Seven scary stories to tell by the light of your screen

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One of my favorite parts of Halloween is having an excuse to scare the pants off people. It’s the time of year for ghosts, for creeping dread, and peering into the void. And what could possibly be better for horror than the future?

Seven of our reporters imagined the spookiest possible outcomes on their beats — the horrors of the future. Turn the lights off, and dial up the brightness of your screen. Maybe you’ll see it, just out of the corner of your eye: the fear that’s always lurking. The possibility that the bright future we’re trying to create will go dreadfully, immensely wrong, with very human consequences. Read these stories alone in the dark... if you dare.

—Elizabeth Lopatto

Table of Contents

Andrew J. Hawkins

The translucent egg-shaped shuttle glided silently to the curb. A bright light flashed my face, causing my vision to blur and a second later a woman’s gentle voice said, “Welcome aboard, Andrew.”

The interior of the shuttle was Airbnb-sparse but inviting. I sat on the gray leather bench and pulled out my phone. There were several bottles of water next to a box of Kind bars and some succulents. Smooth jazz oozed from hidden speakers.

But the shuttle stayed stationary, and my phone was dead, a black rectangular void; the Company’s shuttles were essentially rolling Faraday cages: no wireless service allowed. They had to be for what came next.

The mood lighting suddenly shifted to a spastic, woozy display of neon pinks, blues, and greens as an advertisement for the latest energy drink consumed the shuttle’s interior. All trips via the Company’s shuttles this month were subsidized by the energy drink. That’s why they were so cheap. Next month would be underwritten by a dandruff shampoo. The month after that, the US Army.

The ad was way louder than it needed to be. The flashing, staccato lights were starting to make my eyes burn. I remember a time when you could skip after five seconds. I remember being able to opt out.

I remember being able to opt out

Eventually, the shuttle began to drive. It knew where I was going because it had all my metadata, including my search history. Over the course of the trip, I was bombarded with targeted ad after targeted ad. The shuttle’s AR windshield became a tapestry of wish-fulfillment: images of my face on a more sculpted body in an ad for a barre class, an image of me with a beautiful woman purring about a dating app. Did I know there was available real estate in this neighborhood that was within my price range? My phone was still bricked. I tried shutting my eyes, but infrared sensors picked up on that and the shuttle slowed to a crawl. These ads were mandatory viewing.

Opening my eyes again, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a hologram of my mother on the armrest. “Don’t forget to buy life insurance, darling,” she wailed, her face frozen in anguish. The shuttle was using a funeral home photo plucked from my cloud as a reference for the hologram; I could tell because she’d never in her life worn that candy-apple-pink blush the mortician applied. The algorithm was primed to look for an old photo, but of course, the funeral home photo counted as old, all these years later. I flinched as her tiny, translucent hand reached for mine. Was I dreaming, or was it getting colder? “Fifteen minutes saves you 15 percent,” she moaned.

My dead mother stayed with me until the end of the ride, imploring me to buy life insurance, Yankee candles, and a new air freshener called “Avocado Breeze.” Finally, the ride concluded, and she morphed back to her reference photo before vanishing. I felt cold and wanted to step into the sun, but the shuttle door remained closed and locked, trapping me inside. Three more ads in exchange for my freedom.

The techno music began to peak, building and building and building. They were cramming in as many images as possible. It became an unreadable blur, but the tempo kept ascending. I felt dizzy, nauseous, near death. In despair, I waited for the beat to drop. Finally, I implored it to, screaming at the flashing screens, begging for relief. But it never came.

Adi Robertson

One night, a woman checked her DMs and found a message listing her home address and threatening to murder her.

The frightened woman reported the threat and went to sleep. When she woke up, she expected the platform to say the message was protected free speech, as usual. But miraculously... the user had been suspended.

The internet had changed. Tech companies began reporting threats to police. They shut down neo-Nazi forums. They banned genocide-fomenting propaganda bots, causing fascist political parties to dissolve. The web started to feel almost safe.

A few weeks later, the woman picked up her phone to talk to a friend. But the chat app had no on-screen keyboard — just a list of bland pre-canned auto-replies. She tapped a selection, only to see a link appear below it, recommending a product she’d recently bought.

“You can log back on when you’ve calmed down!”

The woman swore in frustration and tried again… but her phone had locked up. “It sounds like you’re angry,” blinked an error message. “You can log back on when you’ve calmed down!” It offered to let her online if she bought a health monitoring bracelet and signed up for SoulCycle.

Desperate, the woman grabbed a pen and paper, intending to write a letter. But as she signed her name, she realized…

The internet companies were moderating the postal service, too.

Angela Chen

[Two women sit across from each other in a dark restaurant.]

