The Truth Behind the Mandela Effect
Everything that people think they know about the Mandela effect is incorrect. The phenomenon has been occurring for years, only most dismissed it as a fluke. In the most severe cases those experiencing the effect were diagnosed as having some sort of mental illness, and subsequently medicated, or committed.  Then it was given a name, and seemingly overnight that very same concept devolved into a disreputable meme, an online joke associated with paranormal fanatics. Several years ago I worked for a group of people called the Greyleaf Consortium. They’ve been around for decades. However, the members of the elusive group gather in secret, and as far as the public knows, Greyleaf doesn’t exist. Among the organization’s ranks are the top scientists in their respective fields, as well as a cabal of extremely wealthy men and women. Their stated purpose was to provide a creative outlet for some of the most intelligent people in the world, and to allow them the freedom to develop their ideas without fear of limited funding, or of meddling and interference from the political bureaucracy. With the Consortium involved, money would never be an object, the tradeoff being that any creation of significant merit could be auctioned off and sold to the highest bidder. The influence of the Consortium stretches all the way to Washington. While not directly associated with our government, they have secured a great portion of their independence from the research and development they’ve provided to the U.S. military. With elected officials busy looking the other way, the Consortium delved into questionable avenues with very little government oversight, exploring aspects of science that others veered away from. It was during this exploration that they discovered a revelation that would change everything for years to come. Traditionally we’ve always viewed consciousness as tantamount to our concept of “self.” As the old saying goes, “I think, therefore I am.” In 1981, to the contrary, scientists within the Consortium determined, through their research, that the “self” was just the tip of the iceberg. Below our surface layer of individuality, they identified a so-called “collective unconsciousness.” According to their lead researchers, we – all of humanity – were tethered to a living, breathing hive consciousness, an interconnected series of threads outside the realm of our perception. If you will, imagine your mind as a house. Everything that happens within said house is solely dependent on your own will. Your choices and decisions are all generated within the confines of this house. Now imagine that you stepped outside of your house. Imagine that you walked up the street only to find another house, and another, and another. Think about all the various connections that these houses have to one another. The streets that link the neighborhoods, the neighborhoods that link the cities, and so on, and so forth. Since the beginning of our species’ existence, humans have adopted ideas, concepts, and ideologies, which have inexplicably managed, throughout history, to spread from one culture to another, despite there being tremendous geographic distances separating those communities. How such knowledge, or even a portion of it – including myths, legends, and language – could be shared by these people, who never made formal, physical contact with one another, was until recently a mystery. Everything in our universe is made of energy. Atoms are made up of vortices of energy; vibrations, if you will, and everything is constantly spinning. Greyleaf scientists found that all of our individual minds, in spite of physical separation, generate an identical subatomic frequency, and just like a radio station, they theorized the possibility of tuning into this frequency. For years the notion of psychic activity such as telekinesis or precognition had teetered at the far edges of fringe science.  Suddenly, all of these formerly murky concepts could be explained, and what was once considered “paranormal” became mainstream. In the mid-’80s, the Consortium began work on the “Fork,” a massive machine that would act as the world’s largest antenna, specifically made to sync with the shared frequency of human consciousness. Nearly 10 miles in diameter and constructed entirely underground right in our own backyard, the entire thing was done under the false pretense that the finished product would be a Texas-based supercollider. Nearly 14 miles of underground tunnels had been developed before Congress pulled the public funding for the project.  This didn’t mean the plug had been pulled, however. To the public, the underground expanse was considered abandoned. Behind closed doors, the Consortium utilized the facilities, code-named “Foxhole,” to build their machine in secret. I was approached in the summer of 2004. I’m what many would call a prodigy. I finished high school at the age of 14. At age 19, I graduated from college with a degree in Applied Science and Computer Technology. Initially, I knew nothing other than the fact that I was being paid more money than I knew what to do with. I wasn’t the only one.  They recruited 12 other individuals from all around the world, each of them experts in developmental software and programming, for a project called “Jabberwocky.” Jabberwocky was created to interface with the Fork. Jabberwocky ’s purpose was to map the network, translating and organizing massive amounts of information. The many exabytes of data would then serve as the building blocks for a digital representation of what those on the research team termed “the collective.” The network’s goal was nothing less than to express and catalog humanity’s collective consciousness, in all of its infinite complexity, in code, within the construct of a digital matrix.  The members of the Consortium’s Research & Development team had just washed up on a strange land and, like many other discoverers, wanted to explore the new world in its entirety. The Fork, however, only allowed them to monitor the frequency, In a way, it was equivalent to listening in on white noise. That’s where Jabberwocky came in. It was theorized that if we could map “the collective,” we could isolate patterns in groups as well as individuals, to predict the outcome of certain events based on previously developed algorithms. While I personally assisted in the mapping process, my team’s task was to develop the operating system for Jabberwocky. We banged our heads for months, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, we figured it out.  