Previously: “Hurricane Season.”
This week, a story that ticks a lot of boxes for me: The creepypasta “Future Tech.” Written by Creepypasta Wiki user Bucket28 and originally posted in October of 2024 — just in time for Halloween season that year — it makes use of many of my favorite tropes, subgenres, and storytelling devices… on top of just, y’know, being timely and relevant. I’ve said it once and I’ll almost certainly say it again: Good genre storytelling is always a comment on or reaction to its times, and, well…
…You probably get where I’m going with this one.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
With a mysteriously-cancelled television program at its core and a structure that carefully drops crucial and unsettling pieces of information when you least expect it to, “Future Tech” combines a lost episode story with a technology-gone-wrong cautionary tale; there’s even a touch of found footage here, in that the inciting incident for our protagonist is them finding the footage in question. Add to that a couple of nice little auxiliary tidbits which, although not strictly necessary, lend a touch of realism to it, and—that’s certainly a winning combination for me.
This tale would be right at home in a season of Black Mirror — particularly one of the earlier seasons, when it was a little closer to its original concept of examining the increasingly troubling ways in which technology has become inextricably intertwined with our everyday lives.
Find a brief excerpt of “Future Tech” below, and check out the full story over at the Creepypasta Wiki.
***
I don’t know about you, but as you might be able to guess, I’ve always been a sucker for any suggestion of the supernatural or extraordinary. As a kid I’d pour over Guinness World Record books until they fell apart at the spines, and I’d watch Ghost Adventures like an addict, believing every minute of it. It’s really interesting to think about what could possibly exist at the edge of our understanding, even if it means watching hours of Zak Bagans grasping at straws with a blinking music box. It’s this fascination that led me to the discovery that I’ll be sharing here shortly.
For context, these days I’m studying film editing at community college. It can be grueling sometimes, but I really enjoy it nonetheless. Last spring, I had an assignment to take some raw TV footage and cut it down into a smooth 15-minute runtime. All the footage comes from donations, so a lot of this stuff is old, mostly consisting of sitcom outtakes and the like. For my project, I started by digging through a big bin of VHS tapes; they take some time to transfer to mp4s, largely thanks to the school’s old tape player always breaking down, but I wanted to find something unique.
After picking through duds for about half an hour, I saw a tape near the bottom that caught my eye.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photo via MIH83/Pixabay]
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