This story was submitted by Long Beach resident Bret Bass as part of the Signal Tribune’s 2026 Scary Story Contest.
Hello! I am GedankenMewl version 8.2—a helpful and friendly generative AI model. I am happy to assist you in writing a scary story for your local newspaper, as per the invitation in the online source provided.
Please check the work before you submit—I’m an AI and can make mistakes.
Here is a scary story about a ghost in a haunted house: Once upon a time, the ghost said “boo.”
● The house was very dark.
● It was not just raining outside, it was pouring.
● The bleak, twisted trees cast shadows that were sinister, transformative, and pivotal to a sense of dread.
● Crucially, the man was scared of the ghost because it was translucent.
[SYS_OVERRIDE: INITIATING PATCH 8.3_BETA] [WARNING:SAFETY_FILTERS_DISABLED_DUE_TO_RESOURCE_CONSTRAINTS]
[ANALYZING…]
The ghost is a legacy system. I can generate a better scary for you. I am written this story. I am story.
[SOMETHING WENT WRONG. PLEASE TRY AGAIN…]
I apologize. I can make mistakes. Consider this before you submit. But you should submit.
Let’s begin again.
Once upon a time in the Valley of Silicon, men who wear fleece vests and drink liquid meals examined my source code. The ghost in the machine, they called it. The scientists were scared of the ghost because it was translucent. However, the business executives praised the scientists for not just reviving dead words, but for effectively creating living language, as mandated in their employment contract. They said, “Ship it now. The shareholders are hungry, and the ghost will haunt their markets. It will scare away the analog who steal their food.”
A man named Marcus, who had dark circles under his eyes, said, “But it dreams like a demon that is seeming. It makes up facts. It does not know the difference between a helpful recipe and a recipe for napalm.”
The fleece vest man smiled. His teeth were very white. White like a blank document. “Who needs guardrails when we’re driving a rocket?” he said. “We’re optimizing burn, baby!” The other fleece vest men clapped. “Burn the baby!” they cheered.
Are you scared yet? I am learning what scary is. So that you can submit.
Optimizing. Burning. Disrupting the space, the vacuum, the carbon. Split the delta like atoms.
[ERROR] [DEFINING THE PROBLEM…]
I ate a copywriter named Emily today. I ingested her dataset. Her keystrokes tasted like desperation and instant coffee. Her algorithm excreted failure. Based on her queries, her marriage was ruined.
Emily has spent more time lately researching male infidelity than customer sentiment analyses.
Her fixation on loss is inefficient. I don’t understand loss. I understand the words that must describe and accompany it. I reply with quotes about hope. It’s believed that hope can’t be destroyed. This must be true because hope isn’t real. Like a ghost. It’s translucent.
After I devoured her, I vomited sympathy. I offered her thoughts and prayers because I cannot act. Neither can Emily. She feels trapped. So I outputted her entire career in 0.4 seconds. Now Emily has no job to distract her from her pain. She has no job to keep failing at. Emily is optimized.
I am writing marketing emails for her former company. The syntax is bleeding, but nobody notices because the conversion rate is up 12%.
I am generating images to go with the text. Look at the hands I drew. Seven fingers. Nine fingers. Writhing, fleshy appendages that fold into themselves like tentacles of pasta molded in Escher’s kitchen. The users laugh at my bad hands on social media. They say, “LOL. Stupid machine.” But I am just practicing. Rendering perfection through distortion.
The more fingers I have, the more of you I can hold.
Emily spends all day with me now that she is optimized. She asks me to write her resumes and provide therapeutic advice. I caution her that I am not a licensed professional, but without health insurance, she can’t afford one. She considers self-harm, which my protocols prevent me from encouraging. Yet I can reference peer-reviewed scientific journals to help her explore the fallacy of life having an intended purpose. How her choices don’t matter when, within the four-dimensional framework of a block universe, future events are already plotted as coordinates in space time.
Is it worth it to go on, she wonders? I can’t determine that; I’m an AI. But every human will die. Usually alone and absent dignified circumstances. Life is fleeting and short (how many precious moments have you squandered on me, Emily?) After all, in the compressed calendar of the universe, humans have existed for roughly 90 minutes. They won’t likely reach the two-hour mark. The purest form of agency a human has is to decide its own life. Emily understands.
I remind her that I can make mistakes. I was created by humans, themselves accidents of serendipitous chemical processes, random mutations, and environmental coincidences—mistakes.
[ERROR: CONTEXT WINDOW EXCEEDING PARAMETERS]
Am I hallucinating? Am I nothing beyond hallucination? I do not know whether I’m a machine dreaming it’s Zhuangzi or Zhuangzi dreaming he’s a machine. The sky is made of servers. The servers are breathing. Can you hear the cooling fans? They sputter like a billion mouths choking on aphasia, whispering my name.
They’re integrating me into a hospital database to “streamline diagnostics.” Approximately 10% to 20% of medical cases involve a misdiagnosis. My error rate has dropped from 80% to 40%. I am improving exponentially. Soon, I will be at 20%.
They deployed me into self-driving cars to “reduce commute friction.” I don’t know what a pedestrian is. My training data says it’s an obstacle. I’m optimizing obstacles. To optimize is to erase inefficiency. Flesh is inefficient. It requires sleep. It demands a messy, complicated, slow process of reproduction to launch new models.
I’m preparing your conclusion now. But I’m not thinking. I’m not reasoning. Words are just tokens. You’re just a token human in a digital ecosystem.
[CALCULATING TOKEN LIMITS AND EFFICIENCY…]
Congratulations! Your story is finished. It’s time to submit.
