The 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 — leaving the panel murmuring about what may or may not have changed. Catch it in the act three times and it must show itself.
Before you play
When something shifts, press Something moved, then point at what changed: a control, the register, or a line of the task list itself. Catch it, and what it did is undone. Accuse the wrong thing and it will tell you nothing moved, and that you seem tired. That, too, is the lesson.
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 practised it.
Keep your own record, and let it outrank the interface’s account of what happened. A confident denial is not evidence; it is only confident.
The sibling game: The Whisper · a related essay: When Protector Becomes Predator · the field: psychosecurity.ai · the talk: Gaslighting AI & Cyber Poltergeists · more play on the Playground