The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  She snaps several more photos, wishing she brought the long lens, wishing she could get closer. There is an underground exit at the corner of the pit. A black hollow framed by a brick doorway. Maybe an entrance to the tunnel system that runs beneath Portland. She doesn’t notice it until someone—a black-bearded man—steps from it and calls to the others. They pause in their work and he waves to them, and one by one they set down their tools and follow.

  A staggered ramp runs from the top of the construction site to the bottom. Lela tromps down it without hesitation. She tries to keep her footsteps quiet, but the ramp is loose on its scaffolding and the boards boom below her. At the bottom of the site, the air is cooler. There is a musty, almost sulfuric taste to it. The noise of the world falls away completely except for a muffled growl of a jet somewhere overhead.

  She goes first to the table. It is clotted with dirt and busy with yellow-brown bones. She snaps a photo and reaches for the skull. Its deformity is clear now—too long and thin, almost snouted—what she imagines a baboon or warthog might look like beneath the skin. The teeth are as long as her fingers. Lines run across the bone, sometimes straight, sometimes curled, sometimes arranged into what appear to be pentagonal patterns. It reminds her of the beetle-bitten wood found on a tree when you peel the bark damply from it.

  She hears the small man before she sees him. “No,” he says in a high, raspy voice. “No trespass!” His face is tight with anger. He stands in the doorway to the tunnel, the shadows thickly surrounding him. She is already backing away, already retreating up the ramp when he calls over his shoulder. She doesn’t recognize the language he speaks—could it be Latin, like something out of a Roman Catholic service?—but the meaning is clear as the other men kick their way up the stone stairs.

  She’s talked and fought herself out of plenty of dangerous situations. She’s been threatened with a knife, a gun. She’s been undercover in a heroin den—a graffitied room with two soiled mattresses and a lava lamp—when an addict started feeling her up and paused his hand at the battery pack for her hidden camera. When he asked what it was, she said, “An insulin pump. I have diabetes,” and then offered to tie off his arm while he shot up.

  Sometimes you talk and sometimes you fight and sometimes you run. She runs now, pounding up the ramp. It elbows, ten feet off the ground, onto its second level. Here she skids to a stop.

  Down below, the small man is speaking rapid-fire in another language, making his hand into a blade and cutting the air in her direction. The men pour out of the tunnel and head toward her, some of them gripping trowels in their hands as though they were knives.

  She doesn’t realize until now that she still holds the skull in her hand. She sets it down on the platform. Then twists off an anchoring clamp and hefts the bottom ramp. It scrapes half off the scaffolding. She kicks it—once, twice—and it loses its purchase and falls to the ground with a whoomp of displaced air that sends a cloud of grit into the approaching men.

  She scoops up the skull, her finger hooking an eye socket, and considers hurling it down as well. Anything to stop their progress. She pauses her hand. She has photos, but the skull is hard evidence. Something tangible to share with police, professors. She shoves it into her purse and sprints the rest of the way up. The camera thuds against her chest. Her eyes water from wind or nerves, blurring her vision of the workers fumbling with the fallen ramp and the black-bearded man clanking up an extension ladder toward her.

  Chapter 2

  CHESTON’S APARTMENT—on Lovejoy, at the edge of the Pearl—looks out on other apartments, other offices, all of them walled with windows. He lives on the top floor, the tenth of his building. He owns a telescope, a Celestron Astromaster on a tripod, and when he isn’t working, he’s watching.

  He’s watching a woman now. She skids around a corner and hammers along the sidewalk at a full sprint. A ginger-colored braid swings wildly with every step. She clutches an enormous canvas purse. A block away, she rips open the door to her car, an ancient Volvo jeweled with guano, and vanishes inside. A few seconds later the station wagon grinds into gear and lurches into the street and cuts off a delivery truck that lays on its horn. She speeds away, trailing a cloud of black exhaust.

  Cheston whirls the telescope back to the corner where she first appeared. One man—soon joined by three others—stands there, breathing heavily. The telescope brings them close enough to see the whites of their eyes. They watch her car retreat and then say something to one another before returning back the way they came.