Samantha: Okay, enough about me. Tell me about your date last night.

Carrie: It was pretty low-key. We watched Pitch Perfect 54 and got drinks afterward. But he seems really nice! Cute, works at a hedge fund, likes to ski—

Samantha: —okay, okay. But did you refer to GenetiCheck? Their prices are so low now, it’s like $3.99 a person for a report. Before I met Sean, I had a monthly subscription. I think it was like $19.99 and then unlimited reports. It really saved me. Remember when I was dating that guy who turned out to be likely to have a small dick?

Carrie: Oh yeah, Ryan. Was that his name? Moment of silence for Ryan.

[The two women pause.]

Carrie: Anyway, yeah. I already checked GenetiCheck, but he’s not in there. It makes me a little nervous. But what can you do?

Samantha: Actually! It’s a little more expensive, but GenetiCheck can give you a partial report now. Not as good as the real thing, but you don’t want to be dating blind.

You don’t want to be dating blind

Carrie: A partial report... from what?

Samantha: His parents? His cousins? I don’t know. But come on, even if this guy is a privacy freak, someone he knows is in GenetiCheck and they can get you some pretty detailed DNA info. Look, here, it’s $9.99. That’s nothing. That’s like two draughts of Soylent.

Carrie [VO]: I couldn’t help but wonder… should I let there be some mystery left in love? Or was I missing out on the best dating life by not looking him up?

Carrie: I don’t know, this feels a little weird. He didn’t choose this.

Samantha: But why isn’t he in GenetiCheck himself? What is he hiding? Sarah, I’ll give you the $9.99 if you want. It’s my duty. Maybe he has Huntington’s. Maybe… he has the divorce gene.

Carrie: Okay, you’re right.

Samantha: Good. Friends don’t let friends date in the dark.

James Vincent

Gather round, children, and I’ll tell you a story of long ago about a time when the world was a bright and living thing, suffused with the most terrifying emotion of all: hope.

In those early days, we thought the algos would save us. [Children boo nervously.] We called them “artificial intelligence” back then because we didn’t know better and it sounded pretty chill. We thought we might teach the machines to think better than we did. They would be fairer, smarter, and free of our human foibles. Some even thought we might come to know them as kind and loving gods. [Children laugh and perform the dance of the Eternal Loser.] Hush, children, hush.

And it worked! In its way. The algos helped us to spot diseases so that we might live longer and toil the more in the munitions factories and water mines. They helped us to identify criminal behavior so that dissidents and free-thinkers could be purged from society. [Children giggle and pretend to hunt one another like cop-drones.] All the while we were told: yea, this strange new brutality is but a teething problem, and the algos need only more data about us so they may construct the perfect world! And we fed them it, until they knew us all too well. Smh.

The algos need only more data about us so they may construct the perfect world!

But this was the crux of the problem, children: we thought the algos would do our work for us. That we would build them and then they would build a better world. Little did we know that by teaching them using data from our past, they learned only to repeat our mistakes. And by telling ourselves to trust their decisions, we stopped thinking on our own. We gave them more control and told ourselves: “They will know what’s best.” [Children make farting noises at the stupidity of generations past.]

They say there are still people in charge, somewhere, but I’m not so sure. I don’t trust the ones who read the news on the holos; they move too smoothly and their eyes look dead. But you trust me, don’t you, children? And you’ll do what you’re told, won’t you? Yes, you will. Because the algos are in charge now, and we... [coughs] I mean, they know what’s right for you all.

Bijan Stephen

The sun was setting over the restaurant on the outskirts of Davos, and the American president was sucking clean the head of a prawn. “Simply delicious,” he said after he’d taken a large swig of Coke from his frosty mug. “Where were we?”

The British prime minister cleared his throat. “What were you saying about… Luigi?” he asked the German chancellor, who was seated to his right.

“Waluigi. As I was saying: Here is a character who represents what we’re trying to achieve — an unsteady —” she began, but the American interrupted. “Mario Party’s trash. Get me the Chaos Emeralds,” the American said as he shoved another piece of seafood into his mouth. “Call Knuckles. Big the Cat. Get Sonic on the blower. We need those Emeralds.”

The Russian president, who was next to the American, stepped in. “Gentlemen,” he began, conspicuously excluding his German peer, “let’s not fight. A toast: to peace!” He raised his glass of vodka. Nobody joined him.

“Chaos. Emeralds. What’s the status on finding them?”

The British prime minister snorted. “What peace? It’s like you’re cosplaying Rick Sanchez!” He paused. “You know, from that show Rick and Morty?” Nobody answered. America: “Chaos. Emeralds. What’s the status on finding them?”

Germany: “You… You know they aren’t real, right? That none of this is?”

