Beware The Headlights

Indiana's roads get pretty spooky mid-Winter. Sometimes all you can really make out behind you is the headlights...

Short horror and science fiction stories, narrated by the author. If you'd like to see more, consider subscribing to my Substack at areldridge.substack.com.

Transcript

The Coke machine glow of the laptop’s bathes his face in pallid light. Tom scrunches up his eyes as he peers at the screen. He pecks at the keyboard with his index fingers, the way he learnt to do back in Second Grade and never unlearned. He has found a new toy to meddle with on the internet: Stranger.io.

It’s an AI picture generator. The name seems apropos, mimicking the fuzzy and wholly impressionistic style of the artwork it produces. His girlfriend Sally is on a girl’s night out and says she’ll be out late so he has been playing around with it for the last twenty minutes or, so trying to make brilliant sunset hues by using just the right words. So far, he’s had little success in making anything more than some pleasant, if jejune, facsimiles of a third year college oil painter.

It occurs to him that English, possibly language in general, is singularly unsuited to these kinds of fine-tuning shifts. How would he describe in words, for example, the difference between hex code #EAC21B and it’s ever so slightly more incandescent brother #F1C512? He could bang away on this keyboard for 100 hours and never convey the precise dimensions of what he is looking for.

Tom lets out a little grunt of displeasure as yet another wannabe sunset renders up on his screen. No, this isn’t communication. It isn’t even art in the real sense. Merely an analogue system flailing pointlessly at a digital one, without the proper recourse to do so effectively.

He right clicks and saves the newest edition to the desktop folder where he has futilely saved all the other pictures. As he is about to click the save button though, he pauses. A filename had come up in the save menu. It is not one he has created himself. Nor, he notices with fascination, is it an image name based on the keywords that he had just typed. The name of the file is AmalfiSunset.png.

Well, that is wild. I mean, creating a fully rendered image is one thing but to name it of its own accord? To conjecture as to where it might be made? That is something wholly unique. Tom hits refresh, taking him back to the Stranger.io interface menu.

He tries again with something a little different to see if the AI can replicate the feat. The words he types in are “dog pees on fire hydrant.”

The image comes in, blurry and indistinct as the style should be.

The picture renders a scruffy little faux-Manet doodle with less precision. Indeed, it looks like a schnauzer opening up on a fire hydrant. The owner is there too, though his face is obscured, the edges of the image seem to be stretched in a weird external vignette. The fire hydrant is blue which is pretty weird but, hey. He right clicks and saves the image. The title of the image says:

TryingToGetYourAttention.png

He laughs out loud at that one. The Schnauzer looks sheepish, as though he doesn’t really want to pee on the fire hydrant. Whose attention could he be trying to get? And where are these names coming from?

Tom decides he’ll try an experiment. Full reign to the AI system.

“Whatever you want” he types into the search box.

The picture comes back almost instantly.

It is a massive dark shape, formless at the sides and swathed in black. Tom notices the closer to the middle it gets, the more defined the shapes became. It has two huge arms with claws attached. It could be almost be a bear, but the upper torso is too top heavy: a hulking umbra. It looks as though the arms go up to the top of the body. Two red eyes gleam out from where the head should be. One even has some light flare coming off it, as if it were projecting its own light.

The title of the image was ‘SaturnDevoursHisYoung.png’

“Hmm,” he says out loud. Stranger.io apparently has a taste for the macabre.

Something about this is beginning to make him feel uneasy, as though he is coaxing something dangerous out of a box. The word ‘summoning’ comes to mind but he mentally bats it away like a fly.

He types: “show me more”

He sees a dark street, lit only by a single street lamp. The lamplight is showing up a dark viscous fluid running through the street and in the impressionistic style of the program, he can just make out the tiniest hind of red. Is it blood? Is the AI showing him a street filled with blood?

Hesitantly, he reaches out, right clicks. The save box comes up and he looks down at the words displayed beneath:

‘PleaseStop.png’

Tom inhales breath quickly. This is fucked up. This is some programmer’s idea of a twisted joke. Ok, he thinks, ok, buddy, I’ll play along. See where this goes.

“Why?” he types into the search bar.

A slightly longer pause this time. Then a long shot of the creature. It is the same creature too, some hulking abominable snowman thing. This time it’s on the street. Tom can see its knuckles dragging through the blood. God, its arms are so long.

‘YouAreNotSafeInYourHouse.png.’ Of course.

He looks a little closer at the street. Is that? Lambent St.?

No. No, it can’t be, that’s silly.

“Where should I go?”

This time a body on the pavement. The lines are becoming more defined now, less Manet and more Caravaggio. Arcs of darkness cut across the picture, but the face is framed beautifully in light in the centre. It is the head of a read headed man, split in two parts from the jaw, the eyes rolled up into it’s head, the jawbone itself removed, trailing gore and sinews. It looks as though someone has twisted the head in half, like the lid of a jar and left it there. The most disturbing thing is the teeth on the pavement. Something about those brilliant white teeth, on the dark cement, their twins twisted and thrown away just to the side horrifies him.

He thinks it is time to stop playing this game.

But he has to read the message first.

LeaveTheHouseNow.png’

And he wants to go. He wants to shut this down and get out of the house. Maybe go to the bar. He doesn’t actually think anything is coming. It just doesn’t feel right. But his fingers are drawn to that button. With just the slightest tremble he types. “I’m going.”

The next image that comes up is a house. It is his house. The facade of it. And something is outside it.

Trembling, he clicks the file name.

‘TooLate.png.’