Welcome to Scary Story Time with Spooky Boo
Sandcastle, California might seem a little backwoods, but it really does have a lot of people working in the high tech industry. Many of these people commute into San Francisco and have children who spend copious amounts of hours home alone just playing on their computers. There isn’t a better way to find victims of a dot com society than by fascinating the minds of gamers and teens.
The boys in this story were fascinated by the new concept of Deep Fakes and the Deep Web. So enthralled by the idea they couldn’t keep their hands off of it! But what happens to those who are too curious for their own good?
Listen as I tell you the story of three friends who should have stayed away from the deep web and should not have played with the deep fake technology no matter how simple and cool it seemed. There is more than meets the eye in Sandcastle and if it seems too easy to be true then it probably is very, very bad!
Before I begin, remember to check out the website at www.scarystorytime.com to get links to my other podcasts for True Scary Stories from Creepy California and Creepypasta Scary Stories. If you want to hear all of my podcasts in one sitting, then check out my Patreon page and for just a buck per month, you may listen to them all in one feed at http://www.spookyboo.club.
I’ll also be watching Creature Features on Saturday night with my friends. Be sure to check out their YouTube channel and subscribe so you can come and chat with us while we watch the great guests and the b-rated movies along with the hosts including the very sexy Vincent Van Dahl, his sweet housemate Tangella, and the very astute Mr. Livingston.
Now let’s begin…
Deep Fakes from the Deep Web by Spooky Boo
My friends and I were no saints, but we weren’t the kind of guys who go out on Friday nights to party. We played video games and messed around on the internet. I’m 17 years old and about to get my GED in where we call the Hot House. My friends would have been juniors. I guess that kind of tells you about my situation. I was kind of a loner until I moved to their block. All we did was hang out together.
We were the school nerds I suppose. We got along with others, but they pretty much ignored us. Sometimes some asshole jock would trip one of us, but we just kept on like nothing happened. I really didn’t want to get into fights because it wasn’t worth destroying my education. I knew better. It mattered! At least it did then. Maybe I should have started the fights instead of playing on the internet.
Being geeks, we were always looking to new technology and fun games. We created our own D&D game but soon got bored with it so we found some fun MMORPGs to play. That means Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game if you’ve never heard the term before. Yeah, others made fun of us for it, but we didn’t care. Sometimes we’d even catch them playing and knowing we would tell anyone and everyone they would pay us to keep it quiet. It was quite a deal!
One of the jocks, Tate, was playing with some deep fakes one night showing them to other people in the game we were on. He was morphing his picture with a knight and it looked so real that I wanted to try it with an Orc. I asked how he was able to this and he sent me the IP address of the deep fake game site.
I heard the stories about the deep fakes deep web site and I needed to know if it was true. I had seen the ones on Facebook and YouTube that were done by a professional and they were very real to me, but you tell someone had spent a lot of work creating them. The ones from the website my friend was talking about couldn’t possibly be real. There was no way, but my his video was really good. I also heard that people were using them to get out of petty crimes at school and this fascinated me. Not that I was a criminal and going to break the law, but there were some nasty people I could play some fun practical jokes on and save face. I wanted to see if I could do it.
There was also this kid at school who got into a lot of trouble and swore it wasn’t him. They said he murdered four people in the bakery and had him on video doing it, but he said it was the serial killer who was murdering people around town. Yeah, we have quite a few murders in our small area. At first, the cops thought he was the serial killer until it happened again while the kid was locked up, but proof is proof. He remained in prison and he even tried to appeal it but couldn’t.
The donut shop is all boarded up now, but back then it was the best place around. All of these rumors about deep fakes started happening back then, about 2 or 3 years ago. At first, they were funny and just random videos on the web. They started out as pictures where one person you knew morphed into another then someone started to get really crafty and began editing celebrity videos. We were all freaked out on the fakes. Sometimes you couldn’t even tell it was the same person. It was a total mind game.
We passed the videos around and laughed, both humored and a little freaked out. They were all celebrities coming from this one web page. The site didn’t even have a domain name–the URL was just an IP address and sometimes it would change because the old one would redirect to the new one. You had to catch it just in time or the old one would disappear. We kept it running in our little group of nerds in Sandcastle. Hell, we didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night here in this boring town. The rich kids went out of town to Santa Rosa or San Francisco and the cool kids went to the beach. The stoners went into the forest and partied or camped. My little group of friends had nothing but beer and the internet and we weren’t stupid enough to go into that haunted Sandcastle forest. I suppose if you’re stoned it doesn’t bother you, but some people don’t even come back like that old butcher’s wife. At least his chili recipe was good, that’s what grandma said when she brought some home for the family. I wasn’t even born yet, but mom kept it in her favorite recipe book.
