Bunni

Hello. I’m going to remain anonymous for this. I used to work for MIT media labs, I did a lot of work on MIT App inventor, a platform that lets you design and code your own apps for iOS and Android. I also did a little work on scratch, nothing much of note other than the mascot; and no, I’m not talking about Scratchy. I’m talking about Bunni. Bunni was a scrapped scratch mascot I designed. Bunni was used in the very early non-public alpha of scratch. Everyone around the office loved Bunni and I. I felt so good to finally have someone be proud of me and my work. Someone at the office loved Bunni so much they made me a plushie of her. I don’t have the plushie anymore for reasons I’ll share later, but it was a nice gesture. One day I was walking to my bus stop when I saw a note that read “This bus stop has been decommissioned and is no longer in service.” Well shit, I thought to myself. I decided to call my sister and she drove me to work that day. Everyone was happy to see me. I sat down at my desk and started to work. At approximately 10:23AM I received an empty text from my sister, I shrugged it off as a mistake. About an hour and a half later I received a call from my mom. She sounded very frantic and afraid. I still remember her voice. She was telling me that my sister hanged herself at around 10:30AM. I immediately started crying and went to my boss and told him about the situation. He gave me permission to take the rest of the day off. I had my mom come pick me up and we went to my sister's place. We picked out what we wanted to keep and what we’d leave for the other family members. I took a few of her childhood plushies and GBA games. When I had gone home I entered my room, set everything down and screamed into a pillow. When I had taken a moment to calm down and look around me, I noticed my signed Owl City Ocean Eyes CD was missing from my shelf — and so was the bunni plush. I called my coworker and it turns out I had left it on my desk. I had him run it to me, but there was still no sign of my CD. For the rest of the night thinking about why my sister took her own life. I would soon learn why later. I didn’t go to work for the next few weeks but when I returned to the office it seemed… off put. There was almost no sign of happiness in that building. Everyone was just… sad. It was almost as if MIT Media Labs had turned into a regular office building. I opened up the scratch alpha on my computer and built a goofy little animation with bunni. I tried to show my coworkers the animation but they didn’t seem to care. It was almost as if my so called 15 minutes of fame was over, and no one cared about me or Bunni anymore. I saved the project, before scratch used SB3 files, it used JSON files so there was now a file called “BunniAnimation.JSON” on my desktop. I decided to do more work on MIT App inventor as a new version was about to be tested in the office. Eventually lunch break came around, but the office wasn’t as happy as it normally would be at lunch break it was still just sad. At lunch I decided to use scratch and it gave me a pop up that said “This software is corrupted. Please get a new build from your administrator.” So I had my boss send me a new build of scratch. When I opened it Bunni was nowhere to be found. Instead she was replaced by some stupid orange cat. I was furious, but also sad that she was gone. Once I saw the orange cat I closed scratch in anger. When I looked at my desktop, next to the animation file was a new JSON file called “JEALOUSY.JSON” . I decided to use a file decorrupter to decorrupt the old build of scratch, just to be 100% sure the new JSON would work. Sure enough, it worked and bunni was restored. I loaded the JEALOUSY.JSON file. It was a simple when space clicked start sound next costume script. Except bunni looked… angry. When I clicked space it played a recording of my sister screaming that I’ve never heard, along with a distorted image of her corpse. Upon seeing this I screamed as loud as I could, and threw my computer onto the floor. The plastic shell dented and a few keys fell off but it survived for the most part. I told my boss about the incident and he yelled at the whole department about this sick “prank” . I told him it was nothing of the sort, I told him it appeared after I saw the cat for the first time. He told me I was lying and am in denial and should go home, so I walked home that day. When I got home the bunni plush was nowhere to be found. I asked everyone I knew about it, and they hadn't seen it. Eventually I found it, but it looked all scratched up, almost as if a cat used it as a toy. No matter, I set it on my shelf and lied down. Eventually I decided to take a nap. When I woke up I had noticed that my house was burned down. That was when I realized I wasn’t awake, but I was dreaming. In that dream I climbed out of the bed and walked out from the wreckage. The entire neighborhood had disappeared, and I was in a grayscale hell of a field where the ashes of my burnt down house stood. I sat in the monochrome field and sobbed. “Why is this happening to me?” I thought. Then I woke up for real, and when I checked my phone I had a missed call from my sister, and a voicemail as well. I didn’t listen to the voicemail, but just trashed it. I decided to block her number to stop this from happening ever again. But before I did that, I got a text from her. It read “It’s all the cat's fault, REDACTED. I’m so very sorry for your sister, but if it wasn’t for me, the cat would’ve done M̴͖̈́̉͝Ṵ̸̝̈́̋͘ͅC̴̘̬̎͘H̵̨̱̗̱̞̭̮̆̃͋͝ ̸̨̲̏W̵͖̫̩̏̀͆͂ͅÖ̶̺̼́̈́̆͘͘͝R̴͕̓̀̋̇͝͠S̴̮̾͆̒̏̓̀E̵̠̳͒̂͛̃” I ignored the text assuming it was some sick prank, I assumed a coworker got her SIM card or something but I was very wrong. Bunni was communicating directly with me. I opened my computer to a new JSON called “ItsAllYourFault.JSON.” I opened it. This time, it was just bunni. When I clicked the space bar, a text box appeared that said “I wouldn’t have dont that if I were you.” Then I heard a loud noise. I couldn’t pinpoint it, however, nothing in my house seemed wrong. Even the bunni plush remained in its scratched up state. I had started to accept that Bunni was never gonna come back to scratch, so I decided to let it go. Later that week the depression took hold and I quit my job. I eventually gave up on life and just stayed in my room for the next few months. I tried to muster up the will to go outside but I just couldn’t. During that time I was at home I swear my mind was playing tricks on me, my CD turned up. It was where it had always been, but Adam Young’s signature was gone. The Bunni plush moves around my room. I receive normal texts from my sister such as “Come back soon bro, we miss you.” And “Hey, brother. Where ya been?” I would reply but she wouldn’t. Around this time scratch was released to the public, without JSON support, so the nightmare was over. Bunni wouldn’t torment me anymore. I was right. Bunni’s reign of terror was over. It became obvious my sister's death wasn’t her doing, but bunni’s instead and with that I burned the plush and deleted the artwork files and JSONS and the scratch alpha. Eventually life went back to normal, I now work as a white hat hacker, with plans to work with Google.