The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  The coefficients. The bitstream. The parameters. The multiple compressions. She perceives the storm, but she also interprets its component parts. In this way she feels afflicted with a kind of double vision, like the child who experiences wonder at a fairy tale while also feeling safely tucked into a chair or who studies the sky and recognizes a cloud while also willing it into the shape of a dragon or bunny or moth.

  “Holy shit,” Derek’s voice says. “She’s doing it. You’re doing it, Hannah.”

  ❖

  Lela stands behind Derek and studies the monitor. The photo gradually lightens, the pixels crystallize, and then she blinks and the city appears suddenly unrobed of shadow. As if the screen, once smudged with soot, has been wiped clean.

  Hannah grips the armrests so tightly, the ligaments stand out on her forearms. Sweat gleams on her skin. Her head leans back and her teeth grit and her eyes stare at nothing, the pupils so dilated they appear bored through, gateways to something cavernous.

  For the next hour or so, Derek trains her. At first they play around with more pictures. Compressing and recompressing, cropping and rotating and downsampling and block splitting. From there they move on to word processing, music files, games, websites. She gets faster, figures things out without him having to coach her. Maybe because her blindness inclines her toward the extrasensory.

  Juniper is asleep on the bed and Josh is asleep on the futon, his arm thrown around Hemingway. All of them snore softly. Lela wishes she could join them. She digs around in her purse for more Adderall but the bottle is empty. She shakes it anyway. A gesture of stupid hope that captures the spirit of the room.

  Her exhaustion gives her a bruised feeling behind her eyes that courses through her body and extends to the tips of her fingers. She has been standing so long, so still that when she changes her posture, the blood hurts when it floods into the crimped-off spaces. She tries to pay attention, but Derek only makes so much sense as he talks to Hannah about firewalls, VPNs, how she’ll be vulnerable to attack, but he’ll monitor everything, checking for viruses, worms, pirates. “I’m your wingman.” If someone tries to hack them, he’ll block the IP, shield her.

  “But what if the IP is our target?”

  “Goes both ways. There will be a wall between us.”

  “Then don’t.”

  The mouse is wireless and Derek spins it in circles, while turning the idea over in his head. “The system could get overridden. You could conceivably get overridden as well.”

  “Possessed you mean.”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “Don’t block the IP unless I say so.”

  “This is my equipment.”

  “Don’t,” Hannah says in a voice that shakes the air.

  ❖

  Lela feels like now is when she should come to her senses. Now is when she should muffle her ears against whatever possesses Hannah and commands the room. Lela must see her for what she is—a girl, just a little girl—without a mother and in need of protection.

  Cheryl always lectured Lela on her irresponsibility, her recklessness and selfishness and solipsism. She was trying to be good. She was trying to do what was right, but it felt wrong. Cheryl would never have allowed any of this, but Cheryl was gone. Every thought conflicts and dead-ends, and she doesn’t know what else to say except “I think we need to slow down and rethink—”

  Hannah’s hand seizes her wrist. And Lela has a vision then. Of the great expanse of years that lie before them. Hannah is not alive. Lela is not alive. No one is alive because the world is a vast plain of fire through which figures stride, some with beaks and claws and tails and horns and scales, and some with beetles and spiders and flies spilling out of their floppy mouths.

  “Don’t,” Hannah says again, and Lela pulls back her hand as if burned.

  Derek holds up his hands in submission, then drops them to the keyboard once more. He does not look to Lela for approval but moves his fingers rapid-fire, enabling the VPN, calling up a TOR browser, and tapping into the network. There are no standard addresses on the Dark Net, everything hidden, known only by a seemingly random stream of characters that end with .onion. This makes searching difficult. So do the passwords protecting so many of them or the requirement that you belong to an approved friends list. He says he isn’t sure what they’re looking for, and Hannah says she is. An entity, Undertown, and a name, Cloven. They’ll start by searching the wikis and directories and link dumps, maybe get into some chatrooms, see what they can turn up.

