October 25, 2025 — 11:00 PM

Sometimes you have to dive into your own world. That was how Michael Tennyson explained it to his wife before retreating for the weekend to work on the legacy Compaq Portable in the garage. A gifted systems engineer, Michael had recently acquired the vintage machine while consulting for a private defense contractor cleaning up ancient classified archives. The device still booted into a primitive DOS — something older than version 2.11, but not quite version 2.0 either — and the hard drive contained fragments of an abandoned logistics project that had once supported nuclear command simulations.

Michael, intrigued by what he called “impossible code,” spent hours reverse-engineering it, eventually restoring a batch file labeled ENDRUN.BAT. His wife last saw him typing commands by the amber glow of the CRT monitor:

C:\PROJECT\DEFCON> type en drun.bat
@echo off
cd \system\deep
run memchk /nuclear /defrag /hush
/End Run

When she returned the next morning, Michael was seated upright in the same chair, eyes wide open but utterly unresponsive. EMS couldn’t classify his condition—he wasn’t unconscious, but no one could reach him. A local hospital transferred him to a military research facility after discovering irregular EEG patterns that mimicked digital frequency pulses.

That’s when Cyber Forensics got involved. A team was dispatched to analyze the machine, which had remained powered on and humming. On screen, a DOS cursor blinked silently. Investigators noticed the bizarre command /End Run, which looked out of place. It wasn’t standard DOS, or any known syntax. Yet it had executed.

They combed through the batch file and system logs. Then the anomalies started:

  • One team member’s laptop crashed every time they saved notes about the batch file.
  • A second analyst began experiencing auditory hallucinations—described as “metal scraping on bone.”
  • A third developed a sudden fear of confined spaces, having grown convinced that something inside the machine “was still running.”

The original machine contained no network card. No modem. No discernible way it could communicate externally. But someone—or something—had updated the time stamps on files just hours before Michael’s collapse.

In a final attempt to decode the batch file, one analyst recreated the sequence on a virtual machine. Upon executing /End Run, the emulated environment froze, displaying only this message:

LOGIC BREACH DETECTED
MEMORY INDEX CORRUPTED
YOU CANNOT UNMAKE WHAT WAS RUN

The analyst’s system never rebooted. The virtual disk self-erased. No one was able to replicate the event again.

Michael remains catatonic, trapped in a waking void, whispering to no one:

“…it ran… I just wanted to clean it… but it ran… it ran me.”

And the machine in the garage? It still boots. Every time, the same prompt:

C:\PROJECT\DEFCON>

No one types anything. Not anymore.

—Footnote: /End Run is not a valid DOS or BASIC command. It does, however, resemble syntax from FORTRAN batch routines used in Cold War simulations. There is no known function associated with it. Possibly, there never was.