AmimaWritten by Xelrog T. ApocalypseIt was an utterly normal day for me. Well... actually, I'd gotten a parking ticket and a jury summons, so it was a pretty shitty day for me. However, neither of those would seem of any consequence when I got home at the end of it to find my computer infected.But maybe I'm going a little too fast. Let me take a step back, and we'll start from when I returned from work that day. As always, the first thing I did was go through the mail. Feel free to imagine my aggravation at the summons here—it didn't help, either, that everything else was junk mail and bills. Whatever. Just one of life's many joys. Preferring to relax a bit before dealing with them, I went straight to my computer to do... well, nothing at all; just some browsing, check my email, et cetera. Doing nothing can be good for the soul. I noticed my computer running much slower than usual, though. Certainly slower than it was just yesterday. My first reaction was to look at my task bar to see if maybe my antivirus was updating, or maybe Windows was downloading new features or something. You know, the usual culprits. But alas, no such luck.I tried to put up with the slow speeds for a while, just wanting to get a level head before I had to deal with troubleshooting this thing—yet another nuisance on this day that seemed so ripe for them. Eventually, my patience reached its limit, though. My attempts to relax at the terminal having crashed and burned, I went to address this problem now, determined to find a way to wind down if it killed me. Upon opening up My Computer, a red flag raised: My hard drive had no free space left on it at all. To put things into perspective, I have a 1TB internal hard drive, with almost nothing on it. I got this computer from a friend of mine, much techier than I, and while I don't know nearly as much about computers as she, I know that a terabyte is a lot of space, and that my entire computer didn't use even 10% of it yesterday.Clearly, something was going on, and I suspected some kind of virus or malware. I've heard there are some out there that will create "garbage data" on your system, flooding it with pointless files just to fill it up and make it run slow. I'd always wondered what possible benefit there could be in this, but my friend told me there are some scammers who will infect you with one of these viruses, then try to charge you a fee to "clean and speed up" your PC. Fortunately, I hadn't received any such contact... yet. Still, my suspicions seemed grounded. I gave up and performed a scan with my antivirus program—a full scan. Sure, one might think a quick scan would be faster, but if it didn't turn up anything and I was then forced to do a full scan afterwards, it would just wind up taking longer than if I went with the full scan from the start. Kind of a roundabout logic, but I just wanted to get this resolved so that I could finally just relax at my computer.I went to watch some TV for a while. Nothing good on—I really just wanted to go browsing. A couple hours later, I heard the little "scan complete" chime from my speakers, and went to go examine the results. No viruses. No malware. I was baffled. However, there was one thing of note on the screen: "1 file(s) could not be scanned due to corrupted data values." The window had three options: "List," "Report," and "Dismiss." I clicked List to see the details of the file, and it showed a file made up of a bunch of square box characters. "□□□□□.anima" was the file name. This was no file that I put there, and I'm sure it wasn't there before. I'd never installed any kind of language extensions on my computer, so the file name was written in characters from some other language—maybe Japanese, or Arabic or something. I'd also never heard of the .anima file type, but that could wait.The file location was listed in some secluded subfolder of System32. That's where viruses like to hide out, right? I made my way to the folder and examined the file. As expected, it read as an unknown file type. My computer didn't know what program would open it—not that I had any plans of doing so just yet. Besides, what surprised me more was the file size... or rather, the lack of one. There was no file size listed—that is, it was just a garbled mess of text, if you could call it that. It looked like some sort of glitch, but maybe they were some weird kind of special characters. I'd seen people make "signature art" using what looked like garbled messes of text before. One of the first things I learned about computers was that a computer does what you tell it to, not what you want it to—that is, everything happens for a reason. Someone had to program this behavior, make it display like this.I didn't know what the file was, but I knew I didn't need it spamming up my system, as I was sure it was doing. So, of course, having found the little bugger, I immediately deleted it. All the problems went away, I was able to browse in peace once again, the traffic ticket was overturned and I managed to weasel out of my jury duty. That's... what I'd like to say. Instead, a little Windows message popped up, telling me that the file could not be deleted; access was denied. There was no question at this point—definitely some kind of virus. I tried and I tried, but nothing I did was able to get rid of the bugger. After four attempts, a second window appeared over the usual "can not delete" message. This one was formatted like a Windows message, except that there was no title in the top bar of the window, and there was only one word of text: "STOP." This was accompanied by two choices: "Yes" or "No."I considered my options, but... knowing that this was a virus, and it wasn't willingly going to allow me to delete it, I chose "Yes." Thankfully, the window terminated as it should have and I was back to the Explorer window. I decided to do some research, as I probably should have done before messing with the file at all, in retrospect. Putting up with the incredibly slow browsing speed, I ran a search for the file name by copying the characters. When that turned up nothing, I tried just searching for the .anima file type, which I'd never heard of. No results.Maybe this was some brand new kind of virus. Maybe the antivirus software hadn't found a way to recognize it yet, and no one online had encountered it thus far. Maybe I was its very first victim. I was outraged. "This is just fucking perfect," I said to myself, spewing all sorts of vulgarities the likes of which would have resulted in no less than a dozen slaps from even the saltiest of nuns. I didn't want to deal with this right now. I didn't want to deal with it ever, but I especially didn't want to deal with it now. I left the computer for a while after that to just find some other way to wind down.I wasn't that successful. The next day, I was still pretty annoyed. But, I was at least more level-headed than I was the day prior—and this was my weekend, so I would have plenty of time to figure this out. I called up the friend of mine whom I'd gotten the computer from, and she attested that she had no knowledge of any such file on it, nor of how it could have gotten there. She did offer to help me troubleshoot it, thankfully. After I told her all that I had done thus far, she seemed pretty convinced of my theory—that it was some brand new kind of virus without any currently-known method of being dealt with. Unfortunately, she wasn't nearly skilled enough to try picking apart an unknown virus fresh off the market, so her help ended there. Great.With nothing left to do, I decided to experiment with the file. It took a full day to back up my important files on a separate drive—hopefully without the virus carrying over with them—and the following day I was able to start dealing with the thing. The file wasn't a standalone executable, or it would have run by itself when I double-clicked it. Having no knowledge of what program the file was intended to run with, I started cycling through all the programs on my computer, trying to find something that would work. First up was Notepad, as I've found a lot of unknown files can be read in text format. This one turned up as a bunch of the "missing character" box symbols again. So it could be read as a text file, but it was all in another language. I guess that's a start.For lack of anything else to try, I continued through the list of programs—next up was Windows Photo Viewer. I didn't expect anything to happen, since if the file had been opened in Notepad, that meant it had to be some kind of text-based file, right? Well, somehow, Photo Viewer was able to read the thing, and it came up with an image of a nice little suburban house somewhere. If it weren't for the subtle cultural hints, like the buildings in the background and the style of mailbox, I would have assumed it to be an American suburb. Unfortunately, there wasn't any kind of text anywhere in the image, so I couldn't determine the country of origin. I tried to move the window to the side for later, but accidentally closed it instead. So, I tried to open the program again with Photo Viewer, and again it worked... but, this time, I got a different image, this one of the inside of a car driving on a brick road, from a driver's perspective.How was this possible? Even assuming the file could be read by both Notepad and Photo Viewer, it's just one file. Opening it should come up with the same result each time. If this was a virus, it seemed to mess with the functions of my machine something fierce. I opened the file once again in Photo Viewer and, this time, I got a string of big, bold, white symbols on a black background. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they were Russian characters. Is that where this file is fr
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