Bogleech.com"s 2015 Horror Write-off:
" DEVSUP_CONSOLE "
Submitted by ProphetStorm
So believe it or not, it was the Konami Code. The freaking Konami Code. I knew it had some sort of significance, but I had no clue that the significance it had was cosmic. I just knew it was important. Somehow. In some way.
I was messing with console commands. I work as a night guard for a software company, but I hope to become an A-1 hacker, maybe even join Anonymous. I've been on the Deep Web enough to know what goes on, and how to work with it.
Where was I? Console commands. Things are usually really boring around Omegasoft, so I often have time and space to just mess around in cyberspace on my laptop. This particular time I tried something different--brought my hard drive and put it in my office desktop, which was connected to the whole building's infrastructure. Doors, elevators, cameras, everything. I wanted to run a few little tests. Hopefully they wouldn't find any evidence, but even if they did, this is a freakin' software company. Wouldn't be an issue they'd pay attention to.
First I tried getting into the elevators. No go. The encryption was surprisingly tough. So I tackled the doors. Much simpler. But glancing between the screen and the doors, I noticed one door had a strange name. Most of them were 'atrium2_east' or the like. This one was DEVSUP.
DEVSUP?
I couldn't locate it on the cameras, so I clicked on it to see what would happen. That was when the headache started. The screen freakin' lit up. Thousands and thousands of subroutines all tied up in DEVSUP, hid away carefully in the door menu. I grinned, thinking about how much I could make just exploiting DEVSUP. But what exactly was it?
I knew that in most games or programs, there's a file that's the backbone of the whole program, and if that's corrupted, the whole thing will go down. Was DEVSUP the backbone of Omegasoft? I examined some of the file names. That's when things got really strange. My headache worsened slightly.
bodyfunc1, bodyfunc2, bodyfunc3...
grav1, grav2, gravtest...
impactest, impacprog...
These sounded like video game physics engine components. I decided to try something. I opened up gravtest. As I expected, tons of complex coding. But a lot of the characters were unfamiliar. They looked like Japanese symbols, but not like any I recognized. Just to be safe, I picked a patch of Roman character code and entered a few test phrases to see if anything would change.
An error message popped up. "SUBVERSE 5.2 REQUIRES DEVSUP INTERFACE TO EDIT. OPEN DEVSUP INTERFACE?"
Yes. No. Cancel. Hm. I didn't have the software installed on my hard drive, but I decided that if the whole thing was accessible from the building network, I'd be fine. I clicked 'yes'. That's when the crap hit the metaphorical fan. My head felt like it was going to split open, and the door to my office randomly swung open. I looked over to it and felt like I was going to throw up. I chuckled to myself, wondering what would have happened if I had tried to monkey with the 'bodyfunc' settings. I stood and lurched toward the door, going to get some motion sickness pills from the main office.
Then I was in a field.
The transition was not immediate, but I couldn't immediately remember what happened in the time between walking through the door and waking up in the field, so it may as well have been. Then the memory hit me like a freight train. It was almost like experiencing it again. I had walked through the door and fallen into some sort of pit. The bottomless variety. As I fell, I hit what felt like layers of gauze or silk, which parted under me, but each caused a lurch in my stomach and a sickening vibration in my bones. The colors in my vision began separating. Like a bad 3d film, or something. Then there was the sensation of being run through a cheese grater, or something uncannily like it--being taken apart on the most basic, fundamental level. I screamed, and didn't recognize my voice. It was some sort of stuttered, divided shriek. Sounded more like an alien sound effect from a sci-fi flick. Then everything went black.
I came to about two or three yards above the ground in this field, but because I was being...un-shredded? put back together somehow, the pain of landing was secondary to the pain I was already experiencing. I actually passed out, though from the tingling and raw feeling my body had when I woke up, it was clear I hadn't been out long. I stood and looked around.
This was wrong. It was all wrong. So very wrong.
The grass was uniform. Each blade was the exact same shape, the exact same shade of green, and looked more like construction-paper cutouts than actual grass. The sky was a very flat, even shade of blue, and the clouds were identical, spaced evenly and clear-cut, like the clouds you'd see in a kid's drawing. Then a bird flew by.
NO. My stomach heaved again. The bird was wrong. It was shaped, colored, formed exactly like a bird should be. But it just...came out of the air. Out of nowhere. Popped into existence feet from me and flew by. And when it flew, its body was rigid and straight, and its wings flapped mechanically, slowly. A simple axial motion rather than what the articulated flap of a bird's wing should look like. It made me sick watching. I looked at my hand. It looked normal. But on the back was something new. A black bar, with three inscriptions. One was in the same foreign language the code had been in. One was in binary. The third was in Roman text:
DEVSUP AV Y-993 "INCORRECT"
The heck?! Was I in the computer program? Was this a computer program? I swore in confusion, but no sound came out. Rather, a hazy field near the bottom of my vision scrolled in the words in faintly glowing text. Again, my stomach heaved. What was going on? Where was I? Why was I there?
