The Listener

**Just a note...I've been a busy girl, it's been a busy year, and lots has changed in the world, but it's all stayed the same really, hasn't it? I haven't forgot about you, fellow Steemians, I've just been, well busy. As a a hive of bees. Lately, I go to sleep with the sound of a reader telling me a creepy story or two, mainly because it keeps my mind quiet. If I don't have anything on I think about the next project I have to edit, the next project I need to write, and how much work I have to do before I can do a project of my own. Then there's the other things, the daily things that grind us all down, the bills, the inevitable fact that we're going to have to move. Sometimes, I really do want to just get off of the world.

But, then things pop into my head that bug me all day until I write them down, and I'm right back to it. So what do I listen to in the night, that keeps my brain focused on a hushed story, and out of the "I'm a grown up" danger zone? Creepypasta over on YouTube, of course! I told you, I'm a horror kind of girl. It inspired an idea last night, I'll try to right down the jist of it here, shall I?

**No, I can't remember the code to make things bold anymore, and no, I'm not going to bother with it for now, right now, I just want to get the story down. Also, my picture was created with Canva...

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The Listener by Smuggly Sparrow

I scrolled through the pages carefully, looking for that one story that was just right. Not so long that the sun would be rising when it finished, and not so short that it would be over before I even fell asleep. Yes, listening to creepypasta is the only way I can get to sleep now. Like a baby that needs a music box to soothe it to sleep, I now have to listen to what amounts to an old fashioned, but purely modern and sometimes very scary radio program to soothe my brain into sleep.

I'm weird like that. But then, so are 175,000 others. Plus the others that don't subscribe, or the ones that follow another channel. I mainly focus on three channels, but one in particular has seen an increase in followers, so many, I'm in awe every time I look every Wednesday and Friday. He releases new videos on those days, and his numbers are climbing dramatically. Soon, he'll have followers from every nation in the world.

That's not the scary part, though. The part that's scary is what happened last night. That sex monkey reading horror stories to us, for that is how he reads to us, like he's seducing every single one of us with his voice, might have just caused the very end of the world as we know it.

We've all become dependent on listening to him as he reads us into our slumbers, we've all become addicted to that voice. That in itself is not so bad. The bad part is that somebody else figured out that at a certain time on certain days, over 500,000 people across the globe stop whatever it is they're doing and listen. To him.

Whether it's the afternoon jog in Manhattan, the bedtime story of a distracted writer in Lisbon, or the wakeup program of a nurse in Sydney, we all get our bi-weekly doses of that deliciously creepy voice AT THE VERY SAME TIME. And somebody used that against us.

At exactly 9 pm, local time last night, I clicked the play button for a story about a little boy who was lost, only to come back out of cave that he never went into. As did 499,999 other people. Give or take a few.

The problem wasn't that we overloaded the system and shut down the servers, thereby slowing down traffic, no that wasn't the problem at all. The problem was that someone managed to add a little bit of data to that story, an audio file of some kind that infiltrated the brains of the listeners, and made every single one of us stand stock still for exactly ten minutes. This would have been alright, but there were listeners on trains, some driving cars, some walking across busy streets, while others were performing surgery or drilling teeth.

Then the real nightmare started because at 5 minutes and one second the file changed, a noise too low to hear, but our brains heard it, and interpreted it. Our brains were reprogrammed, and we became the army of the unknown signal. Except for me. I have a plate in my skull from an accident as a child. A metal plate that the sound just pinged off of.

I'm now hiding in my home, hoping that Friday's broadcast will contain a different signal. One that stops the murderous rage that has filled the legion of fans that listened last night. They won't stop killing otherwise. I've seen it in their eyes. And for a moment last night, the signal had me, just before it let me go. The people are still in there, they just can't come out to play as normal people anymore. They just keep reenacting the stories they've heard. Especially that one about the killer clown. I hope they don't make it to the other stories, not before we can contain them.

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