Horror Stories

Unbranded Laptop

... was a bare desktop with three icons in the corner. The task bar was empty, and there was no Start menu button.

The wallpaper was black. Why would anyone do this to their desktop? Anyone could remove all the icons, but they had to be pretty skilled hackers to remove the Start Menu button. Of the three icons, one was a Games folder, one was a Videos folder, and the last was the DOS Command Prompt program. Maybe this was a kids' laptop?

Clicking on the Games folder confirmed my suspicions; a little girl must have owned this laptop. I felt some remorse for the poor girl because there was only one game in the folder. The program name was "princess.exe". I clicked on it just to see what the game was like. A fully animated title screen came up, with various generic fairytale princesses twirling across the screen, and then the logo flew down with a bunch of sparkly doves holding it. The game was called "Princess Creator: Make yourself Beautiful!"

Ah, so it must have been one of those low budget "put .png of various clothing items onto a photo of yourself" games. I was right, as the menu popped up I was given the option to "Dress up" or to "View pretty pictures". I wanted to see what the girl looked like, so I clicked on the second option. She had to have been no more than five, and on top of that she looked very cute. She was of either Mexican or Spanish origin. She wore a somewhat tattered white dress with small red frills around the sleeves and collar. It had small roses on it. I smiled, as she looked like she had a lot of fun putting a virtual tiara on her head. However, browsing through the photos, about halfway through, there were pictures of a room with nothing else but a bed inside. She must've been dodging the camera for the hell of it, I guess.

After that I felt I'd seen enough with that program, and might as well go see the other two files on the laptop. I decided to go into the Command Prompt to see if I could locate any other files on the hard drive. I simply got a ":\>_" line with no drive letter. Okay, this is really strange, I thought. I typed into the command box "start C:\" to see if I could open the directory I wanted to explore. I pressed enter, and DOS simply replied " 'start' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." After a few seconds, the program crashed, bringing me back to the desktop.

So I guess the last thing to look at is the videos. I double clicked the folder... and the screen faded to black. I thought it had crashed, but I noticed that there was a small "_" flashing in the top left corner.

Suddenly, the text "start :\>videos\001.wmv" flashed briefly, then a video appeared in full screen. It was the girl again. This time, she was smiling, bouncing slightly in excitement. Her happiness made my heart feel warm. My guess was that she must've been recording herself play the dress up game with the webcam. At first she was simply moving her finger across the track pad, clicking, then giggling excitedly for a bit. She must've been laughing at the things she put on herself in the game.

After about two minutes or so, the screen would cut to black for a fraction of a second and then return to the girl playing the game. This time, however, she was dressed differently, in a simple pink t-shirt with the words "Go Go Girl!" stitched in glitter. I guessed the game was recording her every time she started it, without her knowing. That made me sort of uneasy - I mean, why would anyone program a game to do that? Whatever, I guessed it was going to be the same sort of thing over and over with the video, so I might as well turn off the computer. I reached over and pressed the power button, and...

... It didn't shut off this time. The video continued to play, and I saw the girl this time was wearing an orange tank top with nothing on it. She was smiling and giggling as usual, and I thought maybe I could turn off the computer after the video is done. It couldn't be that long. The video seemed to drag on, with more cuts of her playing the game in a different outfit, and I started to doze off. However, after the next cut in the video...