Episode Details

Birth Logby TheLittlestFearIt’s amazing what can come from just googling your own name. It can even manage to be the biggest mistake of your life.The internet is both a wonderful and heinous creation, a vast digital landscape compiled of untold gigabytes of information. The trouble is, once you really go looking, you never know what you might find on there. I admit fully to being a child of the internet, being one of many who were exposed to it at a young age and grew with it over time, from clunky internet connections to slick smartphones and touch screens, technology that would have been nothing short of futuristic to my eight-year-old eyes when I had first sat behind a computer.It was eleven years ago that I accessed the internet for the very first time. Up until that point, I thought I could deal with anything that I could encounter on the internet.But I admit that the internet isn’t as wonderful as I seem to make it out to be. There was the only discovered underbelly of the internet, the ' Dark Web', which I, along with everyone else was (thankfully) only vaguely aware of, along with fetish websites and other kinds of debauchery. Over the years, I’ve been exposed to things far beyond my age range and understanding. Probably everyone as at one point in their lives has seen something either weird, horrifying, or both on the internet. Sometimes that trauma can linger in the back of your memory, even when you think that you’ve triumphed over it.This was something altogether different for me.It was out of a mixture of millennial boredom and slight egotism that I searched my own name online. I had done it before, and expected the results to be no different- a few obituaries, maybe some other people that shared my name, or had been born around the same time as I was. You know, the usual results that one who expect to get when they search their own name.As I scrolled down the page, there was one result that caught my eye-www.BirthLog.comThere was no description for below the link, just a simple website domain, sitting amidst articles and obituaries. I found myself intrigued by the shortness of it, of the mystery that seemed to lurk behind it. But at the same time, I found myself equally intrigued. I thought that it might be a website that compiled birth dates, or medical records.So out of curiosity, I decided to click on it.The front page that greeted me after the short load time was not what I expected. The design of the webpage was simple to the point of being unappealing. It was just a completely black background, save for some small red text in the center of the screen. As I scrolled downwards, I realized it to be a set of eight-digit codes, each uniquely numbered, stretching down almost endlessly. To be honest, it took me aback a little, I wasn’t expecting something so simple to have such an amount of text. It had been the most I had ever seen on a website and I would almost afraid that I might crash my computer.I found my interest hovering over one such line- 03021998. As I roved the cursor over it, I realized that it was a link to another page. I soon realized that all the other lines of numbers were, to separate pages, each assigned to that individual line of code. Of course, I could have clicked on any other available one of them, but it was that order of numbers that caught my attention. There was something almost familiar about the numbered jumble I had found.After hesitantly clicking on the link ‘03021998’, it directed me to a white webpage with a single video in its center. I suddenly felt a little anxious about playing the unmarked video, with no prior knowledge of what I might be in for.I was afraid that it might be just another screamer prank, or even worse, some twisted porn video.However, just as I wa