I tried something simple. "Spawn underscore bird."
The text scrolled across the bar at the bottom of my vision, followed by the red words "bad phrase." The word 'underscore' had been written out.
"Spawn bird."
The same wrong bird I'd seen before flew by again. So whether or not I was in a computer program, it acted something like one. "Spawn Devsup Av Y-993."
"Bad phrase"
Okay. "Spawn human."
Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. STUPID mistake.
What spawned was...decidedly not human. For one thing, I hadn't specified a gender, race, or age, so it came out as this sort of half-finished template thing. Naked, but no genitals or other sex characteristics. Bald. Its skin was a sickly off-white tone. It had no eyes, just indentations where eyes certainly should have been. Its mouth remained closed and its nose flared slightly as it breathed. What's more, it was wrong in the same way the bird was wrong. When it moved, it didn't bend its knees--just swung its legs, and it glided along the ground doing this. Then the thing spoke. I didn't recognize its language, but it bowed down to me. Did it think I was a god?
"Delete human one," I whispered, and was greeted by a scream that was nothing short of hellish as the thing in front of me literally dissolved. Not a computer dissolve, but a chemical dissolution, bubbling and hissing away.
"Spawn door," I muttered, trying to figure out how to get out of this place. I didn't have my laptop, or a way to access the DEVSUP menu, so I had to experiment. The door that spawned was quite simple. A white slab of wood on a white frame with metal hinges. I walked through.
Nothing. Huh.
Then I heard something like the human speaking again. This time it was angry. I looked over and saw it--it had fallen from the freaking sky. Yeah, nope. I turned to run.
A voice reverberated in the ground, in the air, in my bones. Again, I didn't understand the language, but it certainly wasn't the thing following me. Words in that strange Japanese-like language appeared in my coding box (or whatever the heck that hazy thing was)...and the grass all stood straight up, turning to steel.
Mmf. I don't think I can quite express what it feels like to fall, face-first, into a bed of paper-thin steel blades. Everything went black. For a moment, I thought I had died. I thought it was over. Either I'd go to the afterlife, which had to be better than this, or I'd wake up on the floor by the door to the office. But no. Enormous white letters filled my vision.
RESPAWN 9
8
7
6
Please no
I was messing with console commands. I work as a night guard for a software company, but I hope to become an A-1 hacker, maybe even join Anonymous. I've been on the Deep Web enough to know what goes on, and how to work with it.
Where was I? Console commands. Things are usually really boring around Omegasoft, so I often have time and space to just mess around in cyberspace on my laptop. This particular time I tried something different--brought my hard drive and put it in my office desktop, which was connected to the whole building's infrastructure. Doors, elevators, cameras, everything. I wanted to run a few little tests. Hopefully they wouldn't find any evidence, but even if they did, this is a freakin' software company. Wouldn't be an issue they'd pay attention to.
First I tried getting into the elevators. No go. The encryption was surprisingly tough. So I tackled the doors. Much simpler. But glancing between the screen and the doors, I noticed one door had a strange name. Most of them were 'atrium2_east' or the like. This one was DEVSUP.
DEVSUP?
I couldn't locate it on the cameras, so I clicked on it to see what would happen. That was when the headache started. The screen freakin' lit up. Thousands and thousands of subroutines all tied up in DEVSUP, hid away carefully in the door menu. I grinned, thinking about how much I could make just exploiting DEVSUP. But what exactly was it?
I knew that in most games or programs, there's a file that's the backbone of the whole program, and if that's corrupted, the whole thing will go down. Was DEVSUP the backbone of Omegasoft? I examined some of the file names. That's when things got really strange. My headache worsened slightly.
bodyfunc1, bodyfunc2, bodyfunc3...
grav1, grav2, gravtest...
impactest, impacprog...
These sounded like video game physics engine components. I decided to try something. I opened up gravtest. As I expected, tons of complex coding. But a lot of the characters were unfamiliar. They looked like Japanese symbols, but not like any I recognized. Just to be safe, I picked a patch of Roman character code and entered a few test phrases to see if anything would change.
An error message popped up. "SUBVERSE 5.2 REQUIRES DEVSUP INTERFACE TO EDIT. OPEN DEVSUP INTERFACE?"
