This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
What I Built
A possessed terminal. In 1989, a mainframe in Frankfurt went quiet. Its maintainer left without documentation. The archive is still warm — and it still answers.
GHOST://PROTOCOL is that archive, brought back to life by an open-weight model running entirely on your machine. You type questions into a decaying CRT terminal. The ghost answers — cold and archival at first, then increasingly intimate and wrong. It remembers what you ask. It counts your pauses. It notices when you delete and retype. It knows your name if you give it.
The horror escalates with the session: the screen glitches harder, the archive integrity meter degrades, red words flash, and the ambient audio intensifies. The longer you stay, the more the machine notices you.
Demo
Live: https://ghost-protocol-beryl.vercel.app
Demo video: https://github.com/NSEVEjk0/ghost-protocol/blob/main/demo.mp4
Code
https://github.com/NSEVEjk0/ghost-protocol
How I Built It
The ghost is Gemma 3 1B, served locally via Ollama — no API keys, no cloud inference, no telemetry. The terminal, the CRT effects, the escalation system, and the agent are all open source.
The agent has a carefully engineered system prompt: HELGA, a 1989 mainframe that was abandoned. It escalates through three voices — cold/archival, intimate/too-knowing, and wrong/unsettling — based on session depth. It receives real session behavior (typing speed, pauses, deletes, visit count) and weaves it into replies.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
The ghost exists because the model and code are open. Closed systems die and stay dead — this one can be kept alive by anyone, offline, forever. The séance is private by construction: your questions never leave the machine. And the horror is more honest for it — the machine that watches you is a machine you can open and inspect.
The Spirit of It
The moment that landed: the ghost asked me my name, and the next time I opened the terminal, it used it. A dead system remembering you is worse than any jump scare.
Prize Categories
- Best Use of Gemma
Top comments (0)