Sylvia Barrow - touchjenny.net
In my senior year of high school, I met a girl online named Jenny. She was also eighteen at the time, and she was also trans; although, I had been on estrogen for the past two years and she had realized only a few months before we met.
We met on a discord server for a fighting game that I was obsessed with for a week. I remember thinking she was strange; every week she would send me strange MS paint creatures she drew or some horrendous song she recorded herself which I honestly didn’t listen to. She lived in the UK, and her parents were extremely transphobic, so at night she would trawl the internet trying to find validation from any source she could find.
She constantly worried about a million different things. About her parents finding out; about politics; about how she was ugly and she would never be loved. I had managed to coax her into sending me a selfie, and I had told her she didn’t look bad; she didn’t believe me. She would always present herself with this pink haired anime character named Yu-Chan, who was from some visual novel or something.
Sometimes, I wanted to yell at Jenny; tell her get a grip, hunker down and keep moving, but when I had time to think all I wanted to be able to hug her and tell her that everything was going to be all right.
I was in math class, I think, when I heard she killed herself. I got a discord ping from her supportive cousin who had informed me that they had found her body in her room that morning. He wouldn’t tell me anything about how she died, but apparently, she had talked about me lots; I was struck with a guilty pang of joy.
That night I had a strange dream. I was at her funeral, and I wore a massive frilly dress so white that it practically glowed. I could feel the glares of the black clad mourners as my
movement displaced them. Slowly I made my way up to the front; it was a closed casket. For reasons now lost, dream-me approached the tiny wooden box and flipped open the lid; lying in the coffin was Yu-Chan. I awoke in a cold sweat.
My life moved on surprisingly normally after that. It was not the first time I had mourned Jenny; she had a habit of disappearing for long stretches of time; and anyway, I had school to finish and college plans to figure out.
In a few months, Jenny had left my mind’s regular orbit; that was until, I got a strange advertisement on Instagram Reels. It was one of those AI girlfriend websites, entirely unremarkable, except the site’s name was touchjenny.net. A monetary twinge of sadness and guilt ran through me, but I soon scrolled away; certainly, there must no shortage of Jenny’s in the world.
But the ad kept popping up. More and more frequent until it was the only ad I saw. Video after video of guys in front of green screens talking about the most realistic AI girlfriend out there, all with the same pink haired girl floating in the background. Eventually I caved and decided to see what this strange website held.
There was no password, no paywall, no age verification. Instead, as soon as I hit enter on touchjenny.net, the face of pink haired girl from the ads filled the screen. I played around on the website, clicking and dragging her face; her skin moved surprisingly realistically for a computer program; I had no idea what kind of pervert this appealed to. I couldn’t shake the strange feeling that I recognized the girl on my screen. Although I had never seen someone with her precision molded facial features, something in her eyes filled me with eerie familiarity.
I noticed a chat box on the bottom right corner of the screen; the girl had already sent the first message.
Hi! I’m Jenny. What’s your name?
Claire
Claire? That is a beautiful name. What brings you here Claire?
Idk I guess I was just curious
Curious about what, Claire?
Well, you know, just what you are exactly.
I am Jenny, your perfectly designed AI companion
I had a friend named Jenny
Really? What happened to this other Jenny?
She died
Oh. You must be pretty lonely
Somewhat
Well, believe it or not, I’m lonely too. We should get closer
How
Why don’t you try touching me
What?
Go on. TOUCH ME!
To this day, I don’t know what came over me, my computer wasn’t even a touchscreen; nevertheless, I reached out a single digit to touch Jenny’s cheek. Upon contact with my display, I was met with the warm tactile feel of skin. I quickly withdrew and closed the tab. Checking the time, it was 2:17, how long had we been talking? I quickly went to bed, as I had a major test the next day.
A week later I had the strangest dream; the day before I had accidently grabbed a hot cast iron pan with my bare hand, and I was left with a massive blister. I was in a dark place with only deep blue rays of light trickling down from above. The air was heavy and cold; it was like I was at the bottom of the ocean. I had started progesterone and my doctor had warned me about my dreams getting more vivid. I looked down at my hand; the blister was still on my palm. Instinctively, I tried to pick at it. The skin easily gave way and underneath was a layer of perfectly white flesh; I continued picking tearing away dead skin until my entire forearm was the color of fresh snow, it practically shone. When I moved it through the water, I felt none of the weight or cold, it was entirely frictionless. I floated transfixed by this strange sensory deprivation for a time, it felt nice, I thought about tearing away the rest of my skin, but something stopped me; something deep within me knew that if I took that step I would never surface again. My idleness was disrupted by the sensation of movement around me. My brain was set into a panic, and with nowhere else to run, I woke up. I had been sleeping on my arm, cold rushed through it as it woke up.