Most of us would be home on a Friday night chilling with Netflix or Amazon videos. We’d pick a movie and watch it then chat about it. It was stupid. We all lived really close, but some of our parents were very strict and we weren’t allowed to go to parties or even spend the night at other guy’s houses. I was one of those kids. My mom and dad thought any teen going out on a Friday night would mean only drugs and alcohol. Most of the time I couldn’t sneak out because my window was two stories above ground with no way down. Mom was always in the living room near the front door and dad in the garage where the back door was. I had no way out.
I’m two years older now, but I still remember what happened. It was horrifying. See, that night we were playing around on websites that we weren’t supposed to go to. I hacked the router so I could see the porn sites all my friends went to while we laughed at the scenes and chatted on our video chat. Their parents were pretty dumb, but mine knew how to block me from trouble. I think I had put in some weird DNS number though when getting around the firewall. Hold on, for those who don’t know, DNS means domain name server. It’s what tells your world what name to associate a certain numeric address. Like I said before, most of these sites didn’t have domain names but this one did and we had to access it by changing the router or it couldn’t be seen. One of the other sites on the deep web said to go to facemorphlogic.com so we all went.
Before we logged in, we had to take our pictures and make some videos of our faces. It was the only way to get access to the site. I was a little nervous at first, but we’ve all done it before. You know, those silly elf cards at Christmas time or the birthday jokes. It was kind of fun and we were awarded points at how well we could mimic the face on the screen. First, there was winking and smiling then screaming and yelling. We had to make happy faces and sad faces. We even had to read a horror story to the camera and tell a funny joke. I really didn’t think anything of it except it being a game.
In the video library, the website had tons of different videos that other people created. Some were hilarious and others were weird. There wasn’t anything bad on the surface, it just looked like people messing around. The site said to upload our videos so we did. We were all on video chatting on faceview with each other watching what we did on video. It also allowed us to look at their screens as well. I put Ric’s fac on a dog humping another one and copied Phil’s face on the other dog. They looked so real! We were dying we were laughing so hard.
After I shared a pic of the video on Instagram though, Ric got pissed off. He started swearing at me like I was being mean to him or something. He could always dish out the jokes but never take them. I told him to calm down, but he just wouldn’t listen and logged off. He looked weird, too. Sometimes his face seemed like it was morphing into another.
Phil and I were cracking up and still making stupid videos of other friends doing weird things when Ric got back on a few hours later. He didn’t look right. Suddenly his eyes seemed sunken in and too dark around the edges. It didn’t look like Ric at all, but we could tell it was. It had only been a couple of hours, but it looked like he lost days of sleep and something about him was eerily familiar. I thought about it for a moment and realized that he actually looked a little like the serial killer who was arrested recently.
“What the hell, loser? Did you just drink some battery acid? You look like crap!” I said while tapping on my mic.
RIc just looked at me with those dead eyes and didn’t move. Not one inch. He sat there for a moment then reached over and grabbed his dad’s hunting knife. The blade glinted in the light of the monitor as he held it up to his cheek. Slowly he poked the sharp end into the flesh right under his cheekbone and with on big, swift motion sliced the side of his face.
“Dude!” Phil yelled into his laptop mic. “Dana, call his mom quick!”
I picked up the phone and absently dialed Ric’s cell. He just stared at the blood dripping down from his face onto the phone as it rang. I slammed my finger on the hangup button then dialed his mom. When there was no answer, I punched in 911.
“Quick, get to 2511 Bay Shell Drive. My friend just sliced his face with a knife!” As I was yelling into the phone, I forgot that Ric could hear me. He stood up and threw the phone against the wall then walked right out the door.
Minutes later we heard the sirens pull up to his house a few blocks down and could see the cops walking in. We all didn’t live too far away from each other, and I planned on running down there as the cops came, but we knew he had left. Phil and I met up outside and started searching for Ric in our backyards but he was nowhere to be found. Soon the cops came over and started asking questions. The same standard stuff, we just said he started acting crazy after logging back in and cutting his face then walked out.
A couple of hours had passed and we didn’t see Ric at all. The cops put out bulletins around town and we put up messages on his whereabouts all over social media. Ric has always been the happy one so this was really strange of him to do. His Instagram account remained untouched for hours and that was weird. He took about 20 selfies per hour with anything he could find because he thought he was the hottest gift to all the chicks around.
My parents were gone for the weekend so Phil and I decided to play a video game and wait for Ric to show up. Maybe he would log in and talk to us. About an hour after we started a message popped into the chat.
You did this!
Who is this? I typed into the message bar.
I’m going to kill them. Kill them all!
