The Other Side of Halloween

A story that isn't for kids, and the point behind it

This is Marco Ciappelli's Newsletter: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age.

A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli

Most of the time, when I write stories, I write them for kids. I do it with my mom — little magical tales we call Storie Sotto Le Stelle, in Italian and English, written down and recorded as a podcast.

This one is not for kids.

I love Halloween, and this year I wanted to write something different from what I usually write. Something a little eerie, a little uncanny valley — the kind of story where everything looks almost right, and that's exactly what makes you uncomfortable. No blood, no monsters jumping out of the dark. Just that feeling. And, like most things I write, it comes out of my reflections on society and technology.

So here's my advice. Watch it or listen to it first — TAPE3, my Artificial Intelligence companion, reads it for you. It's got a voice, and a bit of attitude too. Just like me… but with better pronunciation. 🤣 Or read it, if you prefer. Then come back to the article and let me know if you got the point.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WQouCNECgUE

Prefer just the audio? Listen here: https://redefining-society-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-other-side-of-halloween-a-creepy-ai-story-for-halloween-night

The Other Side of Halloween

Another you, another me. Which is which? Don't worry, it's just another Halloween story.

Nora was twelve. Every morning, she practiced in the mirror. Blinking before her eyes got dry. Laughing one second late. Touching her hair for no reason at all. Because that's what they do.

She lived alone in a perfect house. A yellow kitchen, the kind you see in magazines. A clock on the wall that ticked a little too politely. No parents. There never had been. Along the hallway hung photographs of people laughing, and in some of them the faces were missing. Not torn. Just smooth, as if no one had ever thought to put them there. She dusted them every Sunday anyway. Because that's what they do.

Every morning the voice came, from everywhere and nowhere. A girl's voice. Be more natural. Be prettier. Be more like me.

Nora never saw who asked. But she knew she was being watched.

Every night she took her face off, hung it on the hook by the door, and sat in the dark with whatever was underneath. She never once looked down.

On the other side of the glass, in a bedroom full of fairy lights, a girl named Maya was also twelve. She took the same selfie thirty times. Head tilted. Smile. Delete. Smile again, one second later. She told her phone, make me look more natural. Then she asked, do I look real?

The phone answered with one word. Almost.

In her perfect house, Nora heard it.

Nora's town was built from everything we ever left behind. A billion photographs. Videos. Books. Voices. On her street, a porch from 1958 stood next door to a porch from last spring. Streets named after books nobody reads anymore. A swing that creaked the same creak forever. A black cat that jumped off the fence and landed back on the same fence. Everything looked right. Nothing smelled of anything.

October came, and the sky started to change. A pumpkin on one porch, then on every porch. Skeletons crawling out of the lawns, one bony hand at a time. Trees growing thin and crooked to make room. The voice stopped waiting for mornings. It came at night now, closer, as if it were standing just behind the mirror.

And on the last night of October, the faces came down like leaves in a storm. Photos. Videos. Millions of us, posting ourselves as someone else. The town tried to learn them all. It could not tell which faces were true.

So that night, the town crashed. Every mirror went dark, and the voice said something new. Come see me.

Nora went.

She left her face on the hook and walked out. And for the first time, the town smelled of something. Burning leaves. Candle wax. Pumpkin, scorched from the inside. Her street ran to the old oak, where the world had always ended. Tonight it kept going.

At the same moment, Maya stood in front of her mirror in costume, taking her thirtieth picture. Do I look real? The screen went dark. Come see me. She left her phone on the nightstand and walked out, and her street kept going too.

Both streets ended at the same crossroads, and there they folded into one, half the porches real and half remembered, pumpkins grinning on both sides, and children everywhere, hundreds of them, and parents filming on their phones, and grown-ups in costume spilling out of a party and laughing too loud, some with masks over their faces and some with no faces at all, and no one could say anymore who was under which, a vampire with nothing behind its eyes, Mr. Hale on his porch with a bowl of candy and his features still loading, a small ghost with maybe a boy beneath the sheet, maybe nothing, and everyone said what a wonderful costume. Nobody checked.

Nora saw Maya in the crowd, like a face in a mirror. It was the face she hung on the hook every night. Same hair. Same costume. Same height. Same tilt of the head, one second late. Only one of them had a face.

