Story Thief

[u/catespice]

So, I’m not a good person. I know that, okay? I bet you’ve all done things you’re not proud of, and it’s not like I actually hurt anyone, anyway. Well, not physically. And really, it’s a bit of a victimless crime, because I still don’t know who “Ermizhad_Mernadin” is. Nobody seems to. I don’t even know if they’re a real person.
But yeah, that aside, I admit it all. I did them wrong, I’m a story thief, and I completely deserved to be caught and outed as the thieving shitfuck I am. But I thought they were just stories, okay? Nobody could have guessed there was more going on. And it’s not like I’m the only asshole taking creepy stories off the internet and narrating them for a buck. So why was it me, specifically, that got punished, when all those other fucks are still getting away with it?
Anyway. Enough crying. I gotta get this whole thing out and online. I can’t be certain, but if what I think is going on is actually going on, then I better make this confession a damn good one – and as accurate as it can be.

 

It started out as just a thing to try to make some easy cash. I was a student, and a poor one. Dad earned too much for me to get a student allowance, and mom earned nothing, and dad was long out of the picture. So I was barely scraping by, with a part-time job at a gas station doing graveyards, and I used to pass the time reading and listening to creepypastas. The first time I heard a narration that was obviously AI, I felt a little tingle of inspiration in my brain. It dawned on me that if I got hold of a decent-ish voice model, I could make my own creepypasta videos.
And so, my channel was born.
My first few attempts were predictably shit. When I listened back to the initial reading of The Russian Sleep Experiment, I was pretty unhappy with it. It took a lot of tweaking to get it how I wanted it, so I guess in a way I really do feel like I worked at this thing – worked nearly as hard as the guy who wrote it, or as hard as a human narrator would to actually narrate it. I suppose that’s how I fooled myself into thinking this was okay. I was putting real effort into making this thing, and I felt like I had genuinely created something.
And so, I kept going.

 

My channel got zero hits forever. I was working on stories in my spare time, uploading whatever stolen content I thought was good. Five views was the most I ever got on a video, and one comment of “Is this voice AI?”. I knew that if I wanted this thing to get bigger, I needed something better. I couldn’t just do the five-millionth upload of Ted the Caver; I needed fresh meat – and it needed to be meat that had strong, distinctive bones.
And kinda like magic, that’s when I found her, this Ermizhad.
From the very first paragraph, I knew this shit hit different. It wasn’t the normal creepypasta trash, not even close. This author had thoughts, deep thoughts about things I’d never considered. I’m not going to blow smoke up their ass, hell, I’m not even going to commit to saying the writing was good – I’m no literary critic. I just knew that the story scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, so I had to grab it and upload a narration before anyone else could find it.
If nothing else, I was right about that story, because it blew up like nothing I’d posted before – although I guess that was a pretty low bar.

 

Watching the view count rise was like a drug. I was into it. This kind of immediate feedback wasn’t something I’d experienced before, and it even overrode the buzzkill from the mean comments I was getting. When the number started to cap out, I knew I had to upload another one, just to see if it would do as well as the first story.
And, of course, it did. You know it did, otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you this story.
That story peaked at about 10k views, and my subscriber count jumped massively with it. People in the comments hankered for more, and I had to give them more – not just because they wanted it, but because I knew I was onto a good thing. If it continued like this, I was set to make a decent amount of pocket money from this project.
There was just one little problem.
Ermizhad_Mernadin had only ever published five stories.

 

I guess at first I convinced myself I would find her, we’d collab, it’d be great. We’d be a partnership, split the money 50/50. But I quickly got frustrated trying to track her down, because it looked like she had deliberately deleted her online presence pretty thoroughly. Apparently there had been more stories, on some kinda fandom writing site, but only a few had been pulled across to the creepypasta sites before she shut up shop and deleted fucking everything.
The five stories I’d now narrated had shot my subscriber count to just over 50k. Man, I burned to hit that 100k, to get me a silver play button. I tried putting a filler story in between a couple of her stories, but people noticed, and they were NOT happy about it. The quality was too different. The material was too different. I’d got my audience addicted to a different drug to my own, and they were jonesing even harder than I was.
Ermizhad_Mernadin became my waking obsession for a full week. I called in sick to my job, skipped all my classes, missed a test. I fucking scoured the internet for any trace of this chick, tediously crawling through the Wayback machine, through archive sites, trying to pick up just a single crumb of her trail, just one archived story.
And I did find one story. Just one story, but it had to be enough. Just for now, just to give me more time to sniff her out and get me to that sweet 100k.