  Some sites fail to load; some sites are slow to load. They scroll through political websites, some libertarian, some anarchistic, all choked with conspiracy theories. Here are jihadists from ISIS requesting funds and volunteers, and here is an Idaho militia offering up a $100,000 reward for any who might assassinate the Antichrist president. Here are music and movies and TV dumps, where anything you’ve ever wanted to plug into your ears or eyes is available for free. Here is a supposed assassin who will kill anyone for a fee. Here is an NYC hooker who will fuck you for Namecoins or bitcoins. Here is a digital Silk Road offering up weed, crank, oxy, roids, H, E, iPhones, iPads, pistols, pythons, whatever, everything delivered to your doorstep.

  All this time Hannah’s eyes remain open, twitching, tracking things unseen to Lela. Her lips move like a child’s when reading.

  Then Derek clicks on a link with 666 in the address chain. It loads with a slow, shuttering blackness that overtakes the screen.

  Derek shakes the mouse, smacks the keyboard with his index finger several times, before giving up. “What do you see, Hannah?”

  No response. Her face marbleized.

  Derek twists in his chair to examine her. His face sheened with sweat. “Hannah?”

  “Hannah?” Lela says, and takes her by the shoulders, gives her a gentle shake.

  It is then that the girl’s eyes roll back white and her mouth unhinges and she begins to scream.

  “Hannah!” Lela says. “Hannah, can you hear me?”

  Lela can’t hear her own voice over the screaming, which continues longer than it ought to, carried by more breath than a set of lungs could bottle. Lela gives up on shaking Hannah and covers her ears and turns in a hopeless circle and tells Derek they need to unplug her.

  He leans back in his chair, so repelled by the screaming that it might as well have claws that scratch, fangs that bite. “She said not to! Not unless she said to.” The clarity of the monitors behind him fizzles in and out, and in a panic Derek turns his attention to the computer terminal. Something pops. Sputters. Flares. The fans pick up speed and expel the reek of smoke. “Oh no,” he says. “Oh shit.”

  Hannah’s body begins to seize. Shivering and hitching. White flecks of spit fly from her mouth. One of the arms breaks off of her chair. Lela goes to her and gets knocked to the floor by a flailing arm.

  Hemingway barks and Josh tries to settle him down. Juniper stands in the doorway to the bedroom, a hand pressed painfully to his side. No one is doing anything. No one knows what to do. Hannah—absurdly—was in charge until a moment ago.

  Then the girl goes silent, out of breath, though her mouth remains wide open. She continues to convulse in the chair. Her skin brightens red—and then, just as suddenly, blackens. Smoke rises from her hair before it catches flame.

  Lela throws herself at Hannah once more. She misses the cord the first time—then swipes again, grabbing for it, making a fist around it. It’s hot. So currented with electricity that her muscles harden, and for a moment she can’t move. Jolted. Electrocuted. Then Lela falls back and yanks the cord with her weight. And at last it gives, popping cleanly from the lightning port.

  Juniper is beside her now, and he kicks the cord from her hand. She breathes hard from the floor, not wanting to get up but forcing herself to. Hannah’s skin has split, blackened with angry red lines running through it. Smoke curls off her. Lela doesn’t know what she expects. Maybe for Hannah to rub her eyes and clear her throat, to thank her or yell at her, to tell them
all what to do next. Instead she slumps from the chair to the floor, her body so limp it appears deboned, the posture of the dead.

  Chapter 27

  THE ROADS AREN’T SAFE, but Juniper drives them anyway. He has no choice. This is their only chance. The Buick LeSabre he brought to Portland so many years ago has been replaced by a Dodge truck with a grille like a clenched fist. It has a brush guard and tires treaded so thickly, he could climb the side of a cliff. A 6.4-liter HEMI V8 engine with a growl you can feel a block away. If you hoist up the bench seat in the club cab, you’ll find weapons tucked into the smuggler’s space: a pump shotgun, two pistols, boxes of ammo that rattle on a rutted road. The gearshift—with a twist and a yank—becomes a knife spiked by a thin six-inch blade. The topper is windowless and lined with iron, and two heavy-duty bolts lock its door in place. The color, as if there were any question, is black.

