Possessed Computer?

Okay, I realize this sounds completely ridiculous. Go ahead and laugh, as most of my friends did, but if you had been there, you would have been as scared as I was.

As usual, I didn't have any plans for another Friday night since all of my friends live about fifty miles away or more, and I was sitting like a vegetable in front of the computer chatting on AIM and talking on the phone with my best friend, Matt. He's really into computer stuff, and he was all excited about this new program he had. It was a voice activated program that actually interacted and talked back to you. Something he created, having WAY too much time on his hands.

He entered a vocabulary and certain catch phrases into it, and the computer was able to make sentences out of the words as well. It was actually pretty cool because you could insert the phone into this cradle and the computer could directly talk to whoever was on the phone. Alright, so he wanted me to check it out and put the phone in the cradle so I could talk to it. As soon as I heard the voice, it scared me to death. I got this really really bad feeling. Okay, so it WAS a really creepy voice and maybe I'm just exaggerating but the thing seriously scared the bejeezus out of me. So I tried talking to it but I was really freaked out and told it it scared me. Then it said "Please Maggie, like me". Alright now whether or not the computer was programmed to say that, it definitely scared me. I started calling out to Matt to pick up the phone and suddenly I heard the raspy creepy voice say "NO you can't have her!". At this point, I hung up the phone. Matt called back a minute later to see why I hung up and I told him that his computer seriously scared me and I didn't think it was safe. He said he'd heard the voice too and it was a little weird for it to say that, but thought I was just being stupid. He really wanted me to look at the program again so he offered to have me talk to the other voice his computer has, the one we were calling "the female half". This voice didn't really scare me so much. It sounded creepy but I didn't get a bad feeling or anything. Then the voice said something a little weird, it said "my friend is creepy". At first I thought I was hearing things and I said "your friend is what?" "Creepy". Now I knew I was hearing it correctly but I was wondering why the hell a computer would be saying that. It was just weird. So I asked who it's friend was, and then it cut off and I heard this different voice saying "default voice" or something and after that I couldn't talk to the computer because it kept making these weird gibbering sounds. This is when Matt picked up the phone and I kept trying to convince him to turn off his computer because I had a bad feeling. Okay so I was scared at the time and I believe my exact words were "Turn off your computer before it eats you". This didn't exactly make him take me seriously. Meanwhile we called each other about ten times each, it seemed because the phones kept breaking off like every three to five minutes. That was a little weird too but we just blew it off.

I wouldn't leave him alone about turning off the computer and there was something nagging at the back of my mind. Something didn't quite seem right. Then I realized what it was.

This was our conversation exactly. "Matt, how did the computer know I was a female?" "what?" "When the computer said 'no you can't have her' how did it know I was a female?" At this point Matt was quiet and then just got freaked out. He said he had never programmed the computer to say anything like that and there way no way it could have known I was a girl. After this he immediately deleted the program while I was on the phone with him.

I'll admit this sounds pretty far-fetched and ridiculous. I wouldn't believe a word of it if I was reading this probably, and none of my friends did, but I'm writing it down anyways becuase I don't want this story to just be pushed aside and forgotten like Matt inevitably will. All I can say is I'm definitely never going near his computer.