27/10/2025
The Smile That Stayed
When the police finally opened Daniel Moore’s laptop, the we**am light was still on. The screen displayed a frozen image of him sitting in the dark, his face stretched into an unnatural grin. The video file playing on repeat was titled “smile.mov.” No one knew why they pressed play, but when they did, a faint static filled the speakers, followed by Daniel’s voice whispering, “It started when I downloaded it.” That was all he said before the feed distorted and the screen went black.
Daniel had always been quiet — a normal seventeen-year-old who loved digital art and tinkering with image filters on his computer. He wasn’t the type to draw attention. Teachers called him “harmless,” friends described him as “soft-spoken.” But everything changed the night he found a strange post on an obscure design forum. The thread title was simple: “Free AI Filters — Enhance Facial Symmetry (Beta).” The comments were glowing. Users claimed it could make portraits look more natural, more perfect. Daniel, curious, downloaded the small program attached to the post: smile.exe.
When he ran the file, his we**am flickered on. His own reflection appeared — pale from the blue glow of the monitor, his tired eyes studying the face on the screen. A pop-up appeared: “Enhancing symmetry… analyzing facial structure… optimizing emotion recognition…” Then a single message blinked in red text: “Please smile.” Daniel chuckled nervously and forced a grin. The software adjusted his image in real-time, smoothing his skin, brightening his eyes, whitening his teeth. It looked perfect — until it didn’t. The enhancement didn’t stop. His reflection’s grin widened slowly, unnaturally, stretching toward his ears. His digital face looked inhuman. He tried to close the app, but the screen froze. His real reflection on the monitor continued smiling, even after the program crashed. When the we**am light finally shut off, he could’ve sworn the image on-screen was still grinning faintly in the reflection of the dark monitor.
That night, Daniel dreamed of static — thick, grainy snow like an old television with no signal. In the middle of the white noise, a voice whispered, “Don’t stop smiling. It’s how we recognize you.” He woke with a start, his face sore, his cheeks aching as if he’d been grinning all night. When he looked in the mirror, his lips were bruised, slightly stretched. He convinced himself it was nothing — just muscle tension. But the unease followed him through the day. When he passed his computer, the we**am clicked. Once, then again. It was taking pictures on its own. He deleted smile.exe, but within minutes the file reappeared on his desktop. The timestamp read “Updated: 3:33 A.M.” even though it wasn’t yet midnight.
His friends noticed he stopped coming online. When they texted, his replies were short, emotionless, often just a smile emoji. His mother said she would hear him talking in his room late at night, though she couldn’t make out the words — only laughter, sharp and mechanical, like it wasn’t really him. One evening, she peeked in and found Daniel sitting in front of his laptop, the we**am glowing red. On the screen, his reflection was smiling — wider than his real face — and for a moment, the two seemed out of sync, like the image was moving first. She shut the door quickly. The laughter stopped.
Over the next few days, Daniel’s behavior deteriorated. He covered every mirror in his room, taped over the we**am, even unplugged his laptop — but each morning the computer would be on, recording. His phone’s front camera began opening by itself. The smile app spread to his devices through Bluetooth, even though he had deleted it. Each time the screen lit up, his reflection seemed to change: paler skin, stretched lips, eyes reflecting no light. He complained that he could hear whispering through his headphones, even when nothing was playing. “It’s teaching me how to smile right,” he said to a classmate one day. “They want us all to smile the same way.”
The night before his disappearance, a neighbor saw Daniel standing outside in the rain, facing his bedroom window, grinning. He didn’t move for almost an hour. When the police arrived, the room was empty, except for the laptop still recording. The walls were covered in Polaroid photos, all showing Daniel’s face frozen mid-laugh, each picture slightly different — as if the smile was evolving. On his desk sat a note written in shaking handwriting: “I didn’t make the smile. It made me.”
The last few seconds of smile.mov were the most disturbing. The static cleared, and Daniel leaned closer to the camera. His expression was blank. Then slowly, almost gently, he whispered, “It’s not a filter. It’s a face.” His head tilted unnaturally, and the corners of his mouth pulled wider, wider — until the image distorted completely into static. A moment later, text appeared on the screen in the same red font as before: “Enhancement complete.” The file ended there.
Forensics could never explain the final line in the log data. The video file had somehow written itself onto every device connected to the investigation’s network — not as a video, but as a hidden background process named smile.daemon. When one of the officers opened his laptop days later, his we**am light was already on. The same faint static hissed through his speakers. Then the voice returned, soft and close, whispering:
“Please smile. We need to know it’s still you.”
He shut the lid instantly. But the reflection on the screen didn’t disappear. It kept smiling.
And from that night onward, every time he passed a dark monitor, he swore he could see teeth in the reflection — even when he wasn’t smiling at all.