Yes. No. Cancel. Hm. I didn't have the software installed on my hard drive, but I decided that if the whole thing was accessible from the building network, I'd be fine. I clicked 'yes'. That's when the crap hit the metaphorical fan. My head felt like it was going to split open, and the door to my office randomly swung open. I looked over to it and felt like I was going to throw up. I chuckled to myself, wondering what would have happened if I had tried to monkey with the 'bodyfunc' settings. I stood and lurched toward the door, going to get some motion sickness pills from the main office.
Then I was in a field.
The transition was not immediate, but I couldn't immediately remember what happened in the time between walking through the door and waking up in the field, so it may as well have been. Then the memory hit me like a freight train. It was almost like experiencing it again. I had walked through the door and fallen into some sort of pit. The bottomless variety. As I fell, I hit what felt like layers of gauze or silk, which parted under me, but each caused a lurch in my stomach and a sickening vibration in my bones. The colors in my vision began separating. Like a bad 3d film, or something. Then there was the sensation of being run through a cheese grater, or something uncannily like it--being taken apart on the most basic, fundamental level. I screamed, and didn't recognize my voice. It was some sort of stuttered, divided shriek. Sounded more like an alien sound effect from a sci-fi flick. Then everything went black.
I came to about two or three yards above the ground in this field, but because I was being...un-shredded? put back together somehow, the pain of landing was secondary to the pain I was already experiencing. I actually passed out, though from the tingling and raw feeling my body had when I woke up, it was clear I hadn't been out long. I stood and looked around.
This was wrong. It was all wrong. So very wrong.
The grass was uniform. Each blade was the exact same shape, the exact same shade of green, and looked more like construction-paper cutouts than actual grass. The sky was a very flat, even shade of blue, and the clouds were identical, spaced evenly and clear-cut, like the clouds you'd see in a kid's drawing. Then a bird flew by.
NO. My stomach heaved again. The bird was wrong. It was shaped, colored, formed exactly like a bird should be. But it just...came out of the air. Out of nowhere. Popped into existence feet from me and flew by. And when it flew, its body was rigid and straight, and its wings flapped mechanically, slowly. A simple axial motion rather than what the articulated flap of a bird's wing should look like. It made me sick watching. I looked at my hand. It looked normal. But on the back was something new. A black bar, with three inscriptions. One was in the same foreign language the code had been in. One was in binary. The third was in Roman text:
DEVSUP AV Y-993 "INCORRECT"
The heck?! Was I in the computer program? Was this a computer program? I swore in confusion, but no sound came out. Rather, a hazy field near the bottom of my vision scrolled in the words in faintly glowing text. Again, my stomach heaved. What was going on? Where was I? Why was I there?
I tried something simple. "Spawn underscore bird."
The text scrolled across the bar at the bottom of my vision, followed by the red words "bad phrase." The word 'underscore' had been written out.
"Spawn bird."
The same wrong bird I'd seen before flew by again. So whether or not I was in a computer program, it acted something like one. "Spawn Devsup Av Y-993."
"Bad phrase"
Okay. "Spawn human."
Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. STUPID mistake.
What spawned was...decidedly not human. For one thing, I hadn't specified a gender, race, or age, so it came out as this sort of half-finished template thing. Naked, but no genitals or other sex characteristics. Bald. Its skin was a sickly off-white tone. It had no eyes, just indentations where eyes certainly should have been. Its mouth remained closed and its nose flared slightly as it breathed. What's more, it was wrong in the same way the bird was wrong. When it moved, it didn't bend its knees--just swung its legs, and it glided along the ground doing this. Then the thing spoke. I didn't recognize its language, but it bowed down to me. Did it think I was a god?
"Delete human one," I whispered, and was greeted by a scream that was nothing short of hellish as the thing in front of me literally dissolved. Not a computer dissolve, but a chemical dissolution, bubbling and hissing away.
"Spawn door," I muttered, trying to figure out how to get out of this place. I didn't have my laptop, or a way to access the DEVSUP menu, so I had to experiment. The door that spawned was quite simple. A white slab of wood on a white frame with metal hinges. I walked through.
Nothing. Huh.
Then I heard something like the human speaking again. This time it was angry. I looked over and saw it--it had fallen from the freaking sky. Yeah, nope. I turned to run.
A voice reverberated in the ground, in the air, in my bones. Again, I didn't understand the language, but it certainly wasn't the thing following me. Words in that strange Japanese-like language appeared in my coding box (or whatever the heck that hazy thing was)...and the grass all stood straight up, turning to steel.
Mmf. I don't think I can quite express what it feels like to fall, face-first, into a bed of paper-thin steel blades. Everything went black. For a moment, I thought I had died. I thought it was over. Either I'd go to the afterlife, which had to be better than this, or I'd wake up on the floor by the door to the office. But no. Enormous white letters filled my vision.
RESPAWN 9
8
7
6
Please no