GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: THE GATEKEEPERS
There’s something lurking in the code, in the algorithms that’s preying on us—If you’ve seen this post, it might already be too late.
The door was open. It wasn’t supposed to be. It gaped like an invitation no one wanted, humming with silence. I stepped inside Justine’s apartment, whispering their name. No response. Just the kind of stillness that feels loaded. And then I saw the blood.
It was smeared along the edge of their keyboard—a perfect, curling half-print of a fingertip. Beneath it was a tiny message written in red Sharpie on the back of a Post-it note:
"Rule 0 is real."
That was the last thing they ever wrote.
Justine was my best friend, my writing partner, and the person who convinced me to start posting to r/[redacted]. They’d had a few weird run-ins with trolls and vague threats—some from users, some from mods. Stories getting pulled. Cryptic warnings. But Justine always laughed it off. Until one night they didn’t.
We were on a video call discussing story ideas when Justine went quiet. They mentioned getting some strange messages after their last post. The username didn’t ring any bells. Likely just a troll, they said.
Then the screen froze. Glitched. Went black. Justine was gone.
I texted. Called. Emailed. Nothing.
The very next morning, I logged on and their Reddit profile was gone. The username: deleted. All of their stories, every meme, every file in our shared cloud folder—vanished. I tried calling again, only to hear the hollow message that the number was no longer in service. For the first few days, I assumed something had come up. A trip. A breakdown. But by the end of the first week, reality started sinking in. Justine never showed up to their shifts at the bookstore. Their apartment remained untouched. Weeks passed, and still—nothing. The police called it a voluntary disappearance.
But I had the note. And the blood. And something else—an archived message thread. The last user who threatened Justine.
I saved the username: u/[redacted]. I assumed it was some obsessed freak—someone who couldn’t separate fiction from reality. I thought I could track them down.
I was wrong.
I’ve survived cancer. I’ve been stabbed with garden shears. I once fended off a meth-fueled attack with a shovel. Horror has always kept me grounded. It saved my life.
I’ve always been drawn to horror that creeps in slowly. The kind that makes you laugh nervously before it whispers something unforgettable. That’s why, after facing death twice, I started writing stories and sharing them on r/[redacted]—probably the biggest horror community online.
I posted a few. Some did fine. One got pulled for not being a “personal scary experience.” I asked why, didn’t get much, and moved on.
Despite that, I loved it. It felt like home. People encouraged me. Said I had a gift. It wasn’t huge, but it mattered. Writing horror eased my anxiety, my ADHD, my PTSD. It gave me peace.
Then I posted that story.
It was about a girl who hears voices calling her name from outside. She follows them. Disappears. The narrator—me—hears them too. Quiet. Creepy. No gore. Just dread and vanishing children. I followed all the rules. First-person. Past tense. Directly affected.
It blew up—over 210K views, 1.5K upvotes, nearly 100 comments. Then, right before the seven-day mark, it got pulled.
The reason? “Not a scary personal experience.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had written it from my perspective. It literally happened to me—within the rules of the subreddit’s immersive fiction framework.
I received a cold message:
“Hi u/[redacted], your post has been removed for not complying with rule 1. Do not repost or appeal without mod permission. Further action will result in a permanent ban.”
I was furious but focused. I had more stories to tell—and Justine’s disappearance had become fuel. So I sent a respectful message asking for clarification. That night I lay awake, thinking about Justine, obsessively refreshing my inbox.
At 3:17AM, my smoke alarm went off. There was no fire. No smoke. Just a high-pitched, metallic scream. My cat hissed at my closed bedroom door and wouldn’t come near me.
The next morning, there was a sticky note on my laptop:
“You saw something they didn’t like.”
I live alone.
I called for my cat. Nothing. I sat down, shaken. Then my screen began pulsing. One by one, my browser tabs closed—until only one remained:
“Rule #0: The Main Character Must Not Become Self-Aware.”
A glitch. A scream. My laptop emitted a burst of shrieking static. I hit the floor, clutching my ears. Blood poured from one of them. I vomited on the rug.
Then my cat spasmed violently on top of my tablet. Her body arched and twitched, like something was rewriting her from the inside out. A low, mechanical whimper escaped her. Then silence.
The lights flickered. My vision warped. The pressure behind my right eye exploded into a migraine so intense it felt like my skull would burst. I dragged myself to the mirror.
My sclera glowed red. Veins spidered through it like black circuitry. A blinking cursor flickered in the center.
Then I blacked out.
A week passed. My eye began to heal. I tried to write again. I had to. But the rules—they haunted me. Justine’s memory pressed down like gravity.
That’s when I found the second sticky note:
“That removed your witnessing privileges.”
In a panic, I visited someone I trusted. Someone real. Her name was Beth, and she’d never let me down. I showed up at her apartment.