Russia: “Of course they are! The Emeralds are with Shenron, in China.”

The Chinese premier, who’d been silent until then, spoke up. “Shenron, who also hoards the Dragon Balls, lives in Japan,” he said through a translator, though he spoke perfect English. The Japanese president gave his Chinese counterpart a dirty look and then raised his glass. “To finding Shenron, who lives with his wife Sonic on the peak of Mt. Fuji.” The American president smiled because they were finally getting somewhere.

Rachel Becker

If anyone had known that the puppy was going to give little Jordan’s entire first grade class diarrhea, her parents would never have let her take the dog to school. But Jordan begged to bring her new pet to show-and-tell, and Jordan’s parents just couldn’t say no.

And if anyone had known that Jordan’s friend Sally would go home from school that day with diarrhea, Sally’s parents wouldn’t have volunteered to bring a dish for the neighborhood potluck. But even though the whole family got sick, they’d promised to bring their famous potato salad. And potato salad they delivered.

The diarrhea spread, and soon, everyone in the city became desperately sick. There was a run on toilet paper, lines for the latrines. A black market emerged in wet wipes and rehydration salts. Schools shut down, and the city government — the officials who were still standing, that is — put the town under quarantine. Because the terrible truth was that the bacteria that caused the diarrhea was resistant to every antibiotic the doctors tried against it, and there was nothing people could do except to stay hydrated and hope to survive.

Stay hydrated and hope to survive

Public health investigators traced the epidemic back to several puppy mills that had been overusing antibiotics to treat healthy dogs. And the dogs were long gone by the time investigators found the mills that were responsible. Too many antibiotics had created a hothouse of antibiotic-resistant bugs, and the dogs carried them to three towns... and counting.

Hysteria mounted. One family tried desperately to bleach themselves and their homes to keep away the contagion, blinding themselves in the process. Beloved pets were rounded up for extermination, even ones with no links to the contaminated puppy mills. But the disease kept spreading, including to the university campuses and pharmaceutical companies where scientists were testing new compounds as fast as they could, hoping to find something that would kill the puppy poop bacteria.

The government poured emergency funding into antibiotics research, even as the scientific workforce dwindled. The sick and dying couldn’t work, and those who had recovered were too busy trying to keep sick loved ones alive. By the time scientists discovered an antibiotic that could kill the deadly bug, it was too late: the entire supply chain for making, testing, and distributing antibiotics had been felled by the bug. There was finally a cure, but no one could take it.

Casey Newton

Dana woke up in the hospital and reached for her phone.

Her face had been bruised by the explosion, and she was worried that her phone wouldn’t recognize her. But after an extra half-second, her phone unlocked, and she navigated to the camera roll.

Dana exhaled in relief. The video she had taken before the explosion was still there. In it, you could clearly see the soldiers carrying an explosive device onto the stage before the rally. She had only noticed them because, as a volunteer working security, she had seen them slip in the back. They had convinced her that the device was for surveillance, to protect everyone there to see the candidate speak. But it seemed suspicious, and so she shot a short, furtive video of them walking with it backstage.

A few minutes later, her world went black.

From her phone, she opened Facebook and went to post a video. After the upload, a now-familiar message appeared on the screen: DETERMINING ACCURACY.

The Fake News Act of 2024 had required social networks to prevent the spread of false information. Anyone who attempted to violate the act could be subject to fines or prison. It was off to a rocky start — Facebook was using a new artificial intelligence tool to do most of the compliance, and the results could be unpredictable.

But Dana knew what she saw.

A moment later, a blinking red square appeared on the screen. “It appears that you are trying to share false news,” the message read. “This is in violation of Facebook’s terms of services and of federal law. Your posting privileges have been temporarily suspended while we investigate.”

Dana’s heart dropped. She searched for news of the bombing across social media using the hashtag that everyone seemed to be using. What she saw was unrecognizable.

Even the bad deepfakes were better than anything she had seen before

Every video she saw showed a different person carrying a bomb into the rally. Some showed the candidate herself carrying it in, in terrifying detail. Others showed long-dead historical figures and pop stars sneaking into the facility, their arms laden with explosives. One showed a beautifully animated Mickey Mouse as the culprit.

Dana switched to Twitter, where the president had recently sent out a message. “Incredible to see my opponents bombing themselves at their own rallies. Awful!”

A small cry now from Dana. Even the bad deepfakes were better than anything she had seen before.

The phone started to glitch, then made a loud and unfamiliar noise. A message appeared on the screen: “Dana Hassan, you are now a suspect in an open false news investigation. This phone is now evidence. Do not attempt to dispose of this phone in any way.”

A law enforcement officer, the message said, was en route to her location.