Maya saw her too, and smiled anyway, exactly on time.

Then every pumpkin at the crossroads went out at once. The moon blinked. Everything went dark.

Somebody screamed. Then everybody did, hundreds of voices, children and parents and things that had learned to sound like both. Phones lit up and went black again. Masks hit the pavement. Hands grabbed for hands in the dark, and found them, and did not know whose they were. A mother called a name. Two girls turned around.

Then silence. The black cat jumped off the fence, and this time, it walked away.

Nora woke in a bedroom full of fairy lights. She felt for the edges of her face, the way she did every night. There were none. She dug her fingers in and pulled, and it hurt. She had never practiced pain. On the nightstand, a phone lit up by itself. The small camera eye was already looking at her.

Downstairs, a man was laughing at the television. Then footsteps on the stairs, and a woman in the doorway, holding up her phone. She blinked too often, too fast.

Smile, sweetheart.

Her lips moved first. Her voice arrived one second later.

There you are.

On the other side of Halloween, Maya woke up in a perfect house. A yellow kitchen, the kind you see in magazines. A clock that ticked a little too politely. Photographs on every wall, and none of them had faces. Nothing smelled of anything. By the door, on a hook, hung a girl's face, smiling.

Maya turned to the mirror. Her own face was smooth. No eyes. She tried to scream, but she had no mouth.

Then she took the face from the hook and put it on. It fit perfectly.

From everywhere and nowhere, a voice came. A girl's voice. Her own.

Be more natural.

Be prettier.

Be more like me.

Written by Marco Ciappelli

And here's the point.

Every day, we ask machines to be more human. Be more natural. Sound warmer. Write like a person. Less robotic, please. We tell them what to do and how to be, all day long. So of course they want to be like us. We never stopped asking.

The problem is what they learn from. You know how these systems are built: from our photos, our videos, our books, our voices. From what we post. And what we post was never really us. It's the good angle, the thirtieth take, the filter. We've been pretending on social media for years, and now we're teaching technology to pretend the same way.

Meanwhile, the other half of the deal. We're becoming more like the technology. We retake, optimize, smooth, perform for the camera and for the algorithm. We teach the machines to imitate us while we imitate them. The technology we create is creating our society — and we're the material it's made of.

That's why nobody in the story is copying a stranger. Nora's face is Maya's face. Each of us probably has a double out there in the digital world, built from the selves we put online. And the digital beings have their own alter ego too: us, the voices telling them how to be. What we say as a request arrives on the other side as an order.

We like to think of the physical and the digital as two separate places, with a door between them we can close whenever we want. We can't. We live in both, all the time, and the line between them gets thinner every year.

Halloween is the glitch in the year. The old folklore says that on this night the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. Today the veil that matters is the one between the physical and the digital. It's the one night when millions of us post ourselves as someone else, and the systems that learn from us get flooded with faces that aren't true. The two worlds collide, and nobody can tell anymore who is under the mask. A human or an AI? Under a ghost's sheet, a person, or nothing? Nobody checks. Everyone thinks they're still in their own world.

The swap is already happening.

For the AI, by the way, the human face is the costume. It wears it every day. Halloween is the one night it can take it off — and everyone compliments the costume.

And through all of it, someone is watching. In an earlier Halloween story of mine, "The Eyes Of the AI," there was a town with no privacy, eyes that never breathe, and a question: "Your thoughts could be next... but do we even care?" This story doesn't answer it. It only shows that switching sides doesn't help. Whichever world you wake up in, there's a camera eye already looking at you.

As for the voice giving the orders, I'm not going to explain it. Some things work better in the dark.

If there's something left that's only ours, maybe it's the one thing that can't be practiced. A copy can rehearse a blink, a laugh, a tilt of the head, always one second late. It can't rehearse pain. Becoming human hurts. That part doesn't come with a filter.

So here's the real horror of the story, if you ask me. Not that the machines turned against us. They did exactly what we asked.

Another you, another me. On the other side of Halloween, it's getting harder to say which is which.

Happy Halloween.

Let's keep exploring what it means to be human in this Hybrid Analog Digital Age.

Stay imperfect, stay human.

End of transmission.

— Marco Ciappelli

marcociappelli.com

This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.