The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  Hannah tried to wave a girl toward her, but she would not come. She tried to cover a boy with a blanket, but he kicked it off. She tried to grab them, pick them up, lead them away, but they would not budge. She looked at them again, this time from another angle, peeling through the programming constructs that comprised them. These were not children, she came to understand, but representations of them, shadows of them, shared on the Dark Net for pornographic distribution. This was not the reason she plugged in, but she could not move on without erasing them. Only light would wash away the children, and in this case the light would take the form of a disbanding equation.

  How long she had been in the Dark Net, she had no idea. Thirty seconds or thirty days or thirty years. Corporeal and temporal limits were no longer relevant. It had taken practice, but in this otherworld she was learning how to break locks, open cabinets, climb stairs, tromp across a floor, up a wall, across a ceiling. There was impermanence to everything. Code could be shoved around, erased, made to signify something else or nothing altogether. Her literacy was ever-expanding. With time she thought she could probably breathe fire or blow a hurricane-force wind. She could probably grow as big as a tree or as small as a mouse, like something out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She could probably fly. Cyberspace was a whirling codex, a living infinite.

  Now she wanted to make light, so she taught herself to burn. A dust-clotted lamp elbowed from a brass anchor on the wall. She grabbed hold of it and yanked. The fixture tore from its casing, and the wall’s plaster crumbled to make way for the cords beneath. A foul-smelling dust came off the wall when she ripped at it, pulling out a few yards of cord, enough to twist and mangle and tear apart. Electricity spit from it like a fuse. She applied the shorn wire to the floor and to the blankets and to the tossed-aside nightgowns. Tiny flames sprung up and spread greedily and soon the room was ablaze. The children dimmed and their crying muted, and only then did Hannah turn to go.

  In the hallway she heard a noise. Like many doors being slammed. Or many feet pounding toward her at once. She was no longer an anonymous guest. With the fire she had announced herself as an invader, a terrorist. And she was being pursued because of it. She began to run. Back the way she came. Spiders skittered out from beneath rugs, paintings, the seams of the hardwood floor, a black mass of them pursuing her, biting her. She stomped at them. And she swiped at the bats that swung down to scratch her face. A trapdoor opened before her, and she leaped over it. An enormous grandfather clock tipped over, and she dodged out of its way as it crashed to the floor with a metallic doom. Her feet grew faster and faster, blurring through the house, outrunning them all.

  She ran through a vast ballroom lit with blood-red chandeliers in which skeletons waltzed. She ran through a nursery full of dolls—with black eyes and cracked porcelain skin—that turned their heads to watch her go. She ran through a chamber of meat hooks dangling from chains that rattled in her passing. And then she turned a corner and came to a skidding stop.

  There was a worm. Black-skinned and pulsing with muscle. As big around as a man and as long as a garden hose. The wrinkled seams of its skin contracted and expanded with its movement, as it wound and surged itself across the room, and she saw within it a light. A red light. This same light slimed off the worm and stuck to the floor, marking its passage. This detritus squiggled with its own life, as though egged and hatching. A code. The code. Here was the contagion. One source of it anyway. She knew she should run. She could hear the spiders and the skeletons and the bats clattering and scuttling and hissing toward her. But this was what she had come for.

  The worm paid her no attention. When it moved, it made a sound like a hand dragged across a blown balloon. An open window awaited it. It wanted to leave, to portal itself from the house, where it would feed. She yelled for it to stop, and it turned its blind black face toward her, before continuing to slough and heave forward. She knew from the fire she set that she could war with her surroundings. She looked around for a weapon and found it in an armored display. A knight stood on a short platform, a sword in its hands. When she seized it by the hilt, the knight tugged back, the armor rustily coming to life. She shoved it, and it toppled and split apart with a crash. Dozens of bald rats raced screeching from its hollows.

  The worm was nearly to the window when she brought down the sword. Its blade cleaved the worm through the middle. There was a mewling sound. The two sections of it rippled and twisted and bled a stream of digitized red code that soon blackened and ashed away.

