ZALGO’S CODE
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ZALGO’S CODE
Micah’s apartment doubled as his studio—clustered with a quality microphone, soundproof panels, and faint glow of audio software. He toiled as a voice actor, his gift honing podcasts, narration, indie game promos. He prided himself on control: perfect pitch, polished tone, zero noise. Until one October night, the static betrayed him.
It began subtly. During playback of a horror narration, he noticed an extra breath—scraping, distant. He re-ran every take. Each one ended with the same quiet rasp, as if someone whispered behind the microphone.
He shrugged it off as noise bleed. But the next day, the sound showed up in his livestream—a brief warble when he said anything with a vowel. He scrubbed the track. It returned.
One night, Micah dozed after editing. His DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) still ran. Hours later, he woke to his own voice—softer, disembodied—whispering through the speakers:
“Micah… Micah…”
He snapped awake. Heart racing, he yanked cables, shut power. But in that silence… the voice continued. Underneath. One layer of static behind another:
“Zʌʃɣo…”
He whispered back.
“Is that you?”
He realized, then, it sounded exactly like him. Not as a performance. But as if he were split—echoed through a wound in sound.
Micah deleted all project files. He bought new cables, replaced gear. But every mic he touched carried the echo. One evening, he recorded an innocuous greeting for a friend—“Hey, Chloe”—yet playback revealed an extra word, buried behind his grin:
“…Zalgo.”
Chills snaked up his spine.
Coming apart, he spent nights staring at his mixer’s meter: the levels jumping despite no signal. Every breath echoed as a syllable he never spoke. The bar on the waveforms undulated, pulsing like a heartbeat.
He began dreaming of code—lines of indecipherable script crawling across screens, forming sigils that burned into the edges of his mind. In his dreams, something watched: tall, faceless, eyes like red static. It reached into the code… into him.
He woke with scratches on his knuckles and damp stains where he lay. His pillow had been shredded.
Micah’s desperation led him to Ava, an audio engineer friend. They spent two nights scanning the files for patterns. Every file showed the same: faint, shifting glyphs hidden behind speech. When reversed, the whispers formed broken syllables in an ancient necrolanguage. The name Zalgo rang clear thirty-nine times. Then… something else.
Something that wanted out.
Their final session peaked in discovery: occasional snippets of his recorded voice appeared in others’ files—podcasts, prank lines, interviews—like a virus. Ava’s eyes widened: “He’s infecting the network. You.”
That night, the power cut out. Micah’s monitors flickered into red. He dropped his phone. It beeped: a message in an unfamiliar app, blank except for a sound file. He tapped it.
Instant playback: his own voice, whispering from the void:
“I’m here. I speak through you. I contort your mind. I gather breath. Zalgo wants voice.”
The room chilled. Ava screamed.
Micah grabbed his phone. In the reflection of the black screens, he saw, behind him, a tall silhouette. Not human. Its head blurred, features elongated. And two red dots blinking from the darkness.
Micah turned. Nothing. But in his ear, his own voice hissed:
“Behind you…”
He fled into the night with only his phone and a flashlight, trying to leave the apartment behind. In the lobby, the elevator opened and closed on its own. Hallway lights buzzed. He heard footsteps—but no one was there. Every ambient hum hissed with syllables.
When he finally dropped into the street, he stumbled, tripping over a shattered spray can. It hissed like static. The city whispered around him, voices gathering at night, feeding through every device—TVs, car radios, phone speakers.
He realized in horror: every microphone in the city was infected. Every speaker an open wound. Zalgo was coming through all of it.
Micah drove until 3 AM, recordings left running everywhere—to trap the voice, or lure it back. In exhaustion, he collapsed at a 24‑hour gas station. On a whim, he plugged in his headphones left in his pocket and tapped record on his phone.
His voice lulled as he drifted off:
“Please… leave me alone…”
What played back circled him back:
“No. I’m not in you. I am you. Speak. Let me out.”
He woke in terror, arm twitching, phone still recording. He fumbled for his headphones to stop it.
But he couldn’t.
Micah vanished that night. His car was found abandoned in a parking lot three blocks away. The phone was inside, battery dead. The only file recovered was his last recording: 47 seconds of silence… followed by exactly one whisper.
“Zalgo…”
Since then, small towns have reported modems spitting static at night. Podcasts where hosts’ voices warp into broken syllables they never spoke. Gaming streams where, during loading screens, faint chanting echoes:
“Ź̸̢͉̹Ä͍̦́L̸̯̮̔G̦̺ͣO̱̿…”
No one knows how far the infection’s spread. Some laugh it off as audio glitches. Others whisper frantic legends across shadowed forums:
“If you hear your own voice chanting something you never said… unplug.”
If you're reading this… stop. Mute your mic. Disconnect your stream. Don’t speak.
Because Zalgo doesn’t just corrupt your voice.
He uses your voice.
And once that voice is heard…
He’s already inside.
The End
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