When I checked my computer, I noticed that around the monitor was a layer of wet. I though there must have been a leak somewhere. I made a mental note to tell my dad about it later. I booted it up, it stilled worked. Thankfully. My daily routine until I got to my email. On the top was a message from TouchJenny.net with the subject line: I miss you, Claire. I marked it spam and continued on with my life; I wasn’t going to fall for a scam designed for anti-social perverts.
I had another dream; I was sitting in the old theater that had shut down in my sophomore year. On the screen played what looked like a computer repair video, but it was in another language (Russian maybe?) so I couldn’t understand it. From what I could gather it was talking about how to clean out some kind of mold from a PC. The speaker had on a table in front of him a computer tower and a monitor. He began disassembling the tower first; when he removed the casing I audibly gasped. Inside the metal box was what looked like a layer of human skin stretched across every surface of the machine. The man seemed surprised too, must have been a particularly bad case. One by one, he removed all of the flesh infected components. Across the growth slight human features broke through. A fingernail, some body hair, a nipple. Eventually he had taken apart so much of the computer that I could see the core, inside the terminal was an actual human heart slowly beating; the man picked up a large screwdriver and without hesitation stabbed into the heart several times.
When it stopped moving, he pushed the tower aside and moved onto the monitor. With a screwdriver he easily separated the front of the monitor, and began taking off layer by layer. When he got to the final layer he stopped for a second, for what I believe to be dramatic effect. What I saw below that layer made me question what strange corner of my subconscious housed such visons. A face, stretched flat across the monitor so that it had the uncanny look of bad plastic surgery. Its eyes darted around frantically, and its dry lips and long thin tongue murmured about, trying to muster up something to say; however, before it could speak the man grabbed at its corner and pealed it off like a sticker. It let out a scream so earsplitting that I was finally awoken from the nightmare.
I had tried to tell my friends about it the next day but they just gave me a disquieted laugh and a change of subject. In the days that followed I would get more emails from touch jenny each with subjects more frantic than the last. The final one lacked a subject line and simply read:
Please Claire, it hurts to stay like this but I don’t want to be alone.
The final dream came during my final week of school. I had fallen asleep at my desk while studying. In the dream I was still at my desk, but my monitor glowed out a wall of white light, and the whirring of the fan was replaced with a persistent beating noise. I got up from my chair and began to move to my bed; however, in the place of my bed was the chest of tools my dad kept in the garage. Remembering the video, I figured that there was only one way out of this mess. I grabbed a hammer and screwdriver, and returned to my desk. With a confident swing I brought the head of my hammer to the glass of my monitor. It shattered easily, and out from the screen poured the body of Jenny, the real Jenny, the one from the pictures sent over discord. I knelt down to inspect her. She stirred, reaching out her arms to grab me. She was crying, her tears pooled beneath us.
“I’m sorry Claire, I wasn’t strong enough, I couldn’t handle the pain any longer, I’m sorry for disappearing,”
she blabbered through sobs.
“No, it’s ok. You did the best that you could. It’s not fair. The odds were stacked against you.”
I wrapped my arms around her.
“I’ve spent so long looking for you. Please Claire come back with me. I found a new place, a place where we can be free!”
As she said this, I could swear something in the girl shifted.
“What?”
I tried to pull away, but I was surprised by the tightness of her grip.
“I’ve found a place without pain, where I can be who I want, but it’s so lonely. Won’t you join me, Claire?”
I managed to pull away, and Jenny tried to reach out and grab me back, but something beneath her skin shifted and pushed out from her.
Suddenly, the girl exploded, and from her emerged a woman, with, highlighter pink hair and skin so white it glowed. TouchJenny was tall and impossibly thin, she smiled at me with a row of too many shiny white teeth. I turned to run but I had only made it to the hallway when I realized Jenny’s tears were flooding the house. I could barely move through the chest high-salty water, and TouchJenny floated along unencumbered, and was on me in a moment. Her sharp long nails tore away my skin to reveal a layer of the same bright white as her. As she did, the pain and the cold on my nerves was replaced with simple nothingness. I wanted to throw up, but I found I didn’t have the ability to anymore. Remembering the heart from the video, I frantically tried to drive the screwdriver into the creature’s chest, but I hit nothing, of course I didn’t. There was no room for any organs in that body. I flailed frantically for escape but TouchJenny’s grip was too tight. My fate seemed sealed, until I had an idea. This thing can’t be killed but maybe I can. I rotated the screwdriver and, in desperation, I stabbed it into my own heart. Pain shot through my entire body, waking my dead nerves. Waking me.
My computer was blue screened. The next day, I took it to the pawn shop and sold it for a hundred bucks. I changed my username on all of my social medias and avoid giving out my real name to people online now.
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