  She didn’t have more than a moment before the room filled with those who pursued her. The spiders bit and filled her with poison that iced her skin. The bats tangled in her hair. The skeletons reached for her with their gray fingers. She screamed and thrashed and swung the sword and ran stumbling through the swirling mess of it all until she was free.

  Far in the distance, down a hallway that seemed to reach on for a mile, she could see the front door. It was slowly closing. On the other side of it, she could see everyone—Lela and Juniper and Hemingway and Josh and Derek—begging her to wake up, to come back. Maybe—maybe—she could run fast enough to make it through the crack before it closed.

  But right then another worm squirmed into view, pushing itself along the floor. She stutter-stepped, trying to decide whether to run or linger. She gave the front door one long, lingering glance before turning away from it. She hunted down the worm and pierced it through the middle. And then followed its slime trail. The fading stream of code led her to a room full of doors that opened the walls, floor, and ceiling. One of them was painted red, the edges of it glowing with a light of the same color.

  She found a candlestick phone mounted to the wall and ripped the receiver off its cradle and dialed her aunt Lela’s cell. She needed help, but she couldn’t leave now. She was almost there.

  ❖

  Derek took the cell from Lela. He turned the palm-sized scarred-up phone over in his hand, saying, “I didn’t know these things still existed.” As though this was the greater marvel. Then he flipped it open, and his face lit up with the green glow of its screen. His eyes dodged back and forth between the body on the floor and the message that seemingly came from it.

  Juniper carried a sheet from the bedroom and laid it over Hannah’s body. Lela stared at the shroud until he rested a hand on her shoulder, and then she folded into him and let him wrap her into a tight hug.

  Derek tapped the phone against his chin. Then he went to a shelf and pulled a laptop off it and booted it up. He opened a TOR browser and accessed the Dark Net and tried to recall their previous path. “The trouble is, these websites are all named by a scramble of letters and numbers. It’s difficult to remember the way.”

  He worked his way through several websites before tapping 666 into the opening of the URL and saying, “I think this is it, but . . .” He swiveled the screen for them all to see. It was black except for a blinking white cursor in the top left corner, as though the script was waiting to be written.

  “We’re cut off,” he told them. “If she’s in there, she’s in there alone. I can’t do anything from here.”

  “From here,” Lela said. “But there’s another way?”

  Derek shrugged and Josh said, “The IP address. If that’s what it actually is.”

  Derek’s fingers punched the keyboard, swiped the touchpad. Another few minutes of digging and he confirmed the IP was local. “And I’m pretty certain I know the source. There are only two Dark Net hosts in Portland, and one of them went offline Halloween night.”

  “That was Babs,” Juniper said. “A local crime boss. He was hosting servers out of his club, The Oubliette, that got knocked out when . . .” Here his eyes dropped to the shrouded figure on the floor. “So where can we find the other?”

  A few blocks away, Derek said. In the Pearl. At the high-rise apartment of one of his frequent customers, Cheston. “Which means Hannah’s hiding somewhere in the forest of his blade system.”

  This would be th
eir plan then. Lela would go to Cheston’s apartment and retrieve her niece, while Josh and Juniper shut down the databases all across the metro. “Or?” Lela said.

  “Or?” Derek said. “Or we die. Or Portland falls into a permanent darkness. Forget or. There is no or.”

  Chapter 29

  THE DOOR TO THE APARTMENT building is shattered, and Lela’s shoes crunch through the glass. Two bodies lie in the lobby, their arms around each other. Here is an overturned ficus tree, a messy pile of mail. Lela hears a ding, followed by the rattling shudder of elevator doors. She almost runs back into the street but instead dives behind the doorman’s desk. She holds her breath and tightens the grip around the pistol. She waits for the sound of footsteps that never comes. Another ding sounds, and the doors once again shudder in their tracks. A minute passes before she investigates. She turns the corner to find a third body lying with one leg outstretched and the jaws of the elevator closing repeatedly around it.

