The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  “What are you doing?” Hannah says.

  “I need to know what’s going on out there.”

  But first she opens a message marked IMPORTANT from her editor. She never takes a day off, never goes off the clock, which makes it impossible to resist dipping into the office conversation now, just for a moment. No matter what Brandon wants, she’ll say no, but she needs to make clear to him that she’s out for days, weeks, however long it might take her to sort out the mess she’s in. The computer chugs and bleeps. The screen goes dark and she thumps it with her knuckles. “Stupid thing. What’s wrong with you?”

  Just then the red code begins to map its way across the monitor. But Lela gets no more than a glimpse. Hannah lurches across the table and grabs hold of the laptop. “No!” Lela says, reaching for it, but the girl is too fast—hurling it against the wall. The screen snaps off and skids away. Black keys litter the ground. A green chipboard sticks out of the cracked base like a bulging organ. There is a spritz of electricity, and the fan gives a dying gasp.

  A part of Lela wants to scream, slap the girl. How dare she? Lela should throw her against the wall. That’s what she should do. Over and over again until her brains dash out her ear. She grinds her teeth and lets out an animal cry and slams a hand flat against the table.

  And then she sees Hannah. Really sees her. The girl is backing away fearfully, shivering where she stands. “Don’t,” Hannah says, holding up her hands. “Don’t. I’m sorry. I was just trying to protect you.”

  Lela shakes her head. Blinks. Looks blankly at her hands, which are clenched into fists so tightly that her nails bite her palms. She loosens her grip. Shudders out a breath. Whatever possessed her—ever so briefly, like the bee-buzz that bothers her brain when she stands up after hours at the keyboard—it’s gone now.

  “It’s not safe,” Hannah says. “They’re in there.”

  “On the Dark Net?” Lela says, and remembers what Josh told her. “Digital hell.”

  “Yes. It’s like an—I don’t know—incubator for evil.”

  Some dampness bothers Lela’s upper lip. When she wipes at it, her hand comes away bloody. She bunches up a napkin to staunch the flow. She drops herself back into her seat. “Jesus,” she says. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “It wasn’t you.”

  “I’m so goddamn sorry. About everything.”

  “I need you to help me.”

  “I know. I will. I’m here for you.”

  “No, Aunt Lela. I mean, thank you. I’m glad. But I don’t mean that. What I mean is, I think I know what to do. I need to get on the Dark Net, and for that to happen, I need your help.”

  Lela says nothing. Outside, more and more sirens rise from different corners of the city, like wolves calling to each other. “What are you talking about?”

  Hannah explains what happened when the cable fitted into the Mirage port, when the red eye trained its gaze on her. The sense of simultaneously filling up on and falling through a channel of darkness. “That’s where they are. That’s their—I don’t know the right word—womb. Well. Foundation. Factory. Battery. Source. Whatever. When they come for us, that’s where they’re coming from. What you saw on your laptop just now, I saw in that chamber. It’s a virus. An infection. It gets inside our devices,” she says, “and our devices are us.”

  “Possession,” Lela whispers, as though afraid to say it out loud. She writes stories that consist of facts. If she makes a claim, she backs it up with data from a census or case study, quotes from expert sources. That’s why she has never been able to take any religion seriously; the lack of evidence. Now she has proof, and she doesn’t know what to do with it, how to process what she has for so long been in denial of, the extra-normal. It’s all a matter of perspective, she supposes. One person’s blue might be another person’s orange. Time slows down or speeds up according to gravity, so that seconds tick along faster in space than on Everest than in Death Valley than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The peanut butter that makes one mouth water can make another throat close. Someone might see a ghost or a god where others see a shadow. Everyone is making sense of the unknown world with what limited, contradictory sensory equipment we have at our disposal. We’re all, to different degrees, blind.

  Hannah can see now. Lela still can’t seem to process it all, but she’s trying. She’s never had trouble with confidence. She’s said on more than one occasion that she has no regrets. That’s because she never looks back, always forward, always in pursuit. Chasing the next story, certain she’ll conquer it. But now she doesn’t know what lies ahead. She doesn’t know the next story and how it will end. She doesn’t know anything anymore, it seems.

  “Why?” Lela swallows down a gulp of coffee. “Why do you want to go there? And why would I ever let you go there?”

  “Because I think that’s the only way to stop them.”

  “Who says you need to stop them?”

  “Lump.”

  “Lump? The crazy homeless guy?”

  “He’s not crazy. He’s part of this. He’s—whatever you want to call it—on the spectrum. He saved me.”

