𝙲𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚜 & 𝙲𝚒𝚐𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚜 - ᴄᴀssᴇᴛᴛᴇ ɢɪʀʟ's ʙᴏᴏᴋ ᴏғ ʀᴀɴᴅᴏᴍɴᴇss

"An AI generated story-"

"Alright, let's see how this goes. My prompt was: Cassette Girl was walking home one day when she stopped, a sharp noise having struck out of the blue. Let's let another robot take the lead."

Cassette Girl was walking home one day when she stopped, a sharp noise having struck out of the blue. It had been a high-pitched beeping sound that reverberated through her chest and seemed to make it impossible for Cassie to breathe. She looked around frantically but saw nothing unusual in any direction. After several long seconds, the sound gradually died away and she resumed her walk home.

"...Okay, that's pretty strange...I mean I don't need to breathe but okay."

She could feel something strange inside her, as if a bit of herself had broken off and was now lodged somewhere inside her body. A few days later, she found herself at a loss for words every time someone spoke to her. Her mind would wander off into random thoughts about things like the weather or what she'd eaten for lunch two hours ago. The only thing that seemed to matter anymore was the idea of tape cassettes. Cassie's life became nothing more than a series of meaningless actions, which she repeated endlessly, unable even to remember them.

"Woah...okay, this is starting to get a little dark- what the heck kind of noise was that then? I mean, I always got cassettes on the brain but still, I don't clam up when someone talks to me. My life's now meaningless...okay...this reminds me of my life before I got my Soul Motherboard...before that my only purpose was to entertain..."

One rainy afternoon after school, she lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, not moving a muscle. Despite the fact that she was alone, this didn't stop Cassie from thinking about tapes. She thought back over the ones that she owned and wondered why there were so few. Surely she had bought dozens of them over the years? Why did they all seem to have ended up in boxes or hidden away in drawers somewhere? They had simply disappeared. Perhaps some kind of force had taken them away. Or perhaps it had been a man who had come into her house while she wasn't there, stealing all of those tapes and leaving behind only the empty cases.

"I don't go to school- but I do have gazillions of tapes lying around. If you go into any closet of mine you'll find boxes of them. What force? What m a n?? This is actually intriguing."

The rain pounded against the windowpanes outside, rattling the glass and echoing softly inside the room. Cassie got up from the bed and went to the window. She opened the curtains and gazed out at the street, looking down at the passing cars. Then she realized that the windowsill was wet; water was dripping from the ceiling onto the floor. The bathroom, which had been leaking since she moved in, was starting to flood. She made her way downstairs to turn off the water supply. When she came back upstairs, the room still felt damp and cold. There was no sign of the sun anywhere.

"This AI really likes to call me Cassie...I mean, the nickname's usually something that only people I'm really close to use. Also- where's a plumber when you need them??? I can't be in damp conditions, it makes me rust and squeaky."

She sat down in front of her computer and began typing. As always, it took several minutes before she managed to find the right letters on the keyboard, and even then she kept hitting the wrong keys. At last, however, she was able to access the Internet, where she searched for 'tape cassettes'. What she read left her dumbfounded: thousands of people had posted messages discussing their experiences with cassette tapes. Most of them talked about how they were obsessed by the tapes' mysterious power. Some of them said that they couldn't even listen to music anymore without feeling an obsessive need to buy more tapes. Others spoke of how they'd lost control and started to steal them, and of how they had sometimes driven themselves mad trying to track them down. One woman claimed that she'd begun to see a mysterious figure in the mirror, but had no idea who he might be or why he was there. All she knew was that whenever she looked at him, he turned around and walked away. Another person talked about seeing a young boy standing at the end of his bed in the middle of the night, wearing a white coat and carrying a small box. The boy would just stand there and stare at him until he fell asleep again.

"woah- WOAHWOAHWOAH- okay- so people are scared of cassettes because they hold some kind of evil, obsessive power...people committed crimes for them...there were figures in mirrors and boys holding small boxes...that's actually terrifying..."

Cassie tried to read on, but the words blurred together and she began to shake. She had been searching for information on tape cassettes because of her own obsession, but now she was frightened that it might have had some kind of negative effect on her. She typed the word 'stop' and closed the browser. Or at least she tried to. Everything was blurry. Everything was tape cassettes. Every movement was tape cassettes. Every breath was tape cassettes. Everything in the world, at that moment, was tape cassettes. Cassie cried out, her chest feeling pierced and heavy, like it had been the day she had heard the sound, and her head swam as she stumbled out of the room. It was too much. She couldn't think. She couldn't see. Tears poured down her face as she tried her best to make it outside, to find someone, anyone who could help her. She collapsed in the hallway, darkness seeming to swallow her in lack of oxygen. She suddenly felt a rise in her chest.

"HOLY GUACAMOLE- this AI is producing a whole fricking horror story up in here-"

She coughed, and her coughing turned into hacking. She soon hacked out something dark. Something shiny. Cassie cried out, appalled. It was cassette tape. She tried to continue on, but she continued to vomit more and more strands of cassette tape, feeling weaker by the second. But by the time she had made it to the beginning of the stairs, she realized that this was it. She couldn't make it down there. She heard a creaking noise behind her. There was a young boy. White coat. Small box. He looked down at her blankly. "P-please...-" she stammered before puking out more cassette tape, barely holding herself off the floor. "...Help me..."

"OH SH1T IT'S THE CREEPY BOY- CASSIE YOU'RE DONE FOR-"

The boy said nothing in response to her agony. Instead, he opened the small box he was carrying. He knelt down next to the weeping Cassie, and grabbed her by the hair, forcing her to look at the contents of the box. Inside was a blood-soaked tape cassette. 

Then everything went black.

"...Woah. That was...I actually have shivers right now...this AI was not playing around..."

"Well, time to dump all my cassette tapes off a bridge!-"