  She takes the stairs. Her footsteps make a spiraling echo. She pauses at every landing, waiting for the noise to die down so that she can confirm she is alone. On the top floor, she finds the hallway empty. A TV blares behind one door. A stain seeps from beneath another, and she steps around the damp half-circle. And then she arrives at his apartment—1408—the door already open a crack, a red light leaking from it. She supposes she should rush inside, in case anyone lies in wait. That is her standard. To rush. Her sister often called her out on it, saying she hurried everywhere, like a kid in the cereal aisle. But right now she seems capable only of slowness. Hesitation. One inch at a time, one foot in front of the other. Any sudden movement makes her feel like she’s untethered from her body and waiting for it to catch up. So she gives the door a push and reforms her two-handed grip on the pistol and waits for something to come charging toward her.

  The door swings and softly thuds the wall. The living room and kitchen are visible from here. The walls swim with a rippling light that emanates from another open doorway—an office or bedroom. The light is the color of blood. The color of an emergency. The color of a stop sign. A color that tells her to turn back.

  She steps inside. Her pistol follows her eyes. She thinks about hitting the light switch, but the floor-to-ceiling windows already make her feel too exposed. There is a leather couch and a coffee table with a tablet and a laptop on it. On the wall is a mounted big screen surrounded by game consoles and speakers big enough to compete with a concert hall. It’s tidy. Empty of any decoration. Functional but devoid of personality.

  She moves toward the light and finds what she is looking for, an office dominated by a multi-screened computer terminal. It is blindingly red, streaming code. The beating source of it all. Even out of the corner of her eye, she feels sickened, dizzy.

  ❖

  There are hundreds of cell towers in Oregon, many of them in Portland, all with fiber cables trenched between them and the data centers. Each has three faces—alpha, beta, and gamma—that can handle around eight hundred transmissions. Too many people try to make a call, too many people try to stream a YouTube video, then everything slugs to a crawl. Or you get booted off, at which time your phone will relay to another tower, maybe with a rival company. If you’ve ever glanced at your phone at a concert or a football game, and wondered why—in the middle of a city—your signal is spotty, it’s because the towers can only accommodate so many.

  When Derek sent Juniper and Josh off to bomb the data centers, he didn’t want them to bring down Internet access. He wanted to knock out every data center but one. In doing so they would push every signal-seeking device onto the same conduit—the biggest in the area, the only one with enough bandwidth to handle the overflow—Paradise Wireless.

  Its towers bristle from hilltops and its fiber cables tentacle the ground, and every screen, every wireless and cable transmission will shuttle through its port. So long as what Hannah says is true, so long as she can stop this, then they need only tap her into the master cabinet at the Paradise data center, and she’ll be able to stream into any connected device.

  “How the fuck do we do that?” Lela said.

  “We’ll have to go on-site. Their firewall is unbreachable.” Even now he couldn’t stop his mouth from cocking into a smile. “I’ve tried.”

  “That doesn’t sound easy.”

  “It won’t be.”

  “Given what’s happening outside, that sounds like the hardest thing in world history. We don’t even have Hannah.”

  “We’ll need to go on-site to retrieve her as well. At Cheston’s apartment.”

  Lela said, “How did you even come up with this plan?”

  His superior tone would be horribly obnoxious in any other circumstance, but what they needed now was confidence and he was soaked in it.

  An embattled race had been taking place on the digital frontier for some time, and the United States, China, and Russia were the main players. Engaged in secret stealing. Sabotage. Derek knew digital warfare would break out at some point; he was surprised now only by the supernatural powers of the aggressor. “The next world war began a long time ago,” he said. “Welcome to the front lines.”

  ❖

  Derek told Lela what to look for. The metal chassis carrying seven blade servers. She stands before them dumbly, the technology alien to her. The fan system gives off a breathy heat. She runs her finger across the servers, as though she might be able to guess which one hosts Hannah.