  The only vehicles on the road are crashed. An upside-down SUV. A bus on its side. A five-car pileup. A sedan with its hood crumpled like an accordion. A semi that appears to have plowed through oncoming traffic. At times the way is blocked altogether, a gridlocked section of road, all of the cars with their doors open as if the drivers will be back at any second. He turns back to try another route or slowly noses through the wreckage with a rocking screech or takes the truck into the grassy meridian or onto a muddy hillside shoulder. He keeps his eyes on the side mirrors as much as the road before him, and for some time and many miles there is only darkness and his headlights reflecting off shattered glass, rent metal, and the puddles rippled by wind. He doesn’t know if everybody is sleeping or hiding or simply dead.

  Every now and then he checks in with Josh. The Motorola walkie-talkies have a fifty-mile range, and their voices come across with only a few hiccups of static. Juniper says, “How are you doing?” and Josh says, “Almost there.”

  “Same. Keep me posted.”

  Besides Paradise Wireless, there are four other major providers in Portland. Juniper is headed first to a data center in Tigard, a suburb of strip malls and multiplex theaters and tightly packed housing developments. This data center, like all data centers, is not advertised online and cannot be found in the phone book. The buildings are not physically marked with signage. You might drive past one every day. You might live or work nearby and not know any better. Except for the utility vans and trucks—often decaled with the company’s name—that park in the lots, these are buildings that hope for anonymity.

  Because they are critical arteries of digital information. People tend to think about the Internet in a blindly amorphous, almost religious way. There is an all-knowing repository known as the cloud that everyone and everything is a part of, but no one can tell you where it is. Some invisible communication is going on all around us, part of the ether. Towers are erected, steepled on hillsides, where voices are funneled like prayers and hymns.

  In fact, the Internet would not exist if not for the fiber cables that vein the ground beneath our streets, through our sewers. There are around eighty major network junctions—known as IXPs, for Internet exchange points—throughout the country. These are the freeways that feed the domestic traffic as well as the international data that comes from undersea cables. They are nakedly unprotected. As are the fiber cables that branch off them and come together—at pinch points, spaghetti junctions—within the data centers. The term wireless couldn’t be more misleading.

  Every now and then, there will be a data outage due to a fiber cut. During which time you cannot text, cannot email, cannot call your sister in Omaha to wish her a happy birthday or even your local 911 dispatcher to report an emergency, cannot use a credit card or ATM, cannot watch Netflix or ask Google a question or turn on your security system or access hospital records or any of the other hundreds of conveniences we take for granted, that make us safe and happy, that make society hum.

  All it takes is an earthquake—the slight shifting of stone—or a construction project—the metal bite of a payloader’s scoop—and the cables are clipped and everything goes dark. Or someone could simply hoist a manhole cover, climb below the street, and use a knife or a pair of wire cutters to slow or cease all local Internet traffic. The security at the data centers is minimal—sometimes a single guard in the lobby, sometimes no one at all—but even if they hired out a small army, the cables that reach beyond it would remain completely unguarded. We worry about guns and we worry about bombs, but one of the greatest threats of this time is a mere knife jab to the physical cabling that is the circulatory system of the country.

  At the entrance to the Tigard data center, there is a rolling gate—woven with chain-link—that Juniper does not slow down for. The Ram lives up to its name, crashing through with a splash of sparks and a grating screech as it carries the gate with it. He comes to a rocking stop after twenty yards, and the gate releases from the grille and keeps going another five.

  The building before him couldn’t be more nondescript: one-story, brick, maybe four thousand square feet, with two windows bordering the entrance. You’d think they’d be bigger, but even as traffic increases, the need for circuit-and-node real estate grows smaller. Technology shrinks even as it opens up new worlds. To serve the entire state of Oregon only requires around two hundred thousand gigs of data a day. In the building the lights are off, but in the parking lot a vapor lamp burns, casting its glow on three utility vans parked there.

