The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  “There they are,” Juniper says.

  From the back of the shop come two figures. One of them is Josh, all sharp angles and acne and uncombed hair. The other is short but cheats a few inches with his clunky Doc Martens. He is balding, the gleaming scalp offset by forearms patched with thick wiry hair. He wears khakis and a polo shirt wrinkled at the belly from being tucked in earlier. He stares at them through the glass, then twists the deadbolt and opens the door. He studies them each in turn, finally settling his gaze on Lela. “Just so you know, if not for my man Josh, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Getting past him is like getting past Kerberos.”

  “Thank you,” Lela says. “Thanks for meeting with us.”

  “Don’t thank me for anything, honey girl. Not yet. You might have gotten past Josh, but you still have to get past me. How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Can we talk inside? It’s not safe out here.”

  He leans against the doorway, crosses his arms, no rush. “Tell me how I know I can trust you.”

  Josh swats his shoulder. “Come on, Derek. They’re going to get killed out there.”

  Derek makes a dismissive notion with his hand as if to knock the complaint from the air.

  Lela wears a hoodie to fight the cold, but she pulls it back from her face now so that they can look at each other plainly. “Why would I mess with you?”

  “You’re a reporter. You know this address, you know my face. Maybe this is all some ruse you’ve set up so that you can write an article.”

  “It’s not,” Josh says. “This is real. Stop being a d-bag.”

  Lela puts out an arm, silencing Josh. “It’s okay.” Her hair is damp now, and she combs the sodden mess of it back from her face. “I’ll be the first to admit, I am normally a vulture who acts in complete self-interest and will do anything for a story. But this is not one of those times.” Her voice thickens with emotion she isn’t used to managing. “My sister is dead.” She looks down at Hannah. Her face is inscrutable behind the Mirage. “Her mother is dead. People are dying all around us. And we’re going to join them if you don’t help us. Please help us.”

  Derek dodges his eyes back and forth among them, settling now on Hannah. He appears to be chewing gum though he is not. “She’s the one, huh? The little girl in the weird sunglasses who says she can bring down the Dark Net and yet needs our humble help to get inside.”

  “Little?” Hannah says. “We’re the same height.”

  Derek defensively straightens his posture. He appears ready to fire off a response, but instead juts his chin at Juniper. “What about the big guy? Why so quiet?”

  Juniper leans against the doorway, his face mooshed against the frame. Sweat drips from him though the night is cold. “Right now I just want to lie down, but I will say that I have some experience in these matters.”

  “These matters?”

  He holds up his pistol and then slowly tucks it back in its holster. “I’m not going to demand, and I’m not going to beg, but I will say please. Maybe we can help each other.”

  “Please,” Hannah says.

  “Please,” Lela says. “Okay? We’re all saying it. Fucking please.”

  “Words,” Derek says. “Words are just words. They don’t reassure me.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  He’s the kind of person who can’t smile without smirking. “Social security numbers. Credit card PINs. And all account usernames and passwords. You write them down, I’ll authenticate. Then we’re in business.”

  “So you can ruin me if I write about you? At a time like this, that’s your main concern?”

  “Yep.” Derek pops his lips with the p.“How do I know you won’t ruin me anyway?”

  “You don’t. But I won’t. I promise. I’ll keep the intel in a safe. Little insurance policy.”

  Lela looks up and down the street, a shadowy corridor blurred by the now steady rain. Getting inside seems more important than ever, but she won’t let him walk all over her. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Because we’re the good guys.”

  She wants to grab Juniper’s pistol, shove Derek aside, push her way into the store, demand whatever help he can offer. But she’s had her share of difficult interviews and knows the only way to get what she wants. Listen and play off ego. “Fine,” she says. “You’re in charge. You can have whatever you want. Just let us in.”

  Derek considers them another minute, then steps aside, holds open the door.

