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Statement of Jacob Danver. Regarding his experiences on a dating app. Original statement given December 8th, 2022. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I wish he never downloaded that stupid app. Being single sucks, but now I realize it’s better than whatever the hell the alternative was the app tried to sell me on.
Greg’s been a good friend of mine for a few years now. We met in Uni and after we graduated decided to become roommates to save on rent. We were pretty close, I guess, and after he broke up with his then girlfriend, I was there to cheer him up. I took him out to bars to get stupid drunk and forget about her. I listened to him rant and mope about the breakup like a good friend.
It all started when he told me about this dating app he downloaded. I took it as a good sign since I figured it meant he was ready to move on. He said her name was Jessica, and he seemed pretty excited. I was happy for him, of course, and when he told me they were meeting up for drinks one night I smiled and didn’t give it a second thought.
He came back the next day with a stupid grin on his face, and said he’d had a great time at Jess’ place. He showed me pictures, and I recognized the girl from her dating profile. Maybe if I’d thought to ask to compare the two, I would have noticed how the pictures from Jessica’s profile looked weirdly similar to Greg's night out. Not identical, of course, but the scenes from the app looked like they could have been from anywhere. The first few pictures of Jess that Greg showed me would have fit in at any club or bar or pub within a hundred mile radius. The pretty brown haired girl in the pictures seemed to match up, and I commented to Greg that the filters he used were pretty cool. He gave me a weird look, though, so I didn’t push it.
I nodded and laughed as he repeated a joke she’d told him. “She’s just so real,” He told me. “I’ve never met anyone so genuine.” That was embarrassingly corny, I thought, and I told him so. Greg rolled his eyes and told me I was just too close minded, which was a strange thing to say but I brushed it off. I told him I was happy for him and Jessica, that I couldn’t wait to meet her.
I didn’t bother asking him for details about their first night, or any other night they spent together. It was already implied, although now…I can’t help but wonder what they did.
Jess and Greg had been talking for about a month when Greg asked if I wanted to meet her. I agreed, and he was excited when he told me they were going to become official. While I was happy for him, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be a third wheel all night.
Unfortunately, Greg picked up on that.
Greg told me Jess had some other friends who wanted to come along, and one of them was single. I agreed, but I wasn’t expecting Greg’s reaction. His face lit up and started going on about how perfect we’d be together. “You’ll be a real couple,” He told me, which made me frown. I opened my mouth to ask him what that was supposed to mean, but Greg already had my phone in his hand. I thought he was putting in her contact, but noticed instead that he was downloading an app.
It was the dating app Greg found Jessica on, and he told me to make an account. He insisted I’d find Jess’ friend, and ignored me when I tried to point out there had to be hundreds of other women signed up. Greg was positive I’d match with the right girl, and I gave up arguing. I figured I didn’t have much to lose.
After a few days I’d matched with a girl named Kate. Kate was blonde, with high cheekbones and plump lips. She used the same filters as Jessica, and Greg confirmed that was her friend. Weird coincidence aside, I was happy to meet someone that was exactly my type. We hit it off right away. She was interested in all the things I was, and knew everything there was to know about all my hobbies. It wasn’t like she was copy and pasting stuff from google either, she really knew her stuff.
We agreed to meet up for lunch at a nearby cafe. I was excited to finally see her in person, because a part of me still felt suspicious. It was too good to be true, right? Like maybe I was being catfished by some scam Greg had gotten pulled into, or this was all some elaborate prank, but I pushed those thoughts aside. I sucked up my nerves and dressed as nicely as I could while still being casual and took the tube over.
I didn't get stood up, and Kate was waving at me from the table she’d grabbed. She grinned and told me how happy she was to finally meet me in person. When she went in for a hug I reciprocated, but when I hugged her back I noticed how…soft her body was.
I promise I don’t mean it in a weird, creepy way, but it was like hugging a giant stress ball, even though the contact only lasted a few seconds. The pictures really hadn’t been filtered, because her skin was as smooth in person. In the moment I understood why Greg had been so poetic when describing Jess. Kate looked almost polished and sculpted like an ancient marble statue, yet as soft and warm as…
At the time I didn’t come up with a specific analogy, but now the only word that comes to mind is flesh. Which is a weird thing to think, right? Of course Kate was flesh and blood, she couldn’t be anything else, but even then in the back of my mind I noticed the almost artificial realness. Like she was a hyper realistic sculpture, that looked real enough but still alerted something in the back of my mind. Uncanny valley it’s called, I think. I didn’t think to look that sort of stuff up until after it all.
Inside the cafe was warm. It was a cold day, and the heating of the small shop was working overtime. Inside was toasty, and I blamed the pink in my cheeks on the heat. Kate was unaffected by the warmth even though I took off my jacket to stop sweating. She had to notice the uncomfortable heat, though, right? She never stopped smiling as we chatted, but her face was shiny either from a sheen of sweat or makeup.
The date was going well. The conversation focused only on me, though not for lack of trying. I tried to ask her questions about her own life, but she smoothly deflected all of them to the point where I don’t think I knew much more about her than her first name. I told Kate about my hobbies, and when I asked about hers she paused for a second. She seemed unsure, before she gave me a bland smile and said she “liked learning and photography”. I tried to get her to elaborate, asking if she studied photography, if she had a portfolio, or got any sort of higher education to pursue these interests. She brushed it off, saying she picked things up here and there, and she’d always been good at adapting. Kate changed the topic, and I never asked again.
I liked Kate, okay? She was funny and smart and beautiful, so I was willing to overlook some of the weird stuff.
She had been eating her sandwich slowly as we chatted while I had finished mine rather quickly. I noticed there was a smudge of something on the corner of her mouth. We were flirting, and I thought it would be smooth of me to lean forward and brush it away. Kate wasn’t alarmed as I moved towards her, and I gave her my most charming smile as I continued to explain whatever mundane interest of mine we were talking about.