  He kills the engine, climbs out, and hoists from the cab the cardboard box packed with C-4 demolition charges. The puttied bricks give off the smell of motor oil and Band-Aids. It hurts to move. To turn the steering wheel, to depress the gas and brake, to open and close the door, to carry the box, which weighs over fifty pounds. He walks as carefully as he can, no sudden movements, but still he can feel the stitches straining, tearing.

  He’s not worried about dropping the box or fumbling the bricks—he does both as he moves around the perimeter of the building, setting them in place—because C-4 is stable and resilient enough that it will only blow when exposed to extreme heat and shock wave. This will come from the detonators he’s inserted in each of them. He and Sarin had cooked and molded the C-4 themselves to take down a neo-Nazi militia compound—way up in the Cascades—headed by a demon who was readying a series of attacks on mosques and synagogues throughout the Northwest, hoping to start a holy war. Juniper kept the leftovers in case they came in handy.

  In each block he stabs a blasting cap, and from this he runs a detonating cord capped at each end with a booster. There might have been a time when detonating a building would jag his heart with excitement, fill him with some boyish anticipation. No longer. There was too much lost already, and he goes about his business with a joyless determination.

  He hides behind his truck for the detonation. The air pulses yellow, orange, red, and back again. The sound is thunderous, a forceful wind that pops his ears and gives way to a mosquito whine that lingers. Bricks rain down and clunk the truck and scatter across the parking lot. When he stands, with some difficulty, he sees the fiery, cratered remains of the building. Black smoke roils from it.

  He unclips the walkie-talkie. “One down,” he says, and Josh says, “Make that two.”

  Josh was in Beaverton, at another data center. Juniper wasn’t sure he should send the kid off on his own, but in the interest of time, they didn’t have any choice. Lela had even risen from her daze to say that Josh might look like a loser—with his pleated khakis and his pimple-rashed cheeks—but the intern was all right. And now Josh has pulled through. Neither of them has run into any trouble, so maybe things will turn out all right after all.

  It is then—when Juniper says, “Nice work,” and limps toward the driver’s door of the Ram—that he spots the hound. It wanders out of the night, the hard pads of its paws clopping on the wet pavement like hooves. It pauses only for a moment, beneath the vapor lamp in the parking lot, which finds a reflection in the milky cast of its eyes.

  He holsters the walkie-talkie. He reaches into his
pocket and fumbles for his key. He cringes when he runs—as best as he can manage, more of a loping hobble—to the door and yanks it open and climbs inside and cranks the key. By this time the hound has started after him. It lowers its head and tucks its tail. Its body tightens and unclenches when it speeds forward, whippet-fast. It hurls itself against the door powerfully enough to rock the vehicle. Against the window its claws scrabble and its jaws leave a rime of saliva.

  Juniper jerks the truck into gear and spins the wheel hard and plows forward and watches the hound bound after him in the red wash of the taillights. Soon it is lost from sight. He blows out a sigh and thumbs on the walkie-talkie. “Ran into a little trouble, but I’m okay now. What’s your status? Over.” He waits for a response, too long. There is nothing but the hush of static. He repeats himself. Still nothing. “Josh?” he says. “Josh, give me something. I’m getting worried here.”

  Then—in stops and starts, like when you’re spinning the dial, hunting for radio stations—comes a fitful screaming. Of someone who has given up all control. Of pure, consuming pain. There is a woolly silence, and then another voice sounds. Deep-throated. Burned. And familiar. “Didn’t I already kill you?” it says. “Didn’t I tell you to stop with your hopeless causes?”

  “Who are you?” Juniper says, but he already knows. The thing. The man who used to follow him from church to church, haunting him. The man who stood at the base of his bed in the hotel room. Pale-faced. Black-clothed. Whose joints moved like creaking ropes, whose voice sounded like the bottom of a well. They say you can’t remember pain, but he does now: a heated knot twisting his guts, a marrow-deep fear.

  “You mean we weren’t properly introduced before?” the voice says, so deep it is palpable. “You can call me Cloven.”

  When the signal fuzzes out again, it never comes back.