  ❖

  Past the display cases, past the neatly stocked aisles, through the cluttered storeroom, there is a doorway. It opens to a staircase that drops into the basement. Two dehumidifiers groan. Fans whir. The air is warm and smells faintly of burned sugar from all the computer terminals set up here, their screens glowing and hard drives humming. The walls are red-bricked and carry a framed poster of Orwell’s 1984, another of The Matrix. A Guy Fawkes mask hangs from a hook.

  There’s not enough space for them all, but Juniper pushes his way into the adjacent bedroom. Onto the bed he promptly collapses. Joined a moment later by a tired Hemingway, who curls up on the floor with a humph.

  Josh and Hannah sit on an IKEA futon. They watch as Lela writes down all the requested information on a notepad. Derek plops into an ergonomic swivel chair with a netted back. “Thank you,” he says, and takes the notepad and pushes off with his feet and rolls across the floor to face a thirty-inch monitor. His keyboard is split down the middle and angled in such a way that it appears almost winged. His fingers strike the keys with a strange aggression, as if he were at war with the machine. He calls up a browser called Opera and works through several websites, plugging in her information at each. Her bank account reveals several overdraft charges and a savings of $904. “Wow, you’re broke.”

  “Writer,” she says with a shrug.

  Derek logs out, tears away the sheet, tucks it in his pocket. Then he swivels around to face them. “Okay. Now what?”

  “You say you’re the good guys.” Lela tries to make her voice as encouraging as possible. “Tell me about how good you are.”

  A half-full bottle of Mountain Dew sits on the desk. He reaches for it, wrenches off the cap, takes a swallow. “Do you remember, last year, when the Wells Fargo website crashed for twenty-four hours?”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  He taps his chest. “That was us. Took five minutes to bring it down.”

  “You’d think breaking into a bank’s website would be as hard as breaking into a bank.”

  “You’d think, right? But no. You put up a fence in your yard, somebody can climb over it and dig under it. You put locks on your doors, but if somebody wants to get inside, they only need to put a rock through the window. Security is an illusion. We’re all willfully blind to the threats that surround us. Nowhere is safe. No one is safe.” She can tell this is a speech he’s given before. He holds out his arms, as if gesturing the world around. “As tonight has proven. I’ve spent the last four hours trying to crack this thing—whatever it is—but so far I’m getting nowhere. The virus isn’t like anything I’ve seen before.”

  “Why aren’t you infected?”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve got so many security filters on this thing, I could run radioactive waste through it and it would come out purer than spring water.”

  “Why’d you break into the bank’s website?”

  Another swig. His words are hopped up on caffeine, spilling out of him: “The same reason we posted the names and addresses of those seventeen-year-old football players who raped that cheerleader. The same reason we hacked the computer of the archbishop and leaked his kiddie porn to the cops. The same reason we took over the Tacoma PD’s website and posted pictures of killer clowns after they shot that unarmed black kid. Because we’re the good guys.”

  “You keep saying we. You’re part of a collective.”

  He tucks the bottle into his groin and swivels back and forth in his chair. “Actually i
t’s just me. But I represent a greater good. That’s what I mean by we.”

  “Do you have, like, a name?”

  The smirk again. “You mean besides Derek?”

  “Yes, I mean besides Derek.”

  “Still working on that. I’ve got a few avatars. What do you think about The God Virus? That’s kind of awesome, right?”

  The question never gets answered. Their attention turns to Hannah. She rises from the futon and crosses the basement and stands beside Derek. He feels uncomfortable enough to scoot a few inches away from her. He waits for her to say something, and when she doesn’t, his hands rise and fall to slap the armrests of his chair. “What, kid?”

  “We’re wasting time. I need you to take me into the Dark Net.”

  Derek cocks his head, studies her a moment. “Why?”

  “You said you’re one of the good guys.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to go after the bad guys.”

  “And who are they?”

  Lela answers: “A group known as Undertown, Inc.”

