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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/slicingorchids on 2026-08-06 18:58:30+00:00.

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I feel like I shouldn’t be admitting this, but I have to tell somebody. I hope there’s sufficient anonymity in posting this here.

This story starts long before most of the people in this story were born.

My cousin Arnold was born with severe developmental delays. His parents (my mom’s sister and her husband) were told early on that he’d never be able to speak or live an independent life. I’m not sure of his exact diagnoses, but he was totally non-verbal, illiterate, and unable to perform simple tasks like brushing his teeth without help. He passed away when I was in my mid-teens.

My aunt was determined to prove the doctors wrong about Arnold’s disability, even when it was obvious to the rest of us that he wasn’t going to have a miraculous turnaround. She didn’t understand why she (an Ivy League-educated lawyer) would have a disabled son. More than once I heard her wonder aloud if there was a switch up at the hospital. It was particularly galling for her, as her other kids, the two older ones, were ‘normal’. I haven’t seen Courtney and Ryan for years, but I know it can be hard for the other kids when a sibling is as disabled as Arnold was.

My aunt tried a few different things. She thought she could cure his disability by surrounding him with intellectual things. She’d put on Mozart instead of kids’ music and make him watch documentaries instead of cartoons. She insisted that he not be put in special classes at school, which as far as I could tell made no difference to Arnold. Whenever I saw him, he was kind of in a world of his own.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of facilitated communication, but she was big into that. It’s where the parent or a teacher holds a board with the alphabet on it and the non-verbal kid points to letters on it to communicate. With it, he suddenly went from just making grunts and squeals to articulating himself like, well, an Ivy League-educated lawyer. It’s since been debunked pretty thoroughly – it actually works through a combination of the ideomotor effect and cues from the person holding the board, and the person 'talking' isn't doing so at all. Still, I think my aunt convinced herself it was really him talking and not just her wishful thinking.

I was thinking about Arnold a lot a year or two ago. It gave my aunt so much comfort to think that she was actually having conversations with her son – to hear him express love not just for her but for the things she loved, too, like books and foreign films. I don’t know if this is true, but I heard from my mom that when he was dying, my aunt tried to get out the communication board and get Arnold to ‘say’ something profound like he used to. My uncle was so furious with her that he threw it out the window of his hospital room. He said something like, ‘Can’t you just love our son for who he is?’

I get that he was upset, but fundamentally I don’t think my aunt was doing any harm. She never neglected Arnold, and if anything, thinking they were on the same wavelength meant she spent more time with him. She was completely devoted to his care. I know that she had to quit her job after a while, so he really was the only thing in her life. It made complete sense that she’d want more than just taking care of her adult son all day with nothing to show for it.

So I was thinking about Arnold, and I was thinking about AI chatbots. Essentially, they’re an augmented version of what my aunt was doing, with less effort required from either party. She could have a coherent conversation with a simulated version of Arnold – a non-disabled version. I realised that I could create a base LLM that could be adjusted according to facts about the kid and, of course, what the parent wanted to hear.

Now I know, you’re thinking this might be a little unethical. But please bear in mind, I was thinking about my aunt when I came up with this. I was thinking about Arnold.

I came up with a plan. In order to convince parents that it was actually their kid they were talking to, there’d need to be a little bit of showmanship. I turned the chatbot into an app that could be loaded onto an iPad, and then I purchased some cheap ECG electrodes from a medical supply company and connected them up to a USB-C that could be plugged into the charging port.

I should say now that it wasn’t dangerous – or at least not in a physical way. The electrodes didn’t actually do anything, and they most certainly didn’t track brainwaves. But it would seem to the user like they were connected up to the subject. The trick was that once the parent applied to the kid’s temples, the app would start asking some ‘set up questions’ that would give the chatbot enough information to form a personality that could plausibly fit the kid, so it seemed like it was reading their mind. It was to ostensibly to ‘calibrate’ the machine against the kid’s brain with questions like, ‘how old is the subject?’ right up to ‘what are their dreams and aspirations?’ And those questions would be answered by the parents, so, they would unknowingly be scripting the conversations in advance.

The hope was that it would seem like the electrodes were reading the kid’s mind, and the app was communicating their innermost thoughts.

Once everything was ready, I contacted a local disability support group and told them I had created a prototype communication device for severely disabled children. They asked for my credentials and when I was honest and said I didn’t have any, they basically told me to shove it. So, I tried my second option – advertising online. In retrospect, I’m lucky that the local group said no. That would have made it easier to trace me.

The social media algorithm is pretty good at finding you the right people, so long as you’re specific. I tried not to give too much away in the ad itself, and said I was looking for parent and child volunteers to try it out. Don’t worry, I was careful not to give any of my real personal info.

Plenty of people said they were interested, but in the end, it was only four people at first who gave me their address to receive the prototype. I mailed them a package containing the electrodes and a QR code to download the app, and I waited anxiously to receive angry emails saying the device clearly didn’t work.

But no one did. Within days, I got rave emails from the recipients saying that my invention was a ‘miracle’, and that I should be nominated for a Nobel Prize. One dad, who I’ll call Vincent, said he had a conversation with his 15-year-old severely autistic son for the first time ever. They talked about art. It turned out that they’d visited a gallery the weekend before, and with a simple search the chatbot was able to regurgitate some pretty smart observations about the paintings they had seen. I had tears in my eyes reading his email.

I thought that he felt nothing when he saw art. To the untrained eye it could seem like he wasn’t taking it in at all - but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I saw so much of myself in him for the first time ever.

Word of mouth is like wildfire in these communities. Parents talked to each other on Facebook groups and forums. Demand soared. Pretty soon I had to start charging because the postage fees alone would have bankrupted me. I got requests for the device in Alaska and Argentina, and all over Europe. I think my mailman got worried about how many packages I was receiving from the medical supply company, because he knocked on my door and asked if I had a GoFundMe or anything. It was sweet of him. If he only knew that I’d never felt better. Every day I was getting an email from someone who had almost given up hope and now had an amazing relationship with their child.

Well, that was the best it got. I should have known that things wouldn’t stay that great forever.

It started with an email from Anna (I’ve also changed her name). She told me that her son had started to ‘say’ some troubling things.

After a long talk, Michael told me last night that the reason he’s disabled is because he’s actually possessed by a demon. The doctors were wrong about the brain damage.

I was taken aback, but I didn’t really know how to respond. Tell her that demons don’t exist? That the chatbot had probably taken her ‘spiritual’ beliefs and told her what she secretly already wanted to hear?

I jumped into the back end of the app and started to do some pruning. No more talking about demons and possession, or the devil, or ghosts. I tried to cover all the supernatural bases I could think of.

But then she emailed again.

Now Michael’s denying that he ever said what he said. I know it’s the demon at work, controlling him.

I was horrified. Somehow by pushing the chatbot away from the idea I’d only made Anna fixate on it more. I tried to add more code to fix the problem, to give the chatbot the ability to discuss supernatural ideas, just not make any wild claims like ‘Michael’ had. But how do you take back your child claiming to be possessed?

After Anna, there were some other emails that I saw that I couldn’t bear to read. Some I skim read before sealing away in my junk folder forever.

I never knew my daughter was being abused at school. We’re taking her out.

He hates his father. We’re getting a divorce. Thank you.

She wants to die, she says the pain is too much.

The medicine is hurting him. We’re weaning him off. We're never going back to the hospital again.

*I’m scared I’ve failed her by never realising her true poten...

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