  She digs the thumb drive out of her pocket, what Derek called a dongle. She closes her eyes until she can see only through her lashes. And approaches the computer terminal. When Derek realized how ignorant and allergic to technology she was, he made her practice on his own system. He knew that Cheston would have several computers running and the servers would be managed through one of them. She needed to track the wires to the right hub and then insert the dongle into the port. Derek’s beacon program would siphon the data they needed. That’s how he referred to Hannah. As data. Code. An anti-virus program. Human software.

  Of course Lela cares about helping others, preventing the virus from spreading further, but the goal feels abstract. Hannah is what she’s here for. She promised to take care of the girl, and this is the only way she can redeem her failure to do exactly that. The dongle scrapes its way into the port. A light blinks on the butt of it. There is a sound—like an engine chugging to life—as the beacon software goes to work.

  Derek told her to wait five minutes, what feels like an interminable amount of time, before retrieving the dongle and unplugging and destroying the system. “Don’t throw it out a window or toss it in the bathtub and think you’re in the clear,” he said. “I need you to smash everything you see to pieces. Get a hammer, find some scissors, a screwdriver. Whatever it takes. I expect your hands to be bleeding and your shoes to be shredded from the effort.” If people can scour dumps in Nigeria and dig out a dirt-clumped hard drive from a computer owned fifteen years ago by a guy from Pittsburgh and steal his credit card and social security information off it, then she needed to do more than yank a power cord. Total and immediate erasure. That wasn’t going to take back what had already occurred, but it would prevent its further dispersal. One step, then another—slow progress—just like the way she entered the apartment. Just like the way she leaves the office now, returning to the living room.

  She can’t abide the red code. She remembers catching a glimpse of it on her laptop. That was all it took to sharpen her temper, flood her with the urge to hurt. Lose her sense of self. She had nearly struck Hannah when the girl slammed shut the laptop, hurled it against the wall in a splintering mess. Lela doesn’t trust herself. She worries that a part of the virus still chugs away inside her, waiting to load completely.

  A telescope is stationed by the windows. Her foot accidentally thuds its stand, and the telescope swings in a wide arc as if to take in the span of the city, and she pauses to study Portland. She has always considered the skyline beautiful. Maybe now more than ever. Buildings r
ise all around her, weirdly bright with electricity and firelight. It is an odd but striking contrast, the manmade and the elemental. Black smoke rises into the murky red sky that soaks up the reflection of the city burning beneath it.

  When she was down in the street, she could never see much, walled in by buildings. Trapped in what felt like a prison with all its cages rattling. But from this high vantage, she can see the city as a whole and even imagine what lies beyond it. The Cascade Range rising from the wilderness like broken teeth. The cars streaming toward roadblocks on the many arteries leading away from Portland. The National Guard units establishing a perimeter. People wanting to get in and others desperate to get out. Emergency shutdowns of all data systems and power grids. A press conference. Crowds of reporters speaking into cameras. She feels strangely naked when she thinks of them, as if every camera and microphone and notepad has swung toward her expectantly. She is the one they want, the source at the center of it all, the actor in and—maybe?—one-day chronicler of the story unfolding. But that flash of excitement lasts only a second as her gaze travels farther, and farther still, beyond the Cascades, beyond Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, beyond the borders of this country, to the world, and the shadows and the signs of war are everywhere. Portland is today’s tragedy. Torment and peril await everyone, everywhere. The Dark Net knows no borders; it is the trapdoor beneath all our feet. Immeasurably deadly. And with such a broad view of the terror that awaits, she feels small and adrift, and it is too much to hope that she can make any difference.

  Something erupts in the near distance—maybe a gas line—a floral bloom of flame. The force of the explosion arrives a moment later. The window wobbles. The glasses in the kitchen cupboard chime. Because of this she doesn’t hear the footsteps behind her, but she sees a glint reflected in the window. She tries to turn, too late. Someone shoves her. Her body pitches forward—her face slamming the glass—and then the arms belt around her chest and belly. Her body hurls over the couch and onto the coffee table. Its wood jars her spine. One of its legs snaps beneath her weight, and she rolls off it and onto the floor. She has lost all sense of up or down when she scrabbles to right herself. The pistol has fallen from her hand and she reaches wildly for it, and then gives up.