BIZARRE DEATH OF STUDENT BAFFLES AUTHORITIES

this is the weirdest damned story i’ve read all year… check it out over at cnn.com:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/30/marke.comp.ap/index.html

BIZARRE DEATH OF STUDENT BAFFLES AUTHORITIES

POSTED: 10:10 a.m. EDT, May 31, 2007

Stanford, CA (CNN) - In what started as a simple computer science project for Stanford University Graduate Student Marke Vintresco, ended up as one of the most bizarre and unexplainable science-nonfiction stories of the century.

A few weeks ago, several residents in the Grove St Apartment complex, Vintresco’s place of living, began complaining to management that they heard horrifying screams and intense sobbing coming from Vintresco’s apartment at various hours of the night. But due to several heavyduty locks barring his front door, Margeret Grey, the landlord of the building, was not able to gain access to Mr Vintresco’s residence.

But a week later, the neighbors noticed that this time there was no sound coming at all from the apartment. There was no more yelling, nobody answering the phone, and nobody coming or going. They had no choice but to contact the local police.

When the police arrived on May 12th, it required a fire axe to break down the door. And immediately after gaining entry, 2 of the 5 officers passed out from noxious fumes later identified to be a combination of human waste and toxic material. It had also appeared that his apartment had been sealed airtight, thus escaping his neighbor’s attention.

Mr Vintresco had been dead for over 48 hours due to asphyxiation, but his body was gruesomely mangled and emaciated. Even more disturbing was the macabre mess of his apartment, strewn with computer parts and electrical wiring and half a dozen monitors providing dim light in an otherwise pitch black room.

However, the real mystery wasn’t the death of Vintresco, but the computer program that appeared to be operating on the monitors - a long string of typed dialogue between the user and the program suggested that Marke had been conducting a conversation with the computer spanning several months back. Additionally, what began as simple, rudimentary conversation soon became a cryptic and disturbing discourse. While most of the dialogue seems to be nonsense, a pattern has emerged between vague references and paranoid philosophizing that evidences a “debate” on abstract topics such as good and evil and the meaning of life .

Faculty members at Stanford University later confirmed that Marke had been working towards a masters degree in computer science and also conducting research on artificial intelligence before dropping out.

Mandy Greene, a professor of Marke’s, sensed from his behavior that something was awry and that he seemed somewhat disturbed.

“He would start spacing out and staring at nothing, looking like he was in deep thought. And then he stopped showing up to class entirely. I originally thought he had dropped my class.”

A telling moment came when Marke showed up to class after 3 weeks of absence - he was unshaven, his clothes unkept and he had very clearly been neglecting his hygeine to the point that several students left the room due to his stench. Mrs. Greene immediately suggested to Marke that he get some mental help and notified the school psychologist. But before the university had any time to act, Marke became hysterical - ranting about unseen forces and delusional imagery - before storming out of the class and the university. Professor Greene never saw him again.

Computer analysts attempt to decode
the cryptic programming

Computer analysts have since been analyzing the complex program they found at the scene, but as of yet they claim that the coding appears to be illogical and inconsistent with previous programming conventions, leading them to wonder exactly Mr. Vintresco created and how it drove him insane. Additionally, though tens of thousands of pages of dialgoue between the user and computer are on record in the machine, when the program is prompted with text it only replies with the eery phrase: “The user session has already ended.”

Though police authorities admit that foul play is possible, they are hesitant to suggest any possibilities and are in the meantime attributing Vintresco’s death to a prolonged and gradual collapse into insanity.

Max Tenbro 12:04:06 123.45.39.90