  “Who is this kid?” he says to Lela, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “Look. Listen. Let me explain something to you. The NSA knows your movement from site to site, can track your GPS, can track your credit card purchases, can hack the camera on your phone or computer and spy over your shoulder. They can follow every email you’ve ever sent, including edits, deletions, whether you were picking your nose or drinking a root beer when you wrote it. They know everything about you, and if you make a wrong move, they throw you in a cell and pipe Britney Spears through the loudspeakers all night and rip out your toenails until you confess to what they already know. If that’s what the good guys are capable of, imagine the bad. The bad guys are on the Dark Net. The bad guys are causing all of this. You don’t want to mess with them.” He finishes off the bottle of Mountain Dew, stifles a burp. “Besides, you’re just a kid.”

  Lela says, “She’s not just a kid.”

  “I don’t know what that even means.”

  “She’s special.”

  “So am I.”

  “This is different. She’s—I don’t know the word—touched.”

  “By whom?”

  It isn’t easy for Lela to say, “I don’t know. God?”

  Derek rolls his eyes. “Know your audience, lady.”

  “Twenty-four hours ago, I felt exactly the same.”

  “You guys are a joke. A bunch of freak-show zealots. I can’t believe you’re wasting my time.”

  Lela tries to explain herself—stumbling through a half-assed description of the spectrum—and who knows how long the argument would spiral on if not for Hannah slapping Derek across the face. This silences him, makes his eyes go wide. He brings a hand to the cheek where the imprint of her hand rises red.

  “Plug me in,” Hannah says.

  Lela blinks once and sees Hannah as a twelve-year-old girl, blinks twice and sees her ten times the size. Derek hunches down in his chair as she looms menacingly over him. “Do you understand?” the girl says again, and still Derek does not respond. Her voice sounds as though another voice threads together with it, an adult voice that amplifies her words, giving them reverb. “You’re going to help me get inside the Dark Net.” Her hands shoot forward and take hold of his head. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but it appears that a whiteness hazes from her mouth, her visor, her nose and ears, as if she swallowed the moon. The ceiling seems to lift and the walls to bend and the floor to drop, every atom nudged aside to make room for something outsized.

  Hemingway comes out of the bedroom and wags his tail and perks his ears and begins to bark and won’t stop even when Lela shushes him. Finally she clamps his snout and says, “Stop it. Be quiet, you dumb dog.” She holds him and pets him furiously and tries not to feel terrified of her own niece.

  “Let me go,” Derek says. “Please!”

  At last Hannah releases him, and he rolls his chair away and trembles as if run through with electricity.

  A long silence follows. Josh breaks it. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Are you familiar with the term jeremiad?” Juniper says, his voice carrying from the other room. He does not wait for an answer and he does not rise from the bed, but explains that it comes from the book of Jeremiah. It is a list of woes, a lamentation that denounces society and prophesizes moral downfall. “It’s a form of storytelling. Preachers use it, politicians use it. Spirit clashes with flesh. And in the end, one triumphs over the other. Sometimes the good, sometimes the bad. We’re caught up in a kind of jeremiad now. Flesh and spirit, light and dark, physical and digital. A clash of opposites. Right now I’d put my money on Hannah as our only chance of winning. Do you understand?”

  Derek’s nose is bleeding, a thread of red that traces his upper lip and smears down his chin, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are on Hannah. “All right. Sure. Let’s do this.”

  Chapter 26

  THE MIRAGE RUNS through the lightning port behind Hannah’s ear, wiring stimuli into her brain. She unplugs the feed now and slips off the prosthesis. The sudden darkness is familiar, comforting, a pressure relieved. She senses Derek beside her, holding the cable that runs from his desktop.

  “It’s not going to work,” he says.

  “It’s going to work.”

  “I’m telling you. It’s not going to work.”

