Speaker 1: Calorogu Shark Media, Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories.
This episode is titled night Watch Part three, System Failure.
Speaker 2: You don't realize how much you rely on patterns until
they start changing on you. Like the pattern of walking
hospital corridors at night three doors, swipe your badge, turn
right at radiology upservice elevator B to monitoring simple safe
until tonight, when my badge took me to the wrong floor,
when radiology was on the left, when elevator B opened
into spaces that shouldn't exist. They're changing the hospital around me,
or maybe they're changing me. My name is Marcus Chen.
This is my third report. If you're hearing this, the
pattern reconnaissance software I wrote has detected my death perfect death,
which means everything I'm about to tell you is true.
It's been sixteen hours since my meeting with Dr Reeves,
sixteen hours since I learned what Project Perfect Patient really means.
Sixteen hours of watching the world reshape itself around that knowledge.
The meeting wasn't in his office, of course not. It
was in the old medical records room sub basement level,
the kind of place where fluorescent lights flicker no matter
how many times they're replaced. Remarkable pattern recognition abilities, he said,
reviewing something on his tablet, not looking at me. Not yet.
We saw it first with Emily's case, the way you
almost spotted the calibration before it was complete. Most family
members just accept the perfect readings. My hands tightened on
the encrypted drive in my pocket, the one with every
file I'd found, every death, every pattern. Did you choose
her for that? To test me? He smiled? Then professional
perfect Emily was many things, Marcus, a calibration test, a
recruitment tool, a message finally looking up. But mostly she
was proof that the system works. What system evolution? Setting
down his tablet, Medicine has become too messy, too many variables,
too much human error. Project perfect patient removes those variables,
creates clean data, perfect outcomes. You mean perfect deaths. I
mean perfect patterns, deaths, recoveries, complications, all carefully curated, all
contributing to the larger design, he gestured at his tablet.
Your analysis of the monitoring systems was impressive, far beyond
what we expected. You see patterns within patterns. How many hospitals?
All of them? Eventually that smile again. Healthcare is an
algorithm waiting to be optimized. We're just helping it along.
I thought about Phil's security footage, Carol's warning, Jessica's growing unease,
and the people who notice, who see the patterns, become
part of new patterns, standing now like you will. I ran,
of course I ran, But you can't outrun something that's
already inside every system, every monitor, every machine. I made
it to my car, drove home in the pre dawn dark,
spent hours uploading files to secure servers, sending encrypted packages
to journalists, backing up everything I'd found. Then I slept
bad mistake, because when I woke up, things were wrong,
subtle wrongs, the kind only someone who understands patterns would notice.
My phone showed calls I didn't make. My laptop had
files I didn't create. My kitchen had coffee brewed. At
three seventeen am. They weren't just watching anymore. They were rewriting.
I tried calling Phil number disconnected, drove to his house.
Family inside said he'd accepted a job overseas, left yesterday.
Tried warning Carol. Her hospital said she'd transferred weeks ago,
no forwarding details. Jessica was on shift, but the nurse
at the station swore no one by that name had
ever worked there. They weren't just erasing evidence, they were
erasing witnesses. But they made one mistake. They left the
patterns in my apartment. I pull up the monitoring data
i've been collecting. Project Perfect Patient isn't just about controlling death.
It's about controlling reality. Each perfect reading, each CLI data
set is a brick in a larger construction, a system
that can rewrite not just medical records, but everything. My
phone buzzes text from an unknown number. Your pattern recognition
continues to impress time to upgrade your perspective. The lights flicker.
My laptop screen shows patient data I didn't access. Names
I don't recognize, but somehow know diagnoses that change as
I read them another text. Reality is just another system
to optimize. I check my secure files. The encryption is holding,
but the contents the death records I collected are changing,
not being deleted, being optimized. Emily's file now shows she
died three years before I started working here, in a
different hospital, from different causes. But I remember. I remember
because I understand patterns, real patterns, the ones that leave
traces in memory and grief and rage. Mon Uttering software pings,
multiple anomalies detected across the hospital network. Perfect readings everywhere,
too perfect. I grab my keys, have to get back,
have to stop, The door won't open, the apartment feels wrong,
Dimensions that don't quite match memory, phone buzzes. One last time.
Welcome to the optimization Marcus. Your pattern recognition makes you
perfect for phase two. I start recording this message, upload
it to my dead man's switch server. If you're hearing it.
They've made me perfect too. But here's the thing about
people who truly understand patterns. We can't help looking for them,
even in perfection, even in death. And I've found a
pattern they don't know about yet, a flaw in their
perfect system. Because reality isn't digital, isn't clean. Every optimization
creates new variables, new chaos, new patterns. They think they're
writing a program to perfect the world, but they're really
writing their own debugging sequence. The hospital mainframe accepts my
access codes in three hours, codes I never had. Codes
they gave me without realizing. Because the best pattern recognition
specialist is one who sees patterns they didn't mean to create.
If I don't make it, look for the patterns, the
perfect ones They're not hiding death anymore. They're hiding something worse.
They're hiding.
Speaker 1: Ghost is a Calorogus Shark Media production, written and hosted
by Alexander Ian McIntyre, produced by Mark Francis. Executive producers
Mark Francis and John McDermott. Portions of this podcast may
have been created with the assistance of AI. This show,
along with hundreds of others from Caloroga Shark Media, is
available commercial free on any player hassel free. Just look
for the link in the episode or show notes. Calaroga
Shark Media