Many Messed Up Minds

I don’t have much time. Forgive me if this ends up being incoherent or short. I only can tell you the main details.

It started earlier this evening, right? I was on my computer, as I usually am as of an evening. Everything was going normally. I was messing around on Omegle, just chatting to random people on text chat, a bit of trolling, a bit of a laugh. Nothing unusual.

Until the fifth or sixth person I was connected to. The best thing to do here is to copy-paste. I don’t have time to go through it all bit by bit.

Stranger: Hello.

Me: Hi.

Stranger: I take it you’re bored, yes?

Me: Why else would anyone be on Omegle on a Friday night?

Stranger: That’s a good point. Did you enjoy your Chinese food?

Me: How did you know I had Chinese food? Lol, just a general guess, probably.

Stranger: Yeah, everyone I’ve met tonight seems to have had Chinese food. It must be a Friday night thing for young, mid-twenty-year-old men like yourself.

Me: You sure like your generalizations.

Stranger: Well, I’ve been doing this for a while. A certain type of people come on here. I like the type of people that come here.

Me: What do you mean by that?

Stranger: I’m not sure. I just find them … enjoyable.

Me: Weird way of putting it.

Stranger: What makes you feel safe behind a computer screen? The fact that you think no one can see you? That I can’t see the way you’re sitting with your left hand on your face? Your cup of coffee to your right? The green and black T-shirt you’re wearing? Why are you wearing a cap indoors? You should turn your kitchen light off, too, you’re wasting energy. Go on, do it. I’ll wait.

Me: What the fuck, dude? Who is this?

Stranger: Turn the fucking light off.

Me: Or what?

Stranger: Lazy, eh? I’ll turn it off for you, then.

I logged off at this point - he was a freaky fucker and I thought he was having a laugh. But then, my kitchen light went off. I tried to convince myself that it was a power outage, but the charging icon on my laptop didn’t go away. I’m convinced I can hear something in my kitchen. I don’t know what’s going on.

How could this happen? Is it someone playing tricks on me? I know otherwise … I know too much about this sort of thing, don’t I? I told too many people. I thought I was passing on stupid urban myths but obviously not. Innocent mistakes usually cost everything.

I could hide, but I’m sure he could find me. I don’t know. This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening.

It can’t be. It’s impossib

The following is a transcript of the black box recordings of American Airlines flight 295, which crashed in the early morning of 15^th January 2010. 240 passengers and 8 crew were on board. Cause of the crash is still under investigation.

CAPTAIN MICHAEL FORD: That’s our cruising altitude now. We can tell the passengers the height and speed in a minute.

FIRST OFFICER REDMOND SHELLEY: Yeah, can do. That always used to freak me out when I first started flying.

FORD: (chuckles) Really? Never heard of a pilot afraid of flying before.

SHELLEY: Not scared as such. It just used to make me wonder … forty thousand feet up in the air, travelling at five hundred miles an hour, and what’s separating you from out there?

FORD: (laughs again) Aluminium.

SHELLEY: Exactly.

(There is a slight period of silence)

SHELLEY:  The first time I ever flew, I was quite old. I was around nineteen. I had this … experience. You would have thought that it would have stopped me from flying, but in fact it just made me more curious to see what the world looked like up here.

FORD: An experience, eh? What was this?

SHELLEY:  I guess I was tired. I was gazing out of the window, and we were right up above the clouds. I was looking at the tops of the clouds, just daydreaming, and I could have sworn I saw something … something moving around down there.

FORD: That’s kinda weird, Red.

SHELLEY: Tell me about it. Anyway, it just got me wondering. There are so many weird creatures down in the very bottom of the ocean. It just made me think about the fact there could be animals away up here that we don’t even know about.

FORD: I guess. But people have been flying for decades. I’m sure we would have noticed them.

SHELLEY: Perhaps I did? I don’t really know what I saw.

(There is another brief silence before there is a loud grinding sound)

FORD: What the fuck was that?

(The sound is heard again, louder this time)

SHELLEY: We’re losing altitude!

(Various scuffling sounds are heard, instructions are shouted, but by now the recording is overcome by severe static and some speech is therefore indecipherable)

FORD: What the Hell (indecipherable) over by the (indecipherable).

