. The company I worked at never did drug tests, so I did a little reefer every now and again. As I was viewing that, I never wanted to do weed again. Hell, I never wanted to take so much as cold medicine again.

Then, there was a shrieking noise straight out of hell itself, and lights flashing all over. Some of us fell on our ass, some of us started crying, and some of us stumbled around, blinded by the light. After a moment, we realized what it was-- the fire alarm.

We got out of there as quick as we could. On our way down the stairwell, someone was going up-- none of us tried to stop them, we were too busy trying to get away from that damn thing on the desk. Everyone got outside okay, but we were all very, very confused.

We’d all gathered around the ad at about 2:00 PM or so. But now? Now it was dark outside. My watch read around 8:00 PM. We’d lost six hours, staring at some weirdo magic advertisement.

Naturally, everything that happened was attributed to a gas leak. We were told to go home and that we’d be compensated for the time we were supposed to work until the issue was fixed. So, I went to the garage where my car was… and I found someone waiting there for me.

They were a lot younger than me, maybe in college. She had a pair of sunglasses on, and the lenses of the glasses had red X’s painted on them, inside a circle, looking like some crosshairs or something. She was blonde, a bit chubby, and wore entirely black clothes. Underneath her right arm was a brown art folio. I’d never seen her before-- and then I realized she'd been the one to push past me to go upstairs.

“Were you paired with Luto Fredrickson?” She asked.

“What?”

She repeated the question.

“No, I heard you, but… why do you care?”

“Mr. Frederickson has gone by several names over the years-- Lewis Newton, Lincoln Nilson, Ludo Neptune, to name a few. We’ve been trying to track him down, but it looks like we’ve lost him again.”

“You a cop? Too young to be a cop.”

She just smiled at me. “I’m a concerned party.” She held up the folio. “We managed to contain his work. Can you describe to me what you saw?”

I don’t know why, but I told her. She pulled out a composition book with a black and white cover and started writing what I said down. By the end of it, I just… kind of started to panic as I described the feeling of the pills around my legs.

“All right.” She closed her book. “I suggest you go home, rest, and maybe try to move past this incident.”

As she walked away, I asked: “What if I don’t wanna?”

She turned around, genuine confusion on her face. She took off her sunglasses.

“Look. You said that Luto or Ludo or whoever, he’s done this before? Somehow? I don’t know what kind of weird voodoo shit there was up there, but I don’t think this is an isolated incident. What else has happened with this?”

She put away her sunglasses. “You’re going down a pretty deep rabbit hole here. Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Yeah, I’m sure. If there’s more stuff like this out there, I want to make sure it doesn’t reach the public eye.”

She just kind of smiled at me, and reached into the folio, handing me a Polaroid photo. It showed the entire staff standing over Dee’s desk, looking at the ad. I couldn’t see any of it from here, but what I did see was Jay, on the floor-- or rather, halfway in the floor. Something that looked like TV static was dragging him through the carpet. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Jay on the way out.

“When did you take this?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her there.

“About twenty minutes after you evacuated the building.” As if it explained her bonkers sentence, she held up an old Polaroid camera that was at her side. “They’ve weaponized the world’s media. We found a way to strike back.”

After that, we went out for drinks, and she gave me the sales pitch. I got invited to their IRC thing, which eventually became their Telegram. Been part of the group ever since.

#

Whatever Luto did, it never stuck for me. I still do weed every now and again. Tried some of the harder stuff after this, but it wrecked my teeth.

We never saw Jay again. In light of all the weird shit that happened with the ‘gas leak’, the company cut back on employees. I managed to stick around. Since then, I've taken over the company,, and we've moved away from anti-drug stuff, especially since everyone and their godmother is pushing for the legalization of weed now. Good.

I’ve run into a few other things over the years. A few completely normal products have had just… goddamn bizarre ads made for them. Just to name a few: several implied cannibalism ads for fast food places, a beer commercial where they suggest garnishing it with a severed finger, and a movie trailer where every character is somehow Elijah Wood. Not played by Elijah Wood, just… Elijah Wood, looking terrified of the aliens around him.

Luto/Ludo/Whoever the Hell he was keeps popping up. Sometimes he’s a musician, sometimes an artist, sometimes a writer. But his works are all messed up. One of our guys in London is still serving a prison sentence for destroying one of his works before it went up at the Tate.

I don’t know much beyond that. I’m the ad guy, and the backer. Other people have the job of finding and stopping this weirdo.

 

Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)  >>

The Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media: Directory of Entries

 

Mission Statement (Start Here!)