  It is only 4:00, but this is October and the dark is coming. Cheston prefers the dark. That’s one of the reasons he loves Portland, where it rains 170 days a year and where it is gray-skied more often than that. Sunlight burns his eyes, forks a migraine up his forehead. Sometimes he keeps a forty-watt lamp burning in the corner, but otherwise his office is lit by the underwater glow of his computers. He wears sunglasses when hunched over his desk, staring at the bank of screens.

  He keeps it dark, too, so that people can’t see him. But he can see them. Through his telescope. Mostly people sit. They sit and eat their Chipotle burritos. They sit and read their celebrity gossip magazines. They sit and stream shows on Netflix. They sit and check to see if anybody liked their shit on Facebook. But every now and then, something terrible or wonderful happens. He has seen people arguing—couples slamming doors, gesturing wildly, hurling books at each other—and he has seen people making up—in bed, on the couch, at the table, one time pressed up against the window and smearing their bodies pinkly through the fog of their sex.

  They all have their secrets, and that is what he is hunting for, secrets. His telescope scans the buildings—honeycombed with light—hovering in one place, swinging to the next, all of their apartments the same even as the bodies inside them swirl and change shape. Spying gives him such satisfaction, makes him feel powerful, knowing the things he shouldn’t know, the things people prefer to keep hidden. The way the wife eats a grape that has fallen to the floor, the way the husband picks his nose vigorously and browses porn websites and sometimes puts a knife to his wrist and bows his head for a good long minute before sliding it back into the block. They lure him. How can he not watch?

  He feels a similar energy when at his desk. He rents out seven blade servers for other users to host their sites. He is a landlord of sorts. He owns digital real estate. He loans it to others to use as they will. The servers are arranged on a metal chassis next to his desk and wired into several network routers to shuttle the data around and plug into the net. Their lights blink. Their components tick and pop. Their fans and heatsinks hum and stir the air with warmth he tries to battle back with air conditioning he keeps year-round at a cool sixty degrees. He bleeds electricity. He imagines his apartment as a gaping drain with white energy swirling constantly down it, which is why he loves this two-bedroom unit so much, since utilities are included in the rent.

  Most of his payments come from Undertown, Inc., and they pay in bitcoins. Over a year ago, an instant message appeared from a user named Cloven, requesting a private chat. He accepted—not knowing what to expect, maybe some file requests, maybe some dirty talk—and when asked if he might be interested in working for Undertown, he accepted that too. He was a sophomore at Reed College then, on academic probation, not showering, not shaving, not really sleeping, all of his time spent coding and popping Adderall and eating Oreos and drinking those big plastic bullets of 5-Hour Energy. He had stopped going to classes after testifying before the faculty senate about distributing pirated movies and music through the college Ethernet. He figured it was only a matter of time before they kicked him out.

  They never got the chance. He dropped out to run his own business, a legitimate business, the kind that affords him the best kicks, the best equipment, the best apartment, all the Thai takeout in the world. Like his neighbors, he has his secrets. Two of his servers operate as respectable hosts, legitimizing him in the eyes of his ISP for the high-volume traffic. The other f
ive belong to the Dark Net. He has a bribed contact at CenturyLink who regularly and silently expunges those logs.

  Undertown is pleased with his services so far. Cloven calls sometimes—always on the Blackphone, always through Skype and always via a TOR network to avoid a trace—his voice deep and rasping and mysteriously accented. Somehow it hurts to listen to, as if it is penetrating him. Cheston has been promised more work, more responsibility. What this might entail, he cannot imagine, but he has told Cloven he’s ready for whatever, whenever. Zero Day is a term Cloven has mentioned more than once. They are preparing for Zero Day, which is assumedly some kind of launch. Cheston doesn’t ask. It’s better, he’s found, to simply do as he’s told.

