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“The Account That Answered Back”

“The Account That Answered Back” The story centers on a college student who, while browsing forgotten corners of the internet late at night, stumbles upon an abandoned forum thread archived from the early 2000s. The site itself looks neglected—broken image links, outdated fonts, and timestamps frozen in time. The thread discusses a long-dead instant-messaging service, one that officially shut down before the protagonist was even born. Despite its age, the thread contains dozens of eerily consistent testimonies. Each user claims that if an account is created using one’s full legal name and accessed precisely at 1:11 a.m., the service will display a contact already online—bearing the exact same name as the user. At first, the protagonist dismisses the posts as an elaborate hoax or early internet folklore. But curiosity slowly erodes their skepticism. On a quiet night, they follow the instructions. The interface flickers to life, revealing a single contact: their own name, marked as online, the status stuck endlessly on typing…. Moments later, a message appears. It isn’t a threat or a warning. It’s something disturbingly ordinary—an observation about the protagonist’s life, referencing objects and habits so specific they couldn’t possibly be guessed. The messages ask whether they remembered the item left on the kitchen counter, whether they avoided the third stair that always creaks, whether the bedroom door is locked this time. Each detail confirms one impossible truth: something is watching. As the nights pass, the tone of the messages shifts. The account begins describing events that haven’t occurred yet—predicting a missed call that hasn’t happened, a sudden nosebleed that comes without warning, a knock at the door that arrives hours after it’s mentioned. Every prediction unfolds exactly as written, draining the protagonist’s sense of time and control. Sleep becomes impossible as the line between anticipation and inevitability dissolves. Meanwhile, the forgotten forum thread begins updating on its own. New replies appear without notifications, written in the protagonist’s voice and cadence, detailing their reactions in unsettling detail—describing fear, hesitation, and panic in the past tense, as though the outcome has already been decided. The posts feel less like warnings and more like documentation. In the final entries, the tone becomes instructional. The messages stop predicting and begin directing. They explain how to remain logged in indefinitely, how to keep the account active, how to ensure it never goes offline. It becomes clear that the service doesn’t want attention—it wants continuity. The story ends with the forum refreshing one final time. A new timestamp appears, updating in real time. Beneath it is a single line of text: “User has gone offline.” After that, the page stops loading entirely, leaving behind only the implication that someone else has just logged in. music by: Myuu    / @myuu   "Scent of Night" by Nicolas Gasparini (Myuu) Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 creativecommons.org Music promoted by MrSnooze.