Scary Reddit Stories

The End Of The World Will Be Here In Less Than A Month

I found a strange signal the other day. I work as a system administrator at a telecom company in middle-of-nowhere Utah. It was like any other day when I stumbled on the signal. The usual output cluttered up my terminal screen, but this time the output was a little different.

As a system administrator I had a lot of free time at my job. Determined to not lose my mind to the boredom, I decided to take up hobby projects and teach myself scripting on the side. Ironically, the scripting ended up automating most of my job. Now I found myself with even more free time.

So I started work on my biggest project yet. I won't bore you with all the technical details, but it basically gathered replies from various ip-addresses and checked their information such as the estimated origin's geographical location and other various details. I don't know what I was expecting to find. Nothing, I suppose. I was just bored and wanted to test my scripting skills on some pointless project.

Whatever I expected, it was nothing like what I found. The output indicated a signal was coming from the southwest pacific ocean. I checked google maps, but there was nothing there. The supposed origin of the signal was just floating around the ocean.

That's interesting.

I decided to try and ping the ip. A few responses came back and then nothing. The replies stopped coming like the signal had detected me somehow and was reacting. Maybe I was overthinking it.

Then the signal came back, but it was extremely irregular. The response time varied drastically with with each response. At first it seemed like nothing, but then I noticed that there was a pattern repeating.

My analytical brain turned over the pattern for days. The patterns changed each time by a few digits due to latency, but by using the most repeated sequences in the pattern I determined that the correct series of numbers was as follows:

217, 215, 201, 214, 132, 216, 211, 210, 203, 197, 132, 212, 197, 215, 215, 132,  216, 214, 201, 210, 199, 204

I eventually gave up trying to parse the numbers and out of desperation or boredom I tried to remote in to the address. I got back the following in response:

TONGA BASE

user :

The screen prompted me for a username, but I didn't have the slightest clue what it could be. I tried all the typical ones. 'user', 'admin' and 'test'' were all invalid. My usual guesses out of the way, I tried googling  'Tonga Base.' Which turned up nothing useful.

Eventually I found a hit, 'Tonga Pacific Ocean'.The Tonga Trench was apparently at the bottom of the southwest Pacific. Exactly the lead I was looking for. I tried the user 'Tonga', and voila,There was a new prompt, this time for a password. With this revelation, the numbers in the pattern took on a new meaning for me. If you've spent anytime with ASCII you'd recognize that if you shift all the numbers down by one hundred and then convert the numbers as ASCII code to text you'd get :

user tonga pass trench

Trying trench for the password got me past the prompt and into the system. A slew of directories and files lay out before me. The office was emptying out and I was working way later than usual, but I didn't even care. I had to at least check out this system after all that work it took getting into it.

Many of the folders were completely locked for me, but what I could open was unnerving. I felt like I was looking at something I shouldn't be so I got out of my chair and closed the door to my office. When I sat back down I opened the first of a series of log files.

The log detailed a series of operations apparently being carried out on some sort of research station at the bottom of the Pacific. Leaks were patched. Samples were gathered and studied. All of this was super fascinating to me so I moved on to the next log. And then another one. Hours passed and the office was completely abandoned as I pored over weeks of activities performed by these scientists.

I was just about to wrap it up for the night when there was an anomaly. The log date read 24/06/2018. This was the end of the logs, but that was nearly a month ago. Why would they stop writing these meticulous logs?

My answer not too far into this last log. There was evidently some sort of sample brought back from an expedition that interrupted regular operations. Man power from all over the facility was directed towards the study of the new deep sea relic. Some time after the research staff were redirected, there was a similar redirection of security personnel to the area and a site wide alarm was thrown.

What could this sample be that was causing all this chaos?

Whatever it was, it was causing some serious damage. Leaks and breaches were reported by the system all across the facility. The damage was appearing even in places away from the samples location. Flood barriers were deployed to try and prevent the complete loss of the facility, but it was no use.

The last few traces in the log file indicate that nearly all of the facility had been flooded. Cross referencing the station's definition files with the stations lost in the damage indicated that only a few stations remained in the communication block.

Searching for the communication logs I found the subroutine that was responding to me earlier. It had been manually started only a few days ago.

I shuddered as I thought about some poor soul still living down there in the darkness waiting to die. There was something else peculiar in the communication log folder. A single text file named "lastwords.txt".

I'll just leave the contents here below for you to interpret, and then go home to be with my family while there's still time. I just felt like I had a duty to my fellow man to let as many of you know as I could. Good luck to you all.

This is the last testament of Dr. Will Shepherd. Naval Excavation Team #1734 discovered a foreign device of unknown origin buried 7 kilometers beneath the sea floor. It had previously been undetectable by any of sensors on site, but when we brought it back to our facility it began to emit some sort of signal we couldn't understand. There aren't words to describe the events that followed. Extremely hostile anthropomorphic creatures materialized all across the facility and the sea floor. They destroyed the facility and consumed all other personnel. Somehow I remained undetected within our communication relay room, and the creatures have left facility. I pray that they have returned from whatever they came, but the instruments indicate that the device's signal is still active. I fear that they may still be out there searching for more of us to destroy. By my estimates it will take no longer than a month for them to make landfall in North America. Conventional weapons have no effect on them.

This is my last and only log. I hope something in here reaches the outside and that you have more time to prepare than we did.