WHO IS THIS!? I typed again. Is this Ric? Who are you talking about?
THEM! he screamed with the keyboard keys.
I private messaged Phil and we decided to keep me chatting with Ric while he ran over to see if our friend was at home. A few moments later my webcam light came on and I was in a new video chat room. I noticed Phil sitting there in front of Ric’s computer by himself.
“Is he there?” I asked, wondering what the large shadow was behind Phil. “What’s behind you?”
He sat there staring at me with the same dark eyes as Ric had shown just a few hours prior. This didn’t look good. “What’s wrong, Phil? Get back over here.”
Suddenly a link popped up in my browser and my machine automatically started loading the page. I stared at the screen of the facemorphlogic.com website and saw a video of Phil, but it wasn’t Phil. It was that creepy serial killer that was just put away for slicing people up. They looked almost the same!
Phil started laughing from Ric’s machine and when I looked at him, his face continued to morph in and out of the same face as the serial killer. It moved so slowly into one and then the other it was hard to tell sometimes who was who.
“I’ll kill them all! Just like he did,” Phil’s face morphed one more time and then he stood up from the computer and held up the same knife Ric had cut his face with. The whole knife was bloody this time, not just the tip. His face really morphed into the killer’s face one more time and he laughed as he plunged the knife into his gut.
“Do it harder!” I heard Ric scream from across the room. With one huge shove, the knife seated deep into Phil’s guts. blood and whatever else secreted from his wound and intestines. I screamed as everything began spilling from his shredded bowls.
I then saw Ric grab the knife and started punching himself in the torso with it. Blood spurted out all over the camera until I couldn’t see through the lens.
I called 9 1 1 on my cell phone and waited for the emergency operator.
“You can’t call out, you little bitch! Why don’t you come over here and play?” A voice screeched on the other end of the phone. I could tell it was Phil on the phone. I even heard Ric laughing in the background.
Now thinking it was a joke and they were just playing games on me, I grabbed my laptop bag and headed over to Ric’s house. Some damn game they had. My mind screamed at me to cry, but I had to put a stop to this. Either they were playing one sick game or they were really dead and it was someone else. They looked so much like that serial killer, but he was gone–arrested and denied bail.
As I walked into the door, the strong smell of blood hit me. Closing my eyes, afraid for what I’d see, I took a step closer but the sole of my tennis shoe slipped into something really dark and slick. I tried to keep my balance as I fell, but landed right on top of Phil’s entrails. A sharp pain pierced through my backbone as I fell on to the corner of the brick fireplace.
I wanted to crawl away, but my legs wouldn’t move. I couldn’t feel or even move them.
“Help me,” a voice beside me croaked. It was Ric. He looked still alive, but barely. The computer was recording everything and I could see him sitting up beside me. His face morphed into the killer’s face again on the screen. The grin was unmistakable.
Instead of killing me, I felt the handle of the knife smack into my neck. I didn’t feel my spine crack, but I knew it happened. I could no longer feel my arms nor I could move any of my limbs. The only thing I could do was speak.
The last thing that happened before the cops stormed into the place was someone putting the knife handle into my hand. On the screen, it looked like Ric, except it wasn’t Ric. It was the serial killer but when I looked back at the video it was Ric again.
“Good God what happened here?” One cop said to another.
The second cop walked over to the scene and immediately heaved into the mess. Hearing it, I wanted to convulse, but nothing came up.
“You messed up the crime scene, man!”
“Don’t worry, it’s pretty obvious what happened,” he said as he wiped the spittle from his lip.
“Hey, come over here. Check this out!” the first cop motioned for the second over to the computer. They watched the whole scene that was saved to the morphing website. I could see the screen as well.
There I was, it was my friend Ric, but with my face stabbing Phil over and over again in the gut. Then it showed me slipping and falling then hitting my back against the brick. Of course, it stopped before the killer put the knife in my hand.
I didn’t do this. We found that evil deep web deep fakes site and somehow it tricked us and the cops. Maybe the killer was innocent after all. Maybe no one did this. We will never know and I will die in prison. At least Governor Newsom stopped the death penalty here in California because I’m innocent! I was framed by a deep fake website on the deep web.
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this story, please do make a comment on the website or on iTunes. Also, share with your friends!
I’ll be coming out with an anthology of my stories in a printed book available through Amazon and Patreon. When the book is ready I’ll let you know what the link is or check out www.spookyboo.club.
Remember, subscribe to my friend’s youtube channel found on www.creaturefeatures.tv. 🙂 It’s a lot of fun.
If you love punk music, my son has a band called Stay Out. They’re going to be really famous so get their albums now before they all sell out. www.officialstayout.com.
I’ll see you in your nightmares 🙂
