You've probably heard about the pop-up. You might have even seen it.
It starts as a small window in the corner of your browser — the kind of thing you'd close without looking at. But when you move your cursor to the X, the window repositions itself. Not fast, not dramatically. It just moves, the way something moves when it's aware of you.
The window contains a single question: Do you like the red room?
There's no source code that accounts for it. Several web developers have examined infected machines and traced the pop-up back to nothing — no script, no executable, no embedded iframe. The window is simply there, and then it keeps being there. Reboots don't remove it. Reinstalling the browser doesn't remove it. It persists across operating systems, which shouldn't be possible and which none of the developers I've spoken to have been able to explain.
The question changes eventually. Not the words — those stay the same. The voice changes. The first few times you see it, you process it as text. At some point, without any audio component that can be detected or recorded, you begin to hear it. A voice, gentle and without inflection, asking the same question on a loop.
Do you like the red room?
The red room itself is not something anyone has described coherently who has seen what comes after the pop-up. The accounts I've collected — and I've collected eleven of them over the past eight years — describe a door, and a room behind the door, and walls. They all describe the walls. Every account uses different words to convey the same thing: the color is wrong. Not the red of paint or blood or brick. A red without analogue in the visible spectrum, which is a contradiction I recognize but cannot resolve, because eleven people have independently reached for that same impossible description.
Nine of the eleven people I contacted no longer respond to messages.
The other two gave me the same piece of information without prompting, in separate conversations, neither knowing about the other. When they had the pop-up — before they understood what it was, in the days when it was just an irritating browser anomaly — they both began redecorating their rooms. New paint. They both chose the same color. Neither of them could explain why. One of them described standing in the paint aisle at a hardware store, staring at the swatches, feeling certain that none of them were quite right, but choosing the closest one anyway.
You want to get it right, she told me. You don't know why, but the color matters so much. You need it to be right.
The paint she chose was Benjamin Moore Caliente. A deep, saturated red. Her whole room, ceiling to floor.
She said it still didn't look right.
She said she's been looking at paint swatches again.
If a pop-up appears in the corner of your browser with a question about a red room — close the browser. Don't move your cursor toward the X. Close the whole browser, the way you close your eyes when something appears in the dark that you're not sure you want to see.
Once it knows you've read the question, it's already too late. But there's no reason to read it a second time.