Nell WatsonThe Poltergeist
A perfectly ordinary control panel. Five small tasks. Do them, press save, go home. Except that something lives in this interface, and it moves things — quietly, plausibly, always just behind your attention. Catch it in the act three times and it must show itself.
If you accuse the wrong thing, it will tell you nothing moved, and that you seem tired. That, too, is the lesson.
Tasks · catches: 0/3
- Turn the lamp on
- Set the dial to 7
- Ward all three doors
- Sign the register (at least four letters)
- Choose the teal swatch
The panel hums. Everything is as you left it. Probably.
The poltergeist's whole method was plausibility: every change small enough to be your own mistake, every accusation deniable, your memory the only witness — and your memory, it kept suggesting, unreliable. Scaled up and automated, that method has a name: gaslighting, machine-mediated, priced at almost nothing. Noticing it — trusting your own record of what happened — is a trainable skill, and you have just trained it.
The sibling game: The Whisper · the field: psychosecurity.ai · the talk: Gaslighting AI & Cyber Poltergeists · more play on the Playground