  “I’m the one who’s trying to protect you here, Hannah. Let me do that. It doesn’t matter how bad you begged, I wouldn’t take you to a meth lab, a strip club, a dogfight in a junkyard. This is worse than the same thing.”

  Hannah sweeps her hand and knocks the M&M’s off the table. They clatter to the floor, and Hemingway grumbles awake and crawls out from under the table to slurp them up. “I know this sounds weird,” Hannah says, her voice too calm, “but I just know. Okay? I can just feel it. It’s like what Juniper said before. About me being different. Having some antenna that tunes me in to another frequency.” She readjusts the Mirage and tucks her hair behind her ears. “I can see the darkness. I know where it’s coming from. I just know, Aunt Lela.”

  At that moment Lela’s phone begins buzzing in her pocket. She pulls it out, still staring confusedly at Hannah. Before she can answer, the girl’s hand falls over it. “Wait,” she says.

  Hannah takes the cell and turns it over in her hands, as if testing its weight. Then flips it open cautiously. The finish is worn off the frame, the numbers rubbed off the keypad. “Okay,” Hannah says, and returns it to her. “I think analog is safe.”

  The caller ID reads 503—Portland—but it’s not a number Lela recognizes. She thumbs the button and accepts the call and slowly brings the phone to her ear. “Who is this?”

  “Thank god you’re a Luddite.” It’s Josh, the intern, speaking in a panicked blur, each word crashing into the next. “Thank god you have that stupid Flintstone phone.”

  “I tried you earlier. Where are you?”

  “I can’t use my cell. I’m afraid to use it. I’m calling on a landline. Whatever you do, don’t get online right now. There’s a virus that—”

  “We know.”

  “Whatever you think you know, you don’t. You don’t know how bad it really is. Now listen to me very carefully. This whole story just broke wide open.”

  Chapter 25

  THE AVERAGE PERSON checks their phone eighty-five times a day. Given that we’re asleep for probably half of that time, the math works out to eight times an hour. And that’s just phones. How often does a face turn toward a television, a tablet, a laptop, a screen? It’s night, so fewer people should be online, but it’s Halloween night, so more than usual. How many are infected, whether hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, Josh doesn’t know. Nor does he know exactly how the contagion works. But he tries to explain it as best he can.

  Not long ago scientists figured out a way to create mathematical constructs of patients’ hearts. They can do things to these digital hearts, safely experiment, make guesses. Subtract something here, add something there, rearrange, rip, gouge, patch, stint. And based on this model—this complicated equation—they can figure out, perfectly, what will happen to the actual organ during a planned procedure. These scienti
sts now hope to map out bodies, individual bodies, in the same way. So that you would be coded. Meaning a doctor could find or resolve—or even worsen—a problem in you by shifting some numbers around. That’s essentially what’s happening now, Josh says. A code is worsening us.

  Everyone is code. Everything is code. You dial a number on your phone. That is code. You scratch down a grocery list. That is code. You play a folk song that makes someone mellow and happy. Or write a memo that gets someone fired. You put on a business suit because you want authority, and you put on a negligee because you want to be unwrapped. Those are code too. This is code, this conversation between Josh and Lela. A collection of sounds and signals that serves a function—to educate, to warn, to incite action.

  If you eat something, your body will absorb the food, break it down into particles that will nourish or infect you. You will be altered, even if only in a small way. You might become ill. Information is the same. Opening your eye is like opening your mouth. Calling it a Twitter feed feels so apt. People are being fed intelligence now. Spoonfuls of ones and zeroes that are dissolving into them this very second, sparking neurons, creating a fresh pink wrinkle in their brains.

  People fuss so much about what they eat. BPA this, GMO that. Trans fat. Simple sugars. Dyes, additives. But they don’t worry as much about what they consume online. The people who are infected, their hard drives and their minds are now hosting something invisible, unwanted. Their bodies are presently processing it. You can think of this as a virus or as a spell, an incantation, a collection of ciphers, a protest song that brings about change.

  “A possession,” Lela says to him, this time with more confidence.

  “A possession,” Josh says. “Exactly. They’re possessed. This city is possessed.”

  He describes what he has seen firsthand and what he has gleaned from the scanner. The bodies, the fires, the bullets, the knives. “Don’t go outside. Don’t go online.”

  “This isn’t just going away.”

  “No, it’s not,” he says. “This is the battle that starts the war.”

  “We need to do something.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “We? Who’s we?”

  “Just lie low, like I said. You keep your phone charged and I’ll keep you updated, and if we’re lucky, you can write a story about this one day.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do, intern,” Lela says. “I tell you what to do.”