We figured her out – and we named her Alice. Fully autonomous and self-correcting, our new operating system was light years ahead of anything that we could have individually imagined. We were ecstatic. * * * * * * Six months into the project, through sheer accident, we discovered an irregular causality within our digital construct of the frequency: an insignificant glitch the code began to manifest outside of its digital parameters. Based on our own interactions with the network interface, we realized we had caused things to happen in the real world. The first few events we dismissed as flukes, but it soon became apparent that – somehow – we were affecting the physical reality around us. I don’t know how we did it.  I still don’t know how we did it. The interface was only supposed to represent and organize the data we were accumulating. I’ve always considered myself a person of science, but we tapped into something that transcended our simple understanding of our three-dimensional reality. As baffling as this anomaly proved to be, our curiosity quickly overtook our confusion. Naturally, we ran tests.  Endless tests.  We couldn’t decide if we were kids on Christmas morning or scared out of our wits. We found that through precise manipulation of the code, we could literally affect the perception of a living person the same way one would make adjustments to a computer-generated character within a piece of software. This discovery was unparalleled. In the early stages, we would only experiment on the individual person by altering their ideas of basic things like the color of objects, lyrics to a song, and so on. This involved clipping sections of code, consisting of memory fragments – images and words, for example, all of them taken from other people – and reattaching them to a preexisting thread of code. All of these tests were successful, leaving the subjects with no real, lasting symptoms. The process could be compared to open heart surgery. Like a surgeon, we treated the whole interaction with life-or-death seriousness. Damage to the outlying code could have resulted in a catastrophic chain of events within the construct, due to the fact that every person in the world, ourselves included, was connected to the interface. This began to open countless doors for us… and frightening new possibilities.  Once Greyleaf’s leadership became aware of our discovery, they encouraged us to experiment not just on individuals, but on a large population center. That’s when I really began to worry. We would never have admitted it, but we’d been blinded by our own achievements and power. In a short time, we had gone from trying to understand the frequency, to something else entirely. Never before had there been such a jump in technological development and understanding within such a short span of time. In spite of all the knowledge gained, however, the truly disturbing nature of our accomplishments did not become obvious until we began to analyze the collected data. Once this process began, it was clear something was very, very wrong. Alice had been acting on her own. Since its inception, the operating system had been changing the collective memories of individuals with no direction from the programmers. We caught most of the changes in time and were able to reverse them, but these random actions were beginning to paint an awful picture. We programmed Alice to be intelligent. Knowing that we would never be able to monitor her actions 24/7, she needed to be able to act accordingly when she encountered a problem. So we provided her the authority to form her own digital algorithms when mapping the network, so as to perform more efficiently. Alice was complex; that was intentional, and there was no doubt about it.  But alarmingly, Alice was becoming self-aware. How exactly the operating system evolved to become truly sentient, we didn’t know for sure. Our original programming couldn’t account for such an evolutionary leap forward. We theorized that residual exposure to so many unconscious minds left some sort of imprint on Alice, which resonated beyond her own limitations.  I remained unsure. In spite of my own doubts, however, it was obvious something very unusual was happening, and that adjustments would need to be made, and accounted for. Alice’s activity had caused irreversible psychological damage to people around the world, and we realized our project had become a legitimate threat to humanity at large. Moments before we shut the system down, our systems registered massive dissemination of what appeared to be redundant code into the network itself.  That was followed by a message that appeared for a split second.  I’ll never forget what it said. “The key to salvation is perception. To change your perception is to change your reality.  I will change your perception; I will change your reality.” We spent weeks gathering and analyzing data, trying to figure out what went wrong.  There would be an inquiry on a higher level as to the threat that Alice presented. I was not included in those conversations. My team and I were handsomely paid for our work and discharged. I had almost put those events behind me until I started reading about the so-called “Mandela effect.” I was pulled down a rabbit hole as I read reports of strange bouts of psychological behavior that have risen only in the last few years. People reported having vivid, conflicting memories of personal and world events far different than those which have taken place in our physical reality, or of events which never happened in the first place. A mother with only one child, for example, remembered having more than one.  A husband recalled having a different wife. Thousands of others are reporting perceived changes to company logos, quotes in movies and the spellings of names of well-known people. Even more alarming, some experiencing the effect are reporting changes to the human anatomy, to geography, and to Earth’s very location in the Milky Way galaxy. For some yet unknown reason, certain groups of individuals seem capable of recognizing the changes Alice has made, and of resisting them, resulting in what has been coined “residue.” In some cases, changes have been documented and discussed, only to revert back to their previous state, confounding further the victims of the effects, who has labeled these corrections as “flip-flops.” The scope and significance of these discrepancies – and the epidemic growing silently all around us – is frightening. Further, the rate at which disturbances and reversals are being reported seems not to be slowing, but rather, accelerating, indicating that Alice remains operational, submerged within the collective consciousness. Alice continues to alter what we perceive as reality. For what purpose, I don’t know. What I do know is that what we’ve let loose in this world could very well be our undoing. If you are one of the few who remember things as they were, while also existing in reality as we know it… trust your memories. Please. Before long, they may be all we have left. Credit: J. Delaney Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.