I Found a Wikipedia Page on… Myself
Written on September 25th, 2022 by Ethan Zhang
I was browsing the internet when I stumbled upon a Wikipedia page. This Wikipedia page was… odd to say the least. It detailed everything about my childhood, every major event, and everything that shaped me into who I was. This in itself was weird, but who knows, maybe it was a friend playing a prank to freak me out or something along those lines. Yet something told me otherwise.
I asked all my friends, and every single one denied it. The truly terrifying part was that the page noted everything in the future until the day that I died. It noted everything including how reading that page would make me feel. I began to shake violently and hyperventilate. It knew all of my secrets. It knew when and how I would die. It knew everything I was going to do. It determined my fate. Fear surged through me as I paced across the floor of my bedroom as my girlfriend slept soundly. The white light seemed ominous as the shadows cowered in fear. Eventually, exhaustion overtook me. I didn’t know what would happen and I kept the page open as I drifted off. My life continued for a week, and by then, I had already forgotten about the page. Then one night, I opened the tab that had the Wikipedia page. A notification had appeared. It read: This page has been updated, would you like to refresh? Unthinkingly, I refreshed the page. It didn’t seem like anything had changed, but as I read, it became clear that something had. It had become blatantly obvious, and what it said terrified me.
The page shifted the place of a major event. Instead of a cataclysmic event being set to happen two months from now, it was set to happen two days from now. I panicked, it only gave the event, not the when, where, or how it would happen.
“Oh shit. Shit. Shit.” I cursed under my breath as I began to hyperventilate, staring at the evil screen before me, the words dancing as my vision blurred. The next day passed as normal, albeit more tense than normal. Then the day came.
I was merely driving down the road to get groceries. A car barrelled into the driver side of my car. The door crunched, my legs went numb with an ear-splitting crack, I couldn’t feel anything, I howled in pain, then everything faded to black. I awoke in the hospital alone. Nobody beside me, nobody looking after me. My girlfriend was at work. A nurse walked in and told me that I had my legs amputated and needed to stay there for a while. This is what the Wikipedia page had told me. I began to shake, everything on that page had happened. I pulled out my phone and found the page. Every time I look at it, something changes. Now, my death has changed from natural causes to suicide. The date was removed, and now my lifespan reads 2000-unknown. I had caused enough uncertainty to make the day I died unknown, yet not enough to change how. Then the page changed again.
The page was deleted. Wikipedia displayed an error message when I tried to find it again. I changed what would happen to me, and I had no idea how. Since then, the Wikipedia page has come back every once in a while. It predicted that I would land a job by a certain day. It predicted that I would get engaged by a certain year and then get married the same year. All of this was on the pages that popped up, never on the original page. It was all so obscure to me, and I didn’t think I’d ever figure out who was behind this. Then one day, a simple image appeared: it was a gravestone. I stared at the image for a few minutes, hoping it would change, but it didn’t. The date read: March 19th, 2000 - April 2nd, 2034. The date was January 1st, 2034.
Figuring out I had exactly three months to live, I informed my wife. She thought I was joking. She thought it was all a prank. I told her it wasn't. She tried to find the page, and couldn’t. Why did I expect her to be able to see it? This wasn’t normal. I continued to check the page whenever it came up. April was drawing closer, and as March came, all hell broke loose.
March was a disaster for me. Friends left me to make families. I was laid off for spending too much time on the Wikipedia page of myself. My wife filed for divorce as I became more obsessed with my page, and stopped spending time. The page never told me how it would end. The page never told me that I would become obsessed. Yet, somehow, I had a feeling I knew how this would end.
April 1st, 2034. It was late afternoon on April Fools Day. I grabbed a key and knew something was off. I opened the mailbox. Inside was an ornate black box. The only content of the mailbox. I never got mail, so why did I go out to get mail on that April Fools Day afternoon? I don’t know, part of me expected a prank, a letter, or something related to the Wikipedia page, but no: I got a weighted black box instead.
I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and cut the tape off the box’s flaps. I opened it to reveal a letter.
“Dear Mr. Romani,
We have determined you eligible for the gift of insight. We see that you have viewed a Wikipedia page we have made for you that dictated your future. We have also seen how this has affected your life. As a result, we have decided to terminate the page and all contents pertaining to it. Further within this box, you will be given a choice. You may choose to continue your life as a citizen and try to better yourself, or you may choose to end it in the way we have provided on the Wikipedia page. If you attempt to disseminate a copy of this letter, our organization will send agents to terminate you. We would much rather you either terminate yourself with the provided methods or live out your life as you wish. However, this letter does not in any way shape, or form guarantees your future will be bright and well. In fact, we have reason to believe that the opposite will be true. Consider this your last piece of insight: If Soren Romani chooses to live his life out, he will come to work for the Organization for a brief time before being terminated for insubordination and subsequently will struggle to find a job, never getting past the first stages of interviewing. So, Mr. Romani, what will you choose? The choices are yours to make.
Sincerely,
The Director of the Organization
(D.T.O)//
Dated: 4/1/34”
I took the letter out of the box. Beneath the letter was a pistol. It looked futuristic. A black slide was intricately decorated with crimson roses. The grip and receiver were blacked out with skulls. The magazine had one bullet. A 9mm round, already chambered. Safety was the only thing that was left. I took the pistol. It felt comfortable in my hands. I could use the damn thing—on myself.
I soon fell asleep in the evening. When I awoke, it was the early hours of the next day. April 2nd, 2034. I contemplated my options. On one hand, I could end it all, on the other, I could go fulfill the Organization’s alternate hypothesis. Neither sounded especially pleasing. The suffering would still continue if I continued living. I pulled out the pistol and created this post. This will be the last anyone hears from me, Soren Romani. Goodbye to everyone who finds this.
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Report filed on behalf of Soren Romani
Soren Romani was found dead two hours after his final post—a suicide note of sorts—was made. He had committed suicide and shot himself with the pistol he had described in the entry. The letter was not present in Mr. Romani’s home, and it is still unclear what or who the Organization is and what its relations to Mr. Romani are. The Wikipedia page was never found, even in the logs of what Wikipedia pages existed in the past.
Mr. Romani’s computer and phone were found reset and the data on them were all lost. It is reasonable to believe that Mr. Romani may have been using a website that looked like Wikipedia but was in fact a malware.
Mr. Romani, at the time of his death, was declared to be clinically insane or hallucinatory. Mr. Romani’s ex-wife, Sara Lentz, was informed of the incident and was a mix of confused and mortified. Ms. Lentz had thought Mr. Romani was mentally unstable but did not deem him insane. Ms. Lentz believed that Mr. Romani would be able to recover, and at the time of divorcing Mr. Romani thought he would come back to her in time.
Signed,
Deputy Investigator Thomas T. Oglevy,
(D.I.T.T.O.)//
Dated, 4/3/34