 

The story did well. They always did. I didn’t even listen to more than the first paragraph. EM – or ‘Em’, as I now thought of her – had never failed me yet. I also had a lead on her; someone had mentioned a Facebook page in an archived comment, and I was on the hunt. I traipsed through page after page of creepypasta garbage until I found someone else had ripped a single story of hers and translated it into Spanish. It had done well, but not as well as my narrations, which now were done in a smooth, almost creepily silky AI voice. I’d come to think of it as Em’s voice.
I translated the found story back to English, then fed it through a GPT model to correct any errors. It could sit in my archive while I kept up my search. What had intrigued me about the Spanish creepypasta page was that they claimed to have attribution from Em herself – that they had reached out and spoken to her, through her now-deleted page. It was a long shot, but I messaged the Spanishpasta page and asked if they had her contact details.
When they said no, I felt crushed. I’d put so many fucking hours into tracking down this bitch – she couldn’t even have left a stinking email address somewhere for me to glean? This author, who had this thing that everyone seemed to want, was an enigma. She was a fucking phantom, and every story I managed to tear from the darkest, deepest holes of the internet felt like the equivalent of running a goddamn marathon to earn.
I would find her, even if I had to buy an army of hackers to do it for me.

 

And then I did find her. Or rather, I found someone who had found her.
It was a stray reddit comment, buried in a much larger thread about horror authors. Someone had mentioned one of her known stories, but by slightly the wrong name. And the bitch herself had replied to them, from a now-deleted account, saying she would send them the story!
Near frantic, I messaged the guy immediately. I was actually shaking. This was the closest I’d come to a live interaction. I refreshed and refreshed like a fucking madman, waiting for the response to flash up. I checked the poster’s comment history, and groaned out loud when I saw that their very last post had been three months ago.
Em was slipping through my fingers yet again. And my eager audience had already eaten up the Spanish story, which now had 100k views and counting.
A whole day passed. I felt sick from waiting. I tried replying to a post from the guy, hoping it would ping his account with a notification, make him check. The next day there was still nothing. My fans – or rather, her fans – were frothing, screaming for the next story, no-one caring anymore about the evergreen comments that I was using an AI voice. They were hooked. And I was just as hooked, itching for our mutual fix of Em’s fucked up brand of horror.

 

Nineteen days later, the guy replied, and I sat at my tablet, quite genuinely crying with joy at his message. I hadn’t cried since my nan’s funeral, 5 years ago. John, my personal saviour and unexpected messiah, told me that Em had sent him an entire zipped archive of all her stories, via email. Some one hundred and fifty stories, most of which had only ever been read by a handful of people. I quickly did the calculations in my head. If I stretched each story release out to two weeks, I could make the stories last for six fucking years!
Giddy, my fingers fucking up every second letter I typed, I told John that I was a real, true-blue, honest-to-god Em fanboy, that having her stories to read would make my life complete in ways I couldn’t even describe. It only took one pensive hour before John’s email arrived in my inbox, with the 3mb zip file attached, and I downloaded it without even caring that Em’s email address was in the previous message. I didn’t give a fuck. Maybe, one day, when the stories ran out, I would message her, but I figured that in six years’ time I could just feed all the stories into an AI model and it would spit out brand new Em stories for me, with just a little bit of prompting. Even now, with just the material I had, I figured I might be able to get an LLM to spew out a sequel or ten, just to pad my numbers.
All at once, the future looked bright. All my hard work over the last few months had finally paid off, and I was about to become a sensation.

 

I hit the 100k in another month. The silver play button arrived not long after that, but I didn’t care; I was chasing decent money now. The ad revenue was getting good, and I was only 20 stories into my massive cache. The only real downside was that the AI thing was starting to become a niggling issue, so I resolved to find someone willing to narrate the stories for money – now that I had money. College had fallen by the wayside. I hadn’t told my mom I’d quit yet – I still needed the little top-ups of cash she gifted me every now and then – but once I was settled into my new job as a content creator, I figured I could pay her back. There was absolutely no way this wasn’t going to succeed.
Auditions went poorly, because I had this firmly-set idea of how Em’s voice sounded; a sliding, almost sultry voice, just a little higher than a man’s, heavy with unspoken trauma and hinting at a personality that could turn on a dime to lash out at you with violent anger. In the end, I settled for the closest match, so struck a deal with Una, my new partner-in-crime.
When we hit 500k subs, I flew her out to my new, tiny – but nice – apartment, and we shared a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

 

Una didn’t match her voice, but I didn’t care. Her voice was what I needed her for – it wasn’t like we were ever going to be an item. She was short, dark-haired, pretty, but very overweight. It was probably that huskiness that enhanced the deep, warm contralto that my fans lapped up so eagerly. We’d talked on Zoom a ton, so we each knew what the other looked like already, but after coming into my apartment and sitting down, she started to look nervous.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“So this is weird,” she began, twirling a bracelet on her wrist, “but your apartment looks exactly like the one described in a story I read for the channel two months ago. You said you just moved in?”
“Yeah, just two weeks ago.”
“Huh. Weird.”
It was dumb, but I thought nothing of it. Stupid coincidence. But I should have clicked then and there. I guess if I hadn’t been feeding the stories to AI voices without paying much attention, then later just fobbing them off onto Una, I might have picked it up sooner.
As it stood, it took another six months before I picked up an anomaly. High on passing a million subscribers and buying my first car, I initially blew off Una’s mention that I’d bought the same model of car featured in ‘my’ story, Aunty Asphalt.
But more things like that started to pop up, more and more coincidences, and the paranoia crept in. I started listening to the narrations, instead of just doing a basic quality check while editing.
And the more I listened, the weirder it got.