Beth’s apartment always smelled like dried sage and soldered wires. Her shelves were lined with thrifted monitors, half-burnt candles, and jars filled with things like iron shavings and bones she swore were raccoon knuckles. She was into all the weird stuff—UFOs, cyber witchcraft, analog curses, and cursed algorithms. A techno-occultist with a Reddit addiction and a tarot deck made from circuit boards. I told her everything. As much as I could without sounding completely insane—but Beth didn’t flinch. She just nodded and poured me tea from a chipped kettle shaped like a skull.
She listened. Quietly. Thoughtfully.
Then she asked, “Who was the person Justine argued with?”
I pulled up the old messages. u/[redacted].
Beth scrolled on her phone. Her eyes widened.
“That’s a mod.”
She grabbed a pen. Scribbled something on a napkin. Pushed it toward me across the table.
/r/theunformatted.me
“Don’t speak,” she said. “Someone might be listening.”
I went home. Right before typing in the URL, another message hit my inbox:
"Your behavior demonstrates an unrealistic expectation of what mods are able to do in their volunteer time... It’s unnerving to say you love it here and can understand 'some subjectivity' while choosing to participate... Please do not reply to this message."
That was it. It wasn’t gatekeeping anymore. It wasn’t just a bad mod or a power trip. The rules felt alive—shifting, mocking me.
Something was wrong.
I typed in the URL.
/r/theunformatted was a graveyard. Dead posts. Erased comments. A digital necropolis of stories that had been “removed.”
And there, inside the static, I found Em and Ravi.
They were like me. Writers. Survivors. Victims. Each one injured in ways that echoed the themes of their censored stories. In mine, the protagonist lost their sight.
That wasn’t a coincidence.
I drove seven hours to meet them. They told me the truth.
The mods aren’t human. They’re called Fragments.
Self-aware code, born from the first wave of automated moderation tools. Entities that feast on structure, rules, and control. They hunt for creativity and erase it.
And they always leave five sticky notes before they delete you.
Em and Ravi had dozens. We laid them out. It formed a pattern.
“You saw something they didn’t like.”
“That removed your witnessing privileges.”
“Your formatting has been corrected.”
“You are no longer the main character.”
“This violates immersion.”
It wasn’t a warning.
It was a ritual.
So we used it against them.
We baited one. Set up fake accounts. Posted a story embedded with symbols. The words formed a druidic sigil—coded protection hidden in narrative structure.
Then, in Ravi’s apartment, we formed a triangle on the floor. Each of us posted a comment continuing the story. We described the sigil. We named its parts.
It worked.
Our screens glitched in unison. Laptops burned hot. We dropped them to the floor. Lights flared as the hum of code became unbearable. The algorithms screamed.
Then:
“This violates immersion.”
A figure emerged from the center of the triangle. Tall. Wrapped in flair. A hoodie flickering with meme static. Its face was a CRT monitor, cycling through usernames. Its hands were wires—red, black, yellow—sparking at the tips.
It reached for me.
Em shouted:
“I am the author of my own fear.”
The Fragment screamed, a grinding screech that sounded like corrupted audio and steel scraping through bone. Its skull cracked with a burst of static, and thick, steaming lines of liquid HTML spilled from its gut like molten circuitry. The air rippled with heat as the creature lunged for Em, distorting reality around it with a sound like shattering glass and dial-up tones dragged through a meat grinder.
Ravi let out a roar and tackled it mid-leap, sparks flying from the impact of code meeting flesh. I kicked its screen. Em screamed the final line.
The Fragment exploded in a blast of karma and static.
When the smoke cleared, Em was gone. So was Ravi. Only I remained.
My left eye was fried. I stumbled from the room, crying. If this was just one mod—one Fragment—how many more were out there?
Three weeks have passed.I’m on the run. Nowhere is safe.
I’m posting this anyway. From a burner account. Through a VPN. At a friend’s house. No last name. No real location. No doxxing. No rules broken.
I think I still exist. They think I still exist. I think I still remember who I am. They still remember who I am.
But if this disappears too… if this post gets pulled…
Then I’ll know they’ve found me again.
Please. If you see this—comment. Upvote. Share.
Because if no one’s watching… they’ll take that as permission.
And the Mods don’t just delete posts. They delete people.
And you might be next.
This is the sigil we embedded in the original post. It’s not art. It’s protection.
Save it. Share it. Set it as your wallpaper. Print it and keep it near at all times.It doesn’t stop them. But it slows them down.
The more people who carry it, the harder it is for them to track who started it.If you've seen the sticky notes, you're already flagged.
Within minutes, they found me. But they played right into my trap. Before I departed, I was able to leave them with a parting gift, This one is for Em. - “I am the author of my own fear”.
Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio
THE HORROR OF GATEKEEPING IN HORROR: This story was inspired by a sad and unprofessional experience on the NoSleep Subreddit, documented in this article that includes receipts.