  Thousands of lives stream through his blade servers, and he feels charged by them, as if his mind is a circuit board and his veins cables that course with electricity and information. On any of his three monitors, as their host, he sometimes likes to look. He knows he shouldn’t—he knows he might feel safer, nobler otherwise—but he cannot resist. He keeps his desks arranged in an L shape, with three HD LCD monitors atop them. His is a homebrewed workstation, an amalgamation of parts mostly bought off Newegg and running on Linux. AMD 4.0 GHz eight-core processors on a gigabyte motherboard with 32GB RAM and an EVGA GeForce graphics card supporting the monitors. The cases are windowed, decked out with blue LED lights. In the other room, his bedroom, he has a netbook from ZaReason and a Nexus 9 rooted Android tablet stuffed with all sorts of hacking apps. He uses them the way a watchman might in a casino or prison, to study through a fisheye lens what sort of trouble people might be getting into on his property. There he sees things most cannot imagine.

  It is only 4:30 and already the streets look like shadowed canyons. The streetlamps buzz to life and throw pools of light. Apartments glow. He tucks his hair behind his ears—its color orange, parted down the middle—and leans into his telescope, scanning one of his favorite addresses: across the road, third floor, corner apartment, a young woman. Her name is Carrie Wunderlich. He knows this because he has followed her, studied her, for months now. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at 7 a.m., she spins at the Y. She showers and dresses and leaves with her hair still wet, on her way to Hotspur Chiropractic Health, where she works as a receptionist and massage therapist. When she goes out for lunch, at least once a week, she orders soup and salad. She shops at the co-op. He has stood so close to her, he has smelled her perfume, a puff of spiced apricot. At home she wears yoga pants and a too-big OSU sweatshirt. Every night she drinks one glass of white Zinfandel, poured from a box in the fridge, and plops on the couch to watch reality television. Above her gas fireplace hangs an oversize print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and that’s a little how he thinks of her, as his slim-stalked yellow sunflower bobbing across the way.

  She has come home today with a man. The same man who picked her up last Saturday and drove away in a silver Jetta. Cheston keeps watching as if something will happen, but nothing happens. They sit there, on opposite ends of the sofa, drinking her pink wine, moving their mouths in conversation.

  Lightning leaps from a cloud. Thunder mutters. Rain spots and then drums the window, smearing the image of them. They approach the window to watch the storm, and the man puts his arm around her waist and draws her close. Cheston strangles the telescope. The image of them trembles.

  When lightning strikes again, it is closer, and then closer still. Thunder shakes the window. He pulls away from the telescope in time to see the outage before it arrives. Off in the distance the buildings go black, block by block, black black black, rolling toward him, a landslide of darkness.

  He feels a sudden emptiness when the blackout strikes his building. The air conditioner sighs off. The room instantly warms. His computers and servers continue to glow, now powered by backup batteries that can only last so long. Undertown demands uninterrupted service, and for now, they have it.

  He leans into the telescope again. The building across the street is unlit and gives nothing back. He doesn’t like to think about what might be happening over there, what secrets he might miss out on. He closes his eyes and counts to a hundred. The computer and server fans moan. Sweat beads on his forehead.

  He opens his eyes and still the city remains dark, as if a black blanket were tossed over it, and he counts to one hundred again. Lightning webs the sky, strobing his view of downtown. It makes sparkling nests on the roofs of the two highest buildings, Wells Fargo and Big Pink, the U.S. Bancorp Tower. The thunder is continuous now, a muttering and booming, like some furious conversation heard through a wall.

  Lightning strikes the Broadway Bridge and outlines it blue. And then, as if some spark has taken hold and flared into fire, the city erupts with light. The grid-work pattern of the streets illuminates like circuit boards. The air conditioner sputters to life again, and he sighs his relief along with it.

  Then the power returns all over the city. A spike. The lights in the buildings all around him flicker and blaze hot. A few apartments flame out, go dark. A streetlamp explodes with a sparking rain.

  He can hear the surge muscling its way through his system. There is a flare. One of the servers spits and flashes and smokes, and when he goes to investigate it a moment later, he discovers the drive destroyed.