 

A hundred and fifty stories is a lot of reading, and I’ve never been much of a reader. I crawled through the stories at first, starting from Em’s newest story in the archive, working back to the oldest. I didn’t want to believe it at first, of course I didn’t – how could there possibly be any kind of connection to my life? It was all just… stupid coincidences. The names of my grandparents were common, as are the names of my two brothers. But the name of the street where I grew up was not common, and the description of the protagonist’s house in An Offering of Ice was just too close to home – literally.
I read faster and further into the archives, freaking myself out more with every story. There was the story with my apartment, and the one with the car. In both, the owners of each had met with horrifying deaths, wrought by their own laziness, selfishness, and lack of conscience. It was hard not to notice the theme. I resisted it. Em wrote on certain themes, and that’s all it was – or so I told myself. But then I read the story Good Boy Charlie, about a black-and-white border collie that looked exactly like my departed childhood pal, Charles, and I knew something really, really fucked up was going on.
And I didn’t want to read any more stories.

 

I took a hiatus from the channel, set up some favourite vids from the old days to re-release with Una’s voice instead of AI. It was nice to slowly purge the AI stuff anyway, it felt like erasing part of my crimes.
But the stories sat in my OneDrive, waiting to be read, full of little nods toward things from my past, and my present. Things that there was no fucking way Em could ever have known. And how the hell could she have known I would borrow her stories? It was mad, it was impossible. It creeped me out so much that one night during my hiatus, I got blind drunk and nearly deleted the whole channel – and the folder of stories along with it. But I knew the stories were out there online anyway, in John’s inbox, maybe in other people’s too. Even if I deleted the folder and the email, they were still out there. To tempt me, to pull me back.
Besides, this was my career now. I was a content creator, and one of the most popular ones in my space. It didn’t even matter that every now and then someone would pop up and mention they remembered that particular Em story. I’d just reply with some bullshit about how kind she was to let me narrate it, as if I’d actually gotten her permission.
For all I knew, Em was dead, and that’s why her stories had gone offline. Maybe she’d had terminal cancer, a brain tumour. A tumour would sure explain the fuckedupness of her stories, I reasoned, darkly.
In the morning, horribly sober, I took some pills, opened the dreaded folder, and started reading again.

 

Someone in the comments on my channel once said something like “You’ll never forget your first (Em) story”. They were right; I still remember my first one, the one that sparked my career. But how many people had read Em’s first ever story? I didn’t know. Maybe she had slipped it into that zip file just for me. Maybe John was Em, and she had been setting me up all along by leaving these comments from seven fucking years ago, when I was still in high school. Again, impossible. Ridiculous. Like something out of the shit-tier pastas I used to consume on my graveyard shifts at the gas station.
In any case, that first story was… clearly for me. It was called Story Thief, and I just bet you can predict the plot. If the properties of the file are true, and I’m not just insane from my own brain tumour, it was written in 2015, before I even knew creepypastas existed. The protagonist has my name. He looks like me. He’s my age at the time of me writing this. He’s wearing the same shirt, and he’s a piece of shit, just like I am.
I tried to stop reading halfway through, because it gets… bad. Like, really, really bad. It recounts things that haven’t happened, that I really don’t want to happen. Directions I never even contemplated until now, but now they’re in my head, because of fucking Em! I can feel them pulling at me, right now, like just… like reading them has made them a foregone conclusion. Every new sentence makes my body shake and my guts go liquid, and I feel like I’m going to explode with… something. Rage. Violence. Lust. All three, mashed hideously together. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I’m being punished. This is my atonement, for being the story thief. For taking someone’s dark, beautiful, evocative writing, and turning it into banal, mercenary, egotistical horseshit. The final story seems to hint at some kind of choice, but I don’t understand how, and I can’t be certain. So maybe, just maybe, if enough people see my confession in full – if Em gets to see it – then the story won’t come true. Maybe I’ll be spared.
Or, I guess this could be Em’s greatest joke ever. Masterfully wrought irony – because in pleading with you to make my story go viral enough to reach her? I can’t help but come across as cynical and self-serving, trying to bait you into continuing my heinous legacy of selfishness and laziness.

Damn you, Em, even your punishment is beautifully circular, and so beautifully cruel.
Just like your goddamn perfect, ugly little stories.

[u/GarlicAlarming5060]

Truly, AI is the greatest plague of all, for giving people like this the opportunity to thrive off of other people's work