Money for Nothing (1999) 

The Kilauea Recording (2006) 

The Maddening Quiet (1962) 

A Brief History of Killer Apps 

The Anti-Drug Aberration 

Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)

The Lumière Anomaly: Le Chapeau 

The Alescio Manuscripts (1983-1987)

The Lassiter Hotel Footage

Part 1 

Part 2 

Part 3 

Part 4 

Institute Q&A

The Gravid Tape

The Concordance Dagger 

Can't Get You Outta My Brain (Guest Post) 

The Black Rondeau 

Safety Square 

Change Your Number 

Sunwalkers 

Prismatica: Killer Queer Fiction

A Brief History of Killer Apps (Guest Post)

<< The Maddening Quiet (1962) 

 

Tristan here. Bad news: doctors said I have a pinched ulnar nerve from resting my elbow weird on stuff. Updates are going to slow a bit, but other members of the institute have agreed to do write-ups in my absence.

The first of these is written by Cecily Smith, and talks about various ways your cell phone can kill you. She's reluctant for it to be published and objects to the very concept of this blog, but smashed out something usable in the last week.

A Brief History of Killer Apps

Original Write-Up by Cecily Smith


Let me preface this by saying that you'll have to take my word for it on a lot of stuff here. Smartphone apps generally aren't forwards-compatible, so if you have an app on your phone from five years ago, there's no guarantee it'll work on newer operating systems. This applies to all devices, which means, I have to rely on emulators and testimony regarding their effects… but emulation doesn't replicate the anomalies these applications cause, meaning I'm working on testimony when it comes to these things.

Anyway.

The first-ever application (or ‘app’) put on Apple’s store was a television remote, released in May of 2008. Third-party apps began to be listed on the App Store in June 2008. The first death attributed to a smartphone app occurred on August 25th, 2008. This death was nothing of particular note; some poor soul in London was just bidding on an eBay auction while driving and missed the fact that the light had turned red.

This is a brief run-down of apps that have actively caused harm.

Name: Carpe Diem 

Category: Life Aid/Malware

Released: April 9th, 2009

Last Active: April 9th, 2009

Injuries and Deaths: 20 seizures

Carpe Diem was advertised as a daily planning app. In reality, the app was programmed to, after approximately two minutes of continuous operation, display a ‘screamer’ image with flashing lights and a loud sound, which was intended to cause epileptic seizures. Nobody died, thankfully, and it was pulled from the store before it hit 500 downloads. The App’s creator was arrested and was sentenced to six months in prison; the sentence was so light because legislation regarding computer programs that cause physical harm, as opposed to material or monetary harm, was and is still sparse.

Name: Cointraq

Category: Finance/Malware

Released: July 2017

Last Active: September 2017

Injuries and Deaths: Between 20 and 50 injuries, in addition to an unknown quantity of destroyed property.

Cointraq was a very dumb app. It was a 2017 Android application which advertised itself as a way to monitor various cryptocurrency markets in real time. It was also malware, which turned your smartphone into a crypto mining rig for the app’s creator. This wouldn’t have been a problem (at least, from a medical perspective) if they tried to mine using the CPU of the phone; however, they attempted to use the phone’s far less powerful GPU to mine. Most phones that downloaded it were bricked within a week, and the phones that weren’t bricked overheated, with some even catching fire. I doubt that all of the cases of exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7s are related to Cointraq, but I’m willing to bet at least one is.

The precedent for apps that are harmful, but ultimately mundane, usually follow these trends-- malice, incompetence, critical user error, etc. I could write a whole essay on deaths caused by Pokémon Go, but if the Institute focused on ways that Pokémon was actively harmful, we’d never get anything done.

Anomalously dangerous apps take several forms, but commonly are novelties, or at least look like them. If you have a smartphone, you’re likely at least aware of apps that use your phone’s motion sensor to do things like simulate the pouring of liquids, roll dice, or do other relatively useless actions.


Name: Blut

Category: Digital toy/novelty

Released: 2011

Last Active: 2016

Injuries and Deaths: 52 confirmed; 71 total suspected.

A liquid simulation app that requested access to biometric data (i.e. what your phone’s fitness app could register). Users that granted access were allowed to play with a simulation of liquid blood. Several users poured the blood out of its digital container and suffered catastrophic hemorrhaging, with at least four users suffering complete exsanguination.

Name: Lucre

Category: Financial/Marketplace

Released: 2015

Last Active: Ongoing

Injuries and Deaths: 89+, including one case of severe chronological alteration.