I cut myself off abruptly, though, when my thumb touched her skin. It was like sticking my finger in wet putty, and I watched in horror as my thumb left an indent in her skin when I pulled my hand away. For a moment I thought I even saw a flash of white bone as her delicate skin parted under mine. I opened my mouth to apologize, saying I hadn’t meant to press so hard (though I was positive I’d barely brushed her) but she just giggled. Her perpetual smile widened to the point where I wondered if she was trying to distract me from something, if it was even anatomically possible for her face to do that.
She called me a flirt, and as she talked the indent went away. She made no effort to explain it, and I would probably have convinced myself that I’d imagined it if it wasn’t for my thumb. It rubbed away easily enough, but it left an oily sheen on my hands. I told myself it was just makeup or some other cosmetic product.
Eventually it got late, and Kate said she had to go. She told me she enjoyed the date, and said she thanked me for letting her “learn”. I thought it was a strange way to phrase it, but I figured she must mean she was inexperienced. Kate was young like me, and my ego liked to think I was her first foray into the dating pool.
Greg was ecstatic when I said the date went well. Immediately he started to make plans for a double date. He said Jess and Kate wanted to go to a nearby club, the same one from their profile pictures. I agreed and looked forward to meeting up.
Now, for context, it was cold out. By this point it was late December and the weather was starting to change to winter. There was a bitter wind that had me and Greg bundling up to leave our flat, and made me worry about the girls. They seemed unaffected, though, and while both wore sleeveless dresses neither so much as shivered.
I used that as an opportunity to put my arm around Kate under the guise of “keeping her warm”. She and Jess thought that was pretty funny, but Greg soon followed suit and we walked to the club together. I was too busy trying not to be weird about how soft Kate’s skin was to wonder where exactly they’d come from. I didn’t know where they lived, I’d never seen them nearby nor had I seen a cab dropping them off.
Things got weirder as the night went on. I never saw Kate touch the drink she ordered, but she seemed to get as tipsy as I was. She matched my mood exactly, flirting when I flirted and glancing coyly away whenever I got nervous. Around eleven I noticed Greg and Jessica had disappeared, and while I wanted to at least text Greg confirming everything was fine Kate wasn’t worried.
“They’re just having fun,” She said, smiling up at me. Up close in the dim lighting I almost convinced myself that she had…more teeth. Not like they were sharp or pointed canines, no, nothing like that. Just like there were too many to feasibly fit inside her jaw. Like they were squeezed so close together in order to cram into her gums. I leaned closer to try and see, as silly as it sounds my drunk brain meant to count her teeth. When I did that, though, the edges of them seemed blurry and their outlines became hazy.
I guess she thought I was going in for a kiss, because her hand reached up to nudge my face to hers. Something caught in the corner of my eye, though, and I stopped to grab her hand.
Even now I try to convince myself it was just the alcohol. I’ve never hallucinated while drinking before in my life, and I think it would be better for myself if I could believe I was drugged, because thinking about it now hurts.
Like her teeth, her hand looked off. I squinted to try and count her fingers, but they blurred together and made my head ache as I tried to make sense of them. Kate didn’t like that, and soon I found her mouth meeting mine.
Have you ever stuck your mouth in a raw chunk of meat? Neither had I, before that night. It was wet and slimy and not normal. I scrabbled against her body as she pressed further into me, trying to get away and figure out what the hell was going on. My fingers pressed into her skin but they gained no purchase. In fact, it was like sliding my hand through melted wax. Something tripped me as I stumbled backwards, and I landed on my ass. My head knocked back against the floor, and when I came to I was in a dimly lit corridor.
The bartender had seen me collapse and called over security. They told me to go home and sleep it off, saying I’d had too much to drink. There was something not right with Kate and her friend, I’m positive. No one knew what I was talking about when I asked about the girl I was with, and they wouldn’t let me back inside to find her or Greg. I called a cab home and woke the next morning with no messages from Greg explaining where he went or what the hell happened.
I called the police immediately. They laughed when I said Greg was kidnapped and told me not to waste their time because a friend was getting laid. A missing person finally came out when none of our other friends had seen him after a couple of days.
There’s been no sign of him.
Greg was my best mate, and I miss him. I went to delete the app he downloaded for me to meet Kate on, but I couldn’t find it. A little digging in my phone revealed that the developer had completely rebranded it to one of those AI art generators from Twitter. Apparently it’s controversial because no one can find the source material used to train software.
I tried a couple of different prompts and got some cool pictures. I had to stop though, because all the people it generated looked eerily familiar to Kate and Jess. The shiny smooth skin and the odd anatomy was too much for me.
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.
Greg Wheeler was reported missing December 3rd, and has not been seen since the dates given in the statement. The app our statement giver referenced is no longer online, or it’s been rebranded once again, and is impossible to find amidst the millions of others like it.
I called the club they went to and requested a copy of their incident report. Their statement lines up with ours, in the sense that no one can seem to remember either of the girls with the two men. After some more digging and bribing of one of the security guards, I managed to get footage of the night Greg disappeared.
Surveillance cameras show Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Danver entering the club, although the majority of the footage is so degraded we’re not able to see much other than a glimpse or two of either face. They entered in a large group, and the images are too distorted to make out if either one of them entered with one of the women Mr. Danver described. Witnesses from the bar’s statement seemed to recall the a few women out that night who might fit Mr. Danver’s description, but it’s nearly impossible to discern actuality from drunken memories of the masses.
Regardless, this is not the only recent statement we’ve received regarding similar circumstances. I have Tim and Martin on the lookout for any more statements regarding this artificial flesh.