  ❖

  The Internet is his home. Some people might call it a fantasy world, because it is not something you can smell or taste or run through your fingers like black sand, but it is every bit as real as anything we experience. He can vividly remember nightmares he had as a child—a shadow man who stood in the corner of his bedroom, a gathering of thin bears that surrounded a picnic—far more vividly than the lunch he ate yesterday. They’re as real as anything. The Internet is as real as anything. If, in his mind, he has spent hours with a woman—cupped her breast, tasted her spit, snapped the lace band of her panties, both their bodies shuddering with pleasure—and the hours add up to days and then weeks, how is that not real? If he feels something, if his mind is cavernous and pliant enough to be stimulated so?

  The Internet has trapdoors and invisible wires. It has secret passages, secret paths and secret codes, secret languages. It has vaults and cellars and attics full of darkness no spotlight can cut through. You can travel through time, you can travel through walls. With a trembling of your fingers, you can make things appear and disappear. You can hurt people. You can help people. You can buy people. The Internet is a landfill and a treasure trove. Every object and every person and every place and every thought, every secret exists there. Every appetite can be satisfied there. Unlike a body, unlike the world, the Internet is limitless.

  It is where he belongs. Not here, on the streets, in the rain, splashing through puddles and dashing from awning to awning, heading to the tech store a mile away. His hair plasters his scalp and water runs down his collar. He gathers up the hood of his jacket. Across the street, a lamp throws a funnel of rain-swept light. In it stands a figure. A man. The one who sometimes preaches on street corners—Cheston believes—the one lumped with warts. He wears what looks like several black trash bags, torn through to accommodate his arms and legs, one of them hooding his head. His shape is made more uncertain by the wind that rips against his body and makes the bags flutter. Cheston cannot see a face, but he can feel eyes, and they are tracking him.

  He hurries on. He shivers and jams his hands deep in his pockets and every few steps glances back the way he came. His hood eats up so much of his vision, giving him only a periscope to see through rounded by darkness. The first three times he turns, the bag man remains beneath the streetlamp, but when Cheston spins around again, he is gone. Cheston pulls off his sunglasses to see better, bites down on the stem of them.

  He hurries faster still. Not only for the bag man and the dark and the rain, but for Undertown. This is Friday evening, when people return home from a long week at work and loosen their ties and their belts. They have an appetite. They want to indulge. Traffic on his servers multiplies. He has never met any of his em
ployers, but Cloven’s voice frightens him. It sounds like it is coming from the bottom of a well. And his employer has been clear on this one matter: the servers should never fail. He must keep the caverns open. If something goes wrong, Cheston will be held responsible.

  It is only a block now to the tech store, GEEK. The letters on the sign glow red in the night, the four windows a blazing white beneath them. He hates fluorescent light. Its color the color of hospitals and police stations. It makes his eyes flutter. Brings on a headache. But this evening he feels nothing but relief when he pushes through the door.

  A chime fills the store and slowly bottoms out. The color white is everywhere. White light, white drop ceiling, white tile floor, white metal shelving. It penetrates him. He hurries on his sunglasses and they instantly fog over. He pulls them off again to smear clean. He squints at the counter, abandoned, and then down the aisles, empty as well. He calls out, “Hello?” He pulls back his hood. Rain drips off him and patters the entry rug. The counter next to the register is dirty with Mountain Dew bottles and fast-food wrappers, a nest of wires, a motherboard. Cheston holds his hand over a soldering iron that still gives off heat. Through the center of the store reach six long aisles. At the back, three tables display desktops and laptops and printers. Cheston walks the width of the room, glancing down the aisles, each of them a corridor of ink cartridges and controllers and processors and video cards, spools of cords, blister packs of flash drives.

  In the last of them stands Derek, who owns the shop and lives in the basement below. He is short, the size of a twelve-year-old, though he might be forty. Doc Martens, the style with the bulky heel, cheat him a few inches. He always wears a short-sleeved polo tucked into pleated khakis with a braided leather belt. His forearms, which are exceptionally hairy, he keeps crossed across his chest. His face is clean-shaven but rashed along the neck. His hair is parted tidily down the middle with the sideburns trimmed weirdly high. “Greetings,” he says.