Lucre is an app dedicated to "creating a consumer-centric marketplace"-- a swap-meet app, where you could buy and sell unwanted items. You'd put something up for sale, ship it off to one of Lucre's warehouses, and when it got bought, you'd get the money. It advertised 'Insanely fast shipping', and it fulfilled its promise… but the creators of Lucre, Gordon Software LLC, cut corners, in the temporal sense.

Items that were shipped using Lucre ended up becoming ‘chronologically altered’ (and not ‘chronologically confused’, despite it being a much better term). Items would arrive before they were even ordered, poofing out of existence after the buyer realized they didn’t want to order them anymore. (The universe is very tidy about paradoxes, when it comes to inorganic items.) Other times, the items would arrive reduced to their base components, whether that be individual circuit boards or shards of plastic and rubber. But two cases bucked this trend.

Firstly: I’ll let this article from the Orlando Sentinel circa 2017 speak for itself.

SEVEN LOCAL RESIDENTS HOSPITALIZED FOLLOWING EXPOSURE TO RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS

ORLANDO-- Seven individuals, all staff at the Green Well Bar and Grill in Orlando, were hospitalized following exposure to radioactive materials.

Clark Karpin, owner of the Green Well, said in a statement that symptoms of radiation sickness occurred after opening an online order from a small ‘swap-meet’ website, and that the order ‘just looked like ordinary equipment for brewing’.

Karpin had recently acquired a license to brew and bottle his own alcohol, and had ordered used brewery equipment from the internet. It is believed radioactive material was packaged with the items. Doctors expect Karpin and his six employees to make full recoveries.

The agents from the Department of Homeland Security are investigating, and declined to comment.

The second case cropped up much more recently; someone ordered an item when the app started up in 2017, and never received it… until March of this year. The contents were supposedly a french press coffee maker, and the owner, a small-time Youtuber, did an unboxing live stream.

When he opened the box, the live stream’s feed seemed to pause, but the video kept recording. As of writing, the stream has been ongoing for over five months, just the same angle of hands looking down at the coffee maker as they pull it out of the box. We’re trying to find out where he lives so that we can get him out of whatever he’s stuck in, because the stream is still going. Light changes through the windows of their house. But they don’t move.

I realize, at best, apps like this are adjacent to the media studies we dedicate ourselves to. They’re software, and mobile games generally don’t kill people. Most lost apps don’t kill people, and most of them don’t even display any anomalies. Lucre and Blut are two major exceptions, but there is a sort of third that’s an Unholy Grail for me-- basically it’s what the Kilauea Recording is for Tristan, something so dangerous it needs to be gone.

Name: N/A (designated ‘Scan’)

Category: Malware/Spyware/Stalkware/Data-Skimmer

Released: 2010 (?)

Last Active: Ongoing

Injuries and Deaths: Unknown, estimated to be over 5,000

I call this app Scan, based on the fact that the main UI element is a green button with that word on it. Pressing that button lets the app root through your phone’s data, everything from Facebook to your contacts, and from there, it extrapolates, searches, expands its net further and further until no data can escape it.

It can tell you what brand of wine your best friend likes. It can tell you what type of car your ex-girlfriend is now driving, and where she’s going to be spending vacation this year. It can track down your high school bully, the one who made your life hell, and tell you what pharmacy he goes to in order to get his antipsychotic prescription filled. And it proceeds to give you nudges in the right-- or wrong-- direction. One use of it and every machine I own started giving me advertisements for gun stores, fertilizer, and electronics manuals.

And it can do all that in less than twenty seconds after pressing the button. It’s like someone made a real-life version of a hacking app from a bad episode of CSI. Scan isn’t dangerous because of what it does; it’s dangerous because of what people are pushed to do with the information it gives them. The chain of bomb threats in Baltimore in late 2014? Connected to Scan. The 2012 assassination of three members of Brazil’s parliament? Scan facilitated that. Three of the dump sites from the “GUTS X6” killings (Tristan will probably write about that at a later date) showed up on Scan months before bodies were found there.

I use Scan myself. It’s useful for keeping tabs on other members of the Institute, making sure that, when we go off the grid, we do so of our own volition. But my main motive with using it is to figure out who made it and how to get rid of it. Digging through the code is fruitless; it looks like complete nonsense, to the point where I think it has to be some custom programming language that I’m unaware of. Part of the purpose of this blog is to try to get knowledge from the outside world; with that in mind, if you know anything about computers at all, get into contact with me, maybe you can figure out what the code actually does.

Until then, keep an eye on your screens. Who knows what they do when you're not watching?

--Cecily Out

The Anti-Drug Abberation >>