SOC-098

SOC-098 is a small toy whistle found in a box of Millville brand Fruit Rounds cereal from Aldi. This was already weird because this brand of cereal does not come with toys inside, and it was not advertised on the box, but we found it in a sealed bag in an unopened box, which was arbitrarily selected by Researcher ████ on a normal shopping trip where they thought they would "get themself a little treat this time." The whistle is shaped like a simple cartoon parrot and is made of a vacuum-molded bright red plastic. When blown, it creates a sound resembling the flock call of Cacatua alba, also known as the umbrella cockatoo. This sound is extremely loud regardless of how hard one blows into the whistle, and we don't know why, so you should probably wear some kind of ear protection when using it.

Effects

When SOC-098 is used within hearing range of a non-human animal, the animal hearing the sound becomes an instance of SOC-098-1. The affected animal spontaneously develops a syrinx vocal organ similar to that of a parrot. Simultaneously, it  will undergo rapid brain development in order to use this organ to mimic any sound it hears, showing a preference for human speech. This does not confer understanding of human speech, but any instance of SOC-098-1 can be trained to mimic and respond to speech like a parrot, with the cognitive ability varying depending on the animal's original level of intellect. Animals that cannot perceive sound through air vibrations, either through natural lack of hearing organs or acquired lack of hearing ability, are not affected by SOC-098.

If that wasn't enough, when SOC-098 is used in proximity of a computer with a graphical user interface and a functioning microphone, the tone emitted will cause the computer to become an instance of SOC-098-2, overriding whatever software was already on the computer with a new operating system. We tried this a bunch of times with different computers, but for some reason, it always changes the operating system to Windows 98. The operating system installed by the tone of SOC-098 does not correspond to any commercial release of Windows 98, and includes several programs that start up immediately upon installing, referred to as SOC-098-A and SOC-098-B.

SOC-98-A is a program that automatically searches for available Internet connections and connects to them at unusually fast speeds. This is why there is no Wi-Fi in the building where we keep SOC-098 now, so please stop complaining about your phones not working when you're supposed to be testing Stupid Objects and not on your phones anyway. If SOC-98-A successfully connects to the Internet, SOC-098-B will begin running, and cannot be stopped by trying to close the window or even getting fed up and opening the Task Manager.

SOC-098-B is a program that automatically creates an account on a web streaming platform that seems to be randomly selected, albeit heavily weighted towards the service known as Twitch. Accounts created by SOC-098-B have also been found on YouTube, Picarto, Onlyfans, and [REDACTED]. No matter the platform, SOC-098-B will begin streaming the desktop of the SOC-098-2 instance, and will "speak" using heavily-compressed audio clips of sounds made by instances of SOC-098-1. We have no idea how it gets these files, and they don't show up anywhere in the file system of any instance of SOC-098-2, but we ran experiments and it's definitely using SOC-098-1 recordings somehow.

SOC-098-2 broadcasts

The content of the streams broadcast by SOC-098-2 varies, but does not seem to correspond to the platform the account is made on, and usually consists of playing video games created for Windows 98 computers, though sometimes SOC-098-2 may pivot to creating incomprehensible scribbles in MS Paint or writing gibberish text in Notepad. These "creative" actions do not seem to carry any kind of encoded message and really are just random garbage, but the games are where the real weird shit happens.

Games streamed by SOC-098-2 include many widely-known commercial releases for Windows computers, but rarely, a game may appear that is definitely not real and might be completely created by SOC-098-2 somehow. These games are sometimes random nonsense, but sometimes have been found to be remarkably competent and may even reference other SOCs, which is really weird and we'd like it if it stopped doing that.

The games we have seen SOC-098-2 stream include:

• Lego Island
• Monkey Island
• 3D Workers Island
• Petz 4
• Creatures 5
• Forestia
• Nightmare Ned
• Several games in the Putt-Putt series
• All games in the JumpStart series that can be run on Windows 98, from JumpStart Baby to JumpStart 10th Grade
• 3D Dinosaur Adventure
• Dinosaur Adventure 3D
• Escape: Triassic Hall
• Half Life
• First Life
• One and a Half Life
• Second Life

This is not an exhaustive list, as SOC-098-2 keeps streaming when people turn the Wi-Fi back on because they're frustrated that they're missing out on Discord messages, so if you happen to see a SOC-098-2 instance play a game that is not listed here, feel free to add it.

The streams broadcasted by SOC-098-2 will always end after approximately two hours, regardless of amount of viewers. We usually try to stop them from happening, but sometimes they're really funny so we let them run without turning off the power or the Wi-fi. The problem with this is that if SOC-098-2 ends a stream with at least one non-SOC-associated viewer present, it will ask the viewers if they want to "hear my famous syrinx shriek" and play a sound clip identical to the tone produced by SOC-098, causing the anomalous effects of the object to spread to computers and animals within range of the viewer's speakers.

Consider it Loud.