  But it will. The Internet is code, and so is everything around them. When you’re a child, you struggle to read what later becomes second nature. A red light makes your foot depress a brake. A skull and crossbones alerts us to poison. None are direct representations, but signs and symbols that serve as vehicles of meaning and experience. The Internet is no different, made up of ones and zeroes akin to the tiny atoms that build up into the appearance of swords and books and coffee mugs. By plugging in, Hannah will simply need to learn not just a new way of seeing, but a new way of feeling, of living. Because even though the Internet might seem like an unguessable expanse, those ones and zeroes are charged with energy and so they must have mass, a physicality she can negotiate. She knows this, but the knowledge comes from elsewhere, as though voices were whispering in her ear, hands urging her forward. She feels part of a company greater than even those in this room.

  Derek reaches behind her ear, fits the cord into place. The computer makes a sound like knocked door, indicating its detection of new hardware, requesting approval. She hears Derek drop into his chair and roll across the floor. The mouse clicks. The keyboard patters. His voice announces, “Okay, let’s give this a try.”

  For now all programs are shut off, the Internet connection severed. He has only one file open. That’s where they’ll start, he tells her. Baby steps.

  She remembers the word Juniper used on her the other day. Aperture. She feels one opening inside her now and bends every nerve in its direction. It is as if she were floating in some porous borderlands. She is dimly aware of everyone watching her in the chair, while also blurring into another world. A world streaming with code.

  Slowly the one begins to overtake the other. How much time passes, she isn’t sure, but for a long while her mind feels frayed and spastic, like so many centipedes twisting into a ball. She has no vision, only a haywire perceptual antenna. She has been here before, the sensation akin to when she first tried on the Mirage. The doctor told her she needed to be patient, needed to remain calm, and he was right. Everything eventually settled into place. She tries the same now. She tries to be calm.

  But it’s difficult. Because at first it feels like she’s spiraling along a drain rainbowed with color or maybe funneling through a tornado that carries millions of LEGO blocks in its wind. There is no up or down or left or right, no depth or design, only a whirring sense of pieces that don’t fit together.

  “Where am I?” she says. “What am I looking at? Tell me how to see.”

  Derek’s voice sounds far away. “It’s just a photo I took. That’s all. A JPEG of the storm front that blew throug
h on Friday night.”

  She remembers the way the air pressure shifted so suddenly her ears popped, the way the wind hushed and then the raindrops spattered the windows. She had watched the weather from the living room. Watched with her new eyes, the Mirage, as the lightning forked and the clouds churned and the city blacked out. That was when this all began, it seems. As if the storm blew it in.

  She calls up the memory now to fit together with the data channeling into her brain. And then—not all at once, but piece by piece—the panic wipes away and her perception clarifies. She was trying to look at something, as you would look at a screen. But she is not looking at the storm. She is a part of the storm. She can ride the lightning, brush against the stony underside of a cloud, taste the raindrops frozen in flight. Here are skyscrapers to climb, the reflections in their windows burning pleasantly. It’s all there, a tiny infinity.

  Derek says, “What can you see? Can you see it?”

  “Yes,” she says. “No.”

  “Which is it?”

  “I can navigate it.”

  He doesn’t respond for a long time, but when he does, his voice is touched with an almost childish curiosity. “I don’t know if this makes sense, but could you—can you touch the storm? Can you change it somehow?”

  “I’ll try,” she says.

  She tries to center herself, find a place of vague untraceable calm before attempting anything. She cannot touch with her hands, so she must discover other muscles, invisible muscles that might respond to her commands. He wants her to change the photo. The possibility makes her feel like a small god who might on a whim knock over buildings, set trees on fire, blacken the world. She cycles through the data. The lightning is white-hot. The windows are orange-lit and warped with reflections. Everything is otherwise so dark. Overwhelmingly dark. It cloaks what could otherwise be seen. She recognizes the dark by its name. A string of identifiers that determine color. If she rearranges the string, changes the code, everything will lighten. She tries.