The Haunting of Mrs. Knowlton

It was a dreary night, and the fog had descended upon the city like a shroud. I was on call at the hospital, and the silence in the corridors was broken only by the occasional beep of a monitor. I was reviewing the charts of my patients when suddenly, I heard a faint whispering coming from the room of Mrs. Knowlton, an elderly patient with advanced-stage cancer.

I dismissed it as the wind and continued my rounds, but the whispering persisted, growing louder with each passing moment. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of unease and decided to investigate. As I entered her room, I saw her lying in bed, her eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling. But what chilled me to the bone was that the whispering was coming from her.

“You will die,” the voice said.

I recoiled in shock but soon realized that it was only a recording from the speech-generating device we had provided to her as a form of communication. But something about the tone and cadence of the voice was not right. It was far from being natural. It was cold, calculating, and had a hint of malevolence.

I quickly shut off the device and tried to reassure myself that it was a malfunction caused by some technical glitch. But as I was leaving the room, I saw her hand moving slightly, almost as if beckoning me. I hesitated for a moment but then decided to ignore it and walked away.

I spent the rest of the night going through the logs of the device and found that the system had been hacked, and some unknown person had access to the patient’s records and was using it to control her speech device.

The realization hit me like a ton of bricks, that the use of AI in healthcare was not as secure as we had thought. This incident was a grim reminder of how vulnerable we had become to cyber-attacks and how easily our own technology could be turned against us.

I immediately informed the authorities and the hospital’s IT department, but it was too late. The hacker had already gained control over other patients in the hospital, and the sinister whispers were heard throughout the corridors, a harbinger of death for all who heard them.

As the police and the IT team were struggling to regain control, I was called to attend to another patient. As I entered the room, I found the patient to be none other than Mrs. Knowlton, but this time she was wide awake and her voice was her own.

“You should be more careful with your technology,” she said with a smile. “It can be dangerous in the wrong hands.”

I stood there, frozen in shock, as the truth slowly dawned on me. Mrs. Knowlton had orchestrated the whole thing, using her condition and the hospital’s AI system to exact her revenge on those she deemed responsible for her illness. And with that, she passed away, leaving me with a chill that would linger long after the fog had lifted.

The moral of the story: With the advancement of technology and AI, we have opened a Pandora’s Box, and we must be vigilant and responsible for how we use it, or else, it may turn against us in ways we can never imagine.

Anand Taralika

is a Software Engineer who writes about use of tech, data, machine learning for finance, healthcare, sustainable energy and also dabbles into fiction. Get these stories directly in your inbox, so you never miss a story!