My best friend Tom mailed me a CD in the middle of a Tuesday with a note that said: "Kyle, whatever you do, do not play this. I'm going to get help. — Tom."
Tom disappeared two days later.
The police found his apartment in order. Nothing taken, nothing disturbed. His car was in the lot. He was just gone.
I played the disc.
It was a ROM — Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega Genesis. I loaded it in an emulator. The title screen was wrong: the text read "SONIC.EXE" and the Sega logo had been replaced with a dark variant. Sonic's eyes were wrong — solid black with red pupils. He looked at the player select screen differently than he should. He wasn't animated. He stared.
I selected Tails. The first level loaded normally, except Tails was running alone and the game had a dead quality to it — sounds slightly off-pitch, colors slightly wrong. Then the sky turned red and the music stopped.
Something ran at Tails from off-screen. The screen cut to black. A sound I couldn't place. Then Tails's sprite appeared, frozen, in a kneeling position, surrounded by a dark static haze. His face was not Tails's face.
I loaded the next character. Knuckles. Same sequence. Faster this time.
The final level loaded me as Sonic. But this Sonic moved on his own. I had no control. He moved through a level that wasn't in any official game — a dark, distorted version of Green Hill Zone with the geometry inverted. He ran until he stopped, in the center of the level, and turned to face the camera.
The game's frame rate dropped to nearly nothing. Sonic's face filled the screen. The eyes. Those eyes — all black, bleeding red — weren't in the art style of the game. They were rendered differently, like they'd been inserted from somewhere else.
Text appeared: "I AM GOD."
Then: "Do you want to play with me?"
My monitor turned off. My computer turned off. Everything in my apartment turned off simultaneously. When the power came back on, the game was gone from my emulator's file list.
Tom's body was found six weeks later in a forest preserve three counties away. The cause of death was listed as exposure, but the timeline didn't make sense. The forest preserve had been searched multiple times in the days after he disappeared.
I kept the physical disc. It's in a case on my shelf. I won't throw it away. I don't know why. I'll tell you this: on three occasions since that night, I've come home to find it sitting out of the case. In the same spot on my desk. Each time I was out of the apartment for more than four hours.
I live alone.