(A new voice joins, believed to be that of flight attendant Sharon Salter)

SALTER: There’s (indecipherable) on the wing, (indecipherable) with the engines!

(Static becomes too prominent to work out any more speech)

—-

As mentioned, the cause of the crash remains unknown. It has been suggested that the public and the families are given a bogus explanation, for the accident itself is under investigation by the FBI and has been classified as secret. It is not in the interest of the public for them to know that no trace of any human remains was ever found.

The fate of the passengers and crew remains unknown.

Jason was my best friend. You know the sort of friend you know from birth? You grow up together, you go through all of your obsessions together, and you become as close, if not closer, than family? Well, that was us. Born on the same day, we were, although we didn’t start properly playing together until Jase was about two. I was always around, but you see, Jase was pretty quiet, a rather shy young boy. He would only ever talk to me. It seemed to worry his parents slightly, though I’m not quite sure why. They just didn’t like me.

   Jase and I would play for hours. We used to have all sorts of fun. We would invent huge fantasy worlds filled with dinosaurs and space ships and whatever else a young boy’s mind could ever, ever wish for. But there was always something awkward when his mother or father came in. Jase didn’t let it both him when he was younger, but I could tell it started to grate on him when he got older. It was his mother, mostly. His father worked a lot and his mother stayed at home looking after him, and me of course, as I was always there. She would hear us laughing and banging around and she would come up the stairs.

   “Jason, who are you playing with?” she would ask, folding her arms and wrinkling her nose in the way she did when she was annoyed.

   “I’m playing with Christopher!” Jase would reply happily. “We’re being chased by dinosaurs and they’re running really fast and we have to get away and –“

   “Well,” his mother would say, cutting him off. “Could you and Christopher please keep the noise down?”

   She always used to say my name like it was some sort of filthy profanity. She would wrinkle her nose even more and spit it out. I would always feel awkward afterwards and Jase would naturally be worried.

   “Why doesn’t she like me?” I asked him one day, after this whole routine had occurred again. Jase was around seven now, and so as you can imagine, we’d been through his mother’s talks about me a million times.

   “I don’t know,” Jase said to me. “I think she doesn’t like the way I only ever play with you. I think that she wants me to make more friends at school.”

   “But we don’t need any more friends at school,” I replied. “We’re fine playing by ourselves. No one would get what we were playing anyway.”

   “I know.”

   “You promise you won’t leave me behind?”

   “I promise,” Jase said, but his voice was monotonous. He had trotted out that line a thousand times before.

   It went on like this for a while. Jase grew interested in other things. We went from playing dinosaurs, to playing Pokémon, to pretending we were the only survivors in a huge war that destroyed Earth. Eventually, though, Jase began finding other ways to act these things out. First of all was his Nintendo GameBoy, where he found it a lot easier to be a Pokémon trainer. I was left to scuff my feet in annoyance as he whooped and cheered every time he raised a Pokémon’s level. Then it was onto role-playing games, where he could fight of hordes of zombies in an apocalyptic world, leaving me to my scuffing once more.

   Then came the worst night of them all. He didn’t come back after school. He has stopped taking me to school with him. I had to spend the day alone. He came back late. He had been at a friend’s house.

   This went on and on, and it’s still going on now. I don’t know what to make of it all. I was his first friend, and for a long while, I was his only friend. But now he’s off with other people, leaving me to myself. I’m angry. I’m hurt. I just can’t understand it. I know I have to speak to him about it soon, but I’ve heard him come in and his mother’s there, and if she sees me she’ll do that annoying nose thing. I’ve had enough of her doing that at me.

   “Where are you heading now, Jason?” I heard her ask him, as my old friend climbed the stairs. He entered his room.

   “Hey Jase!” I said loudly. He ignored me. He didn’t even make any acknowledgment that I was even there.

   “I’m heading back out to Brian’s,” he called back down. “He’s getting pizza.”

   “Sounds fun,” Jase’s mother called back up. “It’s nice to see you getting out and about.”

   “Jase, what’s going on?” I demanded, standing up. I stood right in front of him, but he said nothing. It was as though he were looking right through me. “JASE!”

    “I’ll give you a lift, if you like,” Jason’s mom called up to him. “God, I’m so happy you’ve finally grown out of playing with that stupid imaginary friend.”

*

Based upon a suggestion by Raggly Were, post #5580514.