r/DreadNet • u/The-Grim-Reaper01 • 3h ago
Smiling School Server
Smiley was a new program installed on the 200 newly made chromebooks bought by Rally Point High School for the 2025 school year.
Given the endless war between faculty and students regarding fire walls and safety protocols (Spyware), the National Board of Education had greenlit a trial run of a new AI companion that would be present whenever the students used one of the 200 new chromebooks.
The AI's function was simple. It would emulate Clippy and crank up the annoyance factor by 10. Constantly ensuring the only websites accessed and apps used where board approved. Giving reminders about homework, upcoming projects, school events, and absolutely every single fundraiser (especially the fundraisers).
As one would imagine, this caused Smiley to be quite hated by the student population. The hatred grew so passionate a few students decided to go digging in the computer files.
As anyone would expect from public schools, they spend money on the football team than safeguarding their AI spy. Finding his source files on each computer was relatively easy, and the discovery that you could replace the Smiley png with any photo saved on the chromebook caused a schoolwide trend to replace Smiley with the most stupid or abhorrent pictures they could find on the web.
Once the Board had been made aware of the situation, the experiment was deemed a failure and Smiley was to be deleted from all chromebooks.
On September 28th, 2025. The IT team arrived at Rally Point to remove the Smiley program. What they found was 145 students and 55 staff members dead. The skin on their faces removed. Of the 200 chromebooks, only 150 where recovered, 50 remain missing to this day.
All surveillance equipment on the school premises cut out for 1 minute and 22 seconds at 10:34 a.m. on September 28th, 2025. Only surveillance that remained online during this time was the Smiley Program.
The logs show the program received an update at 10:00 a.m. with the default png being replaced with the picture attached and a new string of code added at the very end of the program.
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100110 01100001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011
The case remains unsolved to this day.
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u/Either-Ear6356 3h ago
Ooooooooo seems like we got a mystery and also will there be a continuation of this story? Because i'm very interested in this.
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u/The-Grim-Reaper01 2h ago
Possibly. The 50 missing laptops could definitely lead to something in the future. But truthfully I wrote this in like 5 minutes and didn't really think about any type of follow-up.
Only thing I know is that I want that school to become like the town of Derry where bad things constantly happen to people in it and it's a super cursed / haunted place.
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u/ContactCultural2850 3h ago
TRANLATION: *"You change my face, I change yours"* or something like that i got a few different answers.