I’m a big fan of those games where you build civilizations, buildings, whatever. Spore is a great game. Every day I’d get up and mess around with the cities, scaring the crap out of the citizens. That always got a good laugh out of me. Eventually though, I got bored of it, so I started up Firefox and googled ‘games where you can build civelizations’. I didn’t care about the spelling error as autocorrect would fix it anyway.
The search results weren’t all that special as they were either games I have played before, or they required money. Of course, it also showed the usual ‘About 67,900,000 results (0.34 seconds)’ alongside the advertisement that had nothing to do with what I was looking for.
Nonetheless, I searched through the pages until I was at page 23. I saw a result that said ‘Ancient Kingdom - Be the king, control your army and destroy other kingdoms!’
Curious, I clicked. Never mind the fact that I’m a girl, I don’t mind being a king. There was a cool interface that looked like a scroll. The background displayed a castle in the distance. I checked the member list. Weirdly, there were no members, despite the game information saying the game came out in 2010. I guess it wasn’t very popular. I went back to the homepage and shifted the mouse over to the button that said ‘Free download!’ I then clicked.
The installer was 871 Megabytes. For a simple installer, that was quite big. I shrugged it off and opened the file. I went through the legal agreement. It looked pretty strange though, and was fairly short when I scrolled to the bottom. I never read agreements, so I just went over to the ‘I agree’ button.
I waited patiently as my game was installed. A few minutes later, the icon appeared on my desktop and the installer window closed. I laughed at the typo in the file name which went like 'Ancent' instead of 'Ancient'. In any case, I opened the file, and to my frustration, my desktop was instantly covered in transparent white. I was so annoyed and immediately pressed Ctrl Alt Delete. I opened up task manager and closed the game, although the taskbar icon was still there. I then attempted to open it again, and with luck the game opened. There was a black screen for 2 seconds and then I saw a string of binary code. What the hell? I thought.
I googled ‘binary text translator’ and clicked the first link I saw. I couldn’t copy and paste the numbers, unfortunately, so I settled to type them in manually. This is what they were:
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00101110
They translated to ‘You shouldn't have done that.’
Shouldn’t have done what, translate the code? Urgh, this is so annoying! This is obviously a hack, but I don’t know why someone would do that, unless if they’re some jerks.
The game then closed and notepad opened up, showing more code. This one was noticeably longer.
01000100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100001 00100000 01001111 01101000 00101100 00100000 01110111 01100001 01101001 01110100 00101110 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110101 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01100001 01100010 01101100 01111001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 01110111 01100001 01111001 00101110 00100000 01010111 01100101 01101100 01101100 00101100 00100000 01110011 01101001 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00101100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110101 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 00110110 00100000 01100100 01100001 01111001 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100001 01110100 00100000 00110110 00111010 00110101 00110110 00101110 00100000 01000100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101001 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00111111 00100000 01010111 01100001 01101001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 00101110
I then translated it, revealing this message.
Don't read this! Oh, wait. You'll probably read it anyway. Well, since you did, let me tell you something. You'll die in 6 days, at 6:56. Don't believe me? Wait and see.
I chuckled. Yeah right. I could tell this was just a stupid joke to scare gullible people. I’m not even close to being gullible. Believe me, I’ve seen tons of these things and they never happened.
I don’t know if I should believe that anymore though. Since I read that message, I’ve gotten a headache that gets worse every day. I talked to my parents about it and they told me to get some rest. That didn’t work.
I can’t go to the doctor because the building is so far away and I can’t get my mom to drive me there.
My head hurts so muc right now, I can barely see ad everything’ blurry. I still can’t get my parents to believe me. I feel so dizzy. I want someone to read this because I want them to know what happened and im about to fall I love you mom dad everyone please hel
That’s what was found on the girl’s desktop the day after. The girl was found on the floor with binary text on her forehead. Her parents called her doctor and he could only describe it as a stroke. They read the message the girl wrote, which was still in the Microsoft Word Starter window and under the name Untitled. They saved it, put it in a USB and sent it to the police. The police never found out what happened. Unfortunately, the girl’s parents failed to notice the numbers on her forehead which translated to: