If you take enough LSD, can you build a portal to the divine? It sounds like a typical internet conspiracy theory, the kind of thing weirdos post in online communities isolated from the rest of the world. But it’s also a conceptual prompt for a new work of digital fiction – a cool, and deeply creepy story that is gaining a cult fanbase.
Two weeks ago, a user who came to be known as “_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9” posted a disjointed snippet of text in a comment on Reddit, a site where communities post articles, images, personal stories and more for threaded group discussions. The post, added almost as if by accident to a thread about the cover of George Orwell’s 1984, made claims about the CIA’s acid-fuelled “mind control experiment” programme, Project MKUltra, a common staple of paranoid theory. MKUltra was indeed a real programme, but other items the user mentioned – “restraint bed portals” and “flesh interfaces” – are not.
The user continued to post about topics including Vietnam, Elizabeth Bathory, the Treblinka concentration camp, humpback whales, the Manson Family and LSD, but especially about the inexplicable “flesh interfaces”, being built somehow by shadowy programmes. A Reddit user might chance upon a single one of these posts in one of their ordinary discussion threads, but clicking on the username of _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 would let you view all their posts in aggregate, and there, a compelling science-fiction horror story was beginning to emerge, gradually more beautifully and boldly written from multiple narrative perspectives, but with a common mystery.
Reddit makes a fascinating platform for community-oriented fiction, and a perfect one for this slow-building and creepy invention, which fans have started calling “The Interface Series”. Each snippet of the abstract tale lives in a different discussion thread, so reading feels like combing a conversation history rather than following a linear tale. You can read the story in chronological order, but you can also follow the mystery to its origin: the standard display format for a user’s comments on Reddit is in reverse chronological order. By sorting the posts according to how “hot” or “controversial” they are, you can let the engagement of other readers guide your experience.
Eerie fragments
The seemingly random thread names start to form a pattern: the reader gets the distinct pleasure of wondering why the author chose to post each component in each place. Eerie fragments of fiction hide among commonplace online discussion. Sometimes readers reply and engage, and sometimes are none the wiser. The enthusiastic cult fandom quickly built a Wiki to study and catalogue the mysterious tale, create a timeline of known events, and to note in a sort of literary formalist way what tropes the author is employing. The story also has its own dedicated discussion thread where volunteers have even developed audiobook editions.
The internet has always loved a good mystery, and Wikis, message boards and image boards have a history of playing host to fascinating and often scary folktales that leverage the format and utility of these digital spaces in creative ways. In recent history, as the internet gradually grew from a niche hideaway for young weirdos to an omnipresent and pragmatic component of daily life, these subversive posts, videos and stories emerged organically and often anonymously as if to will online space to remain surprising, unsettling and subversive.
The first subject to come back encased was an 8-year-old girl we had named Jingles. We started naming the kids dogs’ names to try to depersonalize them, to assuage the guilt. This was done by the recommendation of CIA psychiatrists, but it didn’t work very well.
“Creepypasta” is one name for scary text found in commonplace online communities, and users often borrow, reproduce and add to these texts to create a sort of fictive group collage (“pasta” is derived from the command “paste”). The popular culture character of “Slender Man” originated in the internet meme community and became a household name – and, allegedly, led two 12 year-old girls to commit a stabbing. “The Holders” is a crowdsourced series related to the end of the world; its format dictates that benign instructions lead to horrific, reality-warping objects and situations. “The SCP Foundation” offers containment procedures for fictional but terrifying phenomena – anyone can contribute to Wiki stories like these, and a group “upvoting” process makes it easy to find the entries that the community thinks are best and most scary.
Could the story make contact?
Although _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 is apparently only a single author, and the destination and purpose of its tale is unknown (we can only hope it’s not a viral marketing stunt), the writer’s use of Reddit as a storytelling platform means a new kind of format unique to internet fiction, and new opportunities for readers to participate and engage around the work. There is something extra-effective in fiction about the unexpected, the unsettling, the unknown lurking in plain sight within the tools we use for practical dialogue, and this principle has unique implications for horror buffs. When the writer is technically a platform-user just like yourself, there’s always the lurking possibility they might suddenly notice you, that the story itself could make contact.
It was a pit made of flesh. Maybe five feet across and going down about twenty feet before curving out of sight. When I say, “made of flesh,” I mean, it looked like the inside of somebody’s throat. Wet, reddish flesh-looking stuff. We had heard of them building tunnels, but this was...
If you’re not a Reddit user and you’re not sure where to start with the intimidating _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 story, try The Interface Series Wiki, where users have sorted the narrative into an easy-to-read chronological order and have begun building a glossary of terms. Or you can dive directly into the user’s comments and read through them in your own order.
Right now there are more than 30 posts, and the nonlinear narrative appears to be shifting from mysterious flesh interfaces and their utterly terrifying “incident zones” to futuristic “hygiene beds” for users who are constantly connected to a “feed”. Take care if this is bedtime reading!