Barely Breathing.exe

It is said when you take a picture of someone, you capture their soul
 in the camera. It is also said that if you print it off, that picture 
contains the soul itself and you can control them with it.
I’m not sure where to start. Do you know what the Primordial Soup
 is? A veritable ocean of elements, all floating around randomly. And 
through millions of years of time, eventually the right set of random 
circumstances came to pass and the elements were able to connect 
together and form the world's first single cell organism.
Now that’s a really boiled down version of it but I’m sure you 
get the gist of it. Fast forward a few billion years to the early 1990s,
 when internet use began to rapidly accelerate. Every home had a 
computer, and new connections between computers were opening on a 
by-the-second basis.
Trillions of bytes of data began to transfer around the world at 
the speed of light, music, text, sound, and most importantly; pictures. 
Now if, when you take a picture of someone and capture their soul, what 
happens when that picture is converted to data and placed on a hard 
drive?
Does the soul follow? 15 years later we believe so. We believe 
that when you take a picture of someone and upload it onto your 
computer, alongside the image data a blueprint of the person’s soul 
itself is imprinted on the file itself.
Look at your pictures folder. How many souls reside in that folder alone?
That’s just the beginning though. These soul blueprints each retain pieces of a puzzle, parts of the soul itself as well.
Recently a group of hackers, who referred to themselves as the 
Cardinals, took an interest to this theory and began experiments. They 
found anomalies within the binary sequences of images based on similar 
features of the person they had taken a picture of. A binary DNA if you 
will.
Now these hackers had come to possess a set of three extremely 
important data files. One avi, one jpeg, and one .mp3, each of which 
possessing interesting unexplainable qualities.
The first, cradle.avi, depicts what appears to be a group of 
teenagers with a low quality video camera, exploring the basement of a 
house. The quality of the video is distorted completely beyond any 
comprehensibility, and the video is very low quality. For most of the 
video the camera is passed around the group, handed back and forth and 
jerked around too much to make anything noticeable out.
But near the end the camera turns at an odd angle, and you can 
semi clearly make out a young girl standing in the corner facing the 
wall. Her hair is long and black and she is wearing some form of white 
dress. You only see her for a split second but many people who have seen
 the video claim there just seems something wrong with her. A bit 
deformed but not in a way anyone can explain.
But the truly peculiar property of this video is what happens to 
the user's computer at the end of it. On the last second of the video, 
if not already so the video will force full screen itself. Along with 
this you are left with a one second looping clip of a window in a wall. 
It loops 15 times, and then the girl is seen again, standing on the 
other side of the window with her back to the viewer, slowly wavering 
back and forth. After a few moments the video ends and the user’s 
computer permanently shuts down.
Inspection has shown that the entire registry becomes completely corrupt, requiring the user to do a total wipe and reinstall.
The second file is known as needles.mp3. This sound file, when 
played, plays for about 3 minutes. It is extremely distorted. One can 
occasionally make out some form of voice talking, but most of the sound 
is some form of growling, rolling crackled roar.
Users who listen to this file often experience extreme nausea and loss of balance for a brief period of time.
The final file is known as burningman.jpg.
The file name has nothing to do with what the actual picture 
depicts. Instead it just displays a haphazard mess of overlayed and 
meshed images of dolls and a hallway. There also seems to be an image of
 a man standing with his head cast down in the background, but the image
 is too distorted to make anything out, much like the other files.
The image, when downloaded and opened on a user's desktop, will 
proceed to stay permanently open on whatever program it is opened 
through. Not only that, the program becomes disabled. Nothing else 
happens, the image just permanently sits there on your desktop, 
unclickable, unminimizable, and your just left there with the man's 
invisible gaze staring at you.
From what the group of hackers were able to discern, this file 
seems to have precompiled into the data something along the lines of 
Cmdow. Yet, as complex and intricate as the program is (it works across 
all OS platforms) no one knows who the original creator is. In fact, few
 people have heard of it as the file is uncopyable nor sendable.
This in fact further adds to the mystery, as often receivers of 
this file will obtain it from random anonymous emails, posted on forms 
on a download link. Posing the question, how was that poster able to 
upload it?
If you ever see any of these files, refrain from downloading ANY 
of them. They all have varying detrimental effects on your computers, 
from practically taking out your whole registry, corrupting system 32, 
freezing your mouse or crashing your computer.
Now onwards:
This group of hackers, the Cardinals, took to analyzing these 3 
files and comparing their odd behaviors. They had heard of other such 
odd files, images, data, etc, but were never able to get their hands on 
them. At least as far as we know, though rumour states they in fact were
 able to locate and collect all of the known files like the original 
smile.jpg, barbie.jpg, even suicidemouse.avi. Not even the grifter was 
able to escape their grasp, rumour states. But rumour also states the 
grifter video even exists, but thats another story.
Nonetheless, all these files in hand, the group lined the files 
up and begin to meticulously work through the binary one 0/1 at a time, 
checking for similar strains and series of binary that matched.
And they did manage to successfully do so, at least legend 
states. The result was 7 individual execute files that did nothing. 
Simply a gibberish pile of 0s and 1s. They endless puzzled over the 
files, each tackling an execute each. They decided to name them after 
themselves, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Wrath, and Pride.
At last they attempted to line the files up. Remarkably, 
something odd happened. The copies of the files quite suddenly meshed 
together. The result was a single complete Execute, already named.
“BarelyBreathing.exe”
And what of this file? Well not much else is known after that 
point. They were too smart to just execute it. They analyzed the file 
every possible way. Hex, binary, conversions, anything to figure out 
what this odd file would do.
To no avail, even after forming together it was an even bigger 
jumble of 1s and 0s and made no more sense than the separate executes.
They backed the file up on a flash drive and proceeded to run it.
 That was the last command found run on their destroyed computers a week
 later. Their corpses had been disfigured beyond recognition. 
Description of the corpses stated that it almost seemed as if they had 
been brutally slashed across their faces and arms. Every square inch of 
skin that had been bare had been mutilated. Almost microwaved and then 
sliced repeatedly by a micro thin razor.
The government attempted to hush up the event, but there was some
 media leakage, and because the Cardinals had been keeping a blog 
amongst themselves and a few close friends (it's closed down and deleted
 now so don’t go trying to find it) it quickly spread out as per what 
they had been attempting to accomplish. And if it was or was not related
 to their terrible deaths.
And what of the flash drive? A friend, who knew of its existence,
 later checked the home of the group and was unable to find it. 
According to reports the drive was found in the pocket of one of the 
group and had been taken into custody by the police, and then simply 
vanished.
The trail continues on, far more though. The file resurfaces 
every few weeks around the globe. Governments attempt to cover it up but
 some media leaks out, of course. Look to the news for people mutilated 
in their own homes by a “murderer”, their computers stolen, etc.
If you ever get a cryptic email with an attachment labelled BarelyBreathing.exe, for fuck sake DO NOT OPEN IT!