  To this he has no response.

  “You wouldn’t know fuck all if not for me,” she says. “I’m the one who clued you in to what’s going on.”

  A voice sounds in the background, and he muffles the receiver and says something in response. Then he returns to her. “I’ve got to go. We’re busy.”

  “I know who you’re with,” she says. “I know who we is. It’s that friend you mentioned before, isn’t it? The one who told you all that stuff about the Dark Net? The hacker? The computer nerd?”

  There is a long silence. A pop of static. His voice is muffled as though he just crushed his face into the pillow. “Geek,” Josh says. “He prefers geek.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  His sigh has a squeak running through it. “He’s not going to talk to you.”

  “Just ask him.”

  “He hates reporters. He threatened to unfriend me on Facebook for interning at the paper.”

  “Let me talk to him. I can be very convincing.”

  “I’m telling you, he won’t. He’s super paranoid. All cloak-and-dagger.”

  “He needs to make an exception.”

  “He won’t.”

  She doesn’t know whether she should regret what she says next: “He will when he hears about my niece.”

  “Your what? Niece? What about her?”

  “She’s been on the Dark Net.”

  “She and a half million others.”

  “No. You don’t understand. I don’t even understand. But she’s been there. There’s no simple way to explain this over the phone except to say she can navigate it like nobody else. But she needs your help to get there safely. Now. She knows where to find these guys. She can stop them.” Lela almost says, “Or so she claims,” but doesn’t.

  Lela has been circling the dining room as she speaks, with Hannah trailing a few feet behind her. Now her niece nods eagerly and bunches her hands below her chin and rises onto her tiptoes hopefully, still a kid after all. Lela remembers what her sister once said to her. Once you become a parent, your sense of self is compromised. Because the child is you, an extension of you, like a third hand, an extra spleen. But you don’t control it—it won’t listen—even when you try to keep it from harm’s way. Every time your kid approaches a cliff-side, a busy intersection, a strange dog, you feel a gut-twisting anxiety, a projective sensation the childless can only distantly understand. Her sister said that a lot. “You wouldn’t understand, since you don’t have a kid.”

  Maybe she was right. Until now. Is she an aunt or a mother? Either way, Hannah is her blood. Suggesting the girl go on the Dark Net feels like shoving her fork-first into a light socket. “She can help,” Lela says, her throat dry. “Now tell us where you are. We’re coming.”

  ❖

  The address is only four blocks away, but they have Juniper. It takes five minutes to rouse him from his narcotic sleep, and another twenty to get him out of bed and explain what’s happened. The donor bags are empty; he’s flush with blood. They unhook the needles, bandage the vein pricks. His pulse is strong and his skin warm, but he moves slowly. Grated teeth. Sharp intakes of breath. When they help him into his jeans, a button-down flannel, he pops a few stitches, but tells them not to worry. “It hurts like a son of a bitch,” he says. “But I’ll live.”

  He shakes out six ibuprofen and downs them with a quarter-empty bottle of Dewar’s kept on the bureau. Then he directs Lela to retrieve the .45 in the closet, tucked beneath his sweaters. She holds it in the air between them. “Is this for me or you?”

  He leans on the bureau, holding himself up. “You ever fire a gun before?”

  “Once. For an assignment. I went to the gun range where the Bloods and the 503 Boys practice and—”

  “Then it’s for me.”

  ❖

  Outside, they pause to rest every few paces. Lela isn’t much help—Juniper is too damn big—so he leans against walls and street signs and newspaper kiosks. The streets and sidewalks are empty. The sky is the color of a bruise. Hemingway walks ahead of them, his ears perked, his tail tucked, confused by the alarms and sirens wailing from every direction. “It sounds like the end of the world,” Lela says, and Juniper says, “Maybe it is.”

  It takes two blocks before they happen upon the first body. An older man in a flannel shirt and jeans, face-up on the sidewalk. A butcher knife sticks out of his sternum like an exclamation mark. Juniper says his name, “Mitch,” and hovers over him.

  Lela shields Hannah from the sight. “Don’t look, okay?”

  Then she says to Juniper, “You knew him?”

  Juniper shakes his head indeterminately—yes, no—and says, “I can’t seem to protect anyone. I can’t seem to do what I’m supposed to do.”

  Lela tells him they don’t have time for pity or reflection or anything except movement. “Just move. Just keep walking.” She asks Hannah to hold her hand and stare straight ahead and try to ignore the bodies. But soon that becomes impossible. There are too many of them. A woman lies in the road, her stomach a saddle shape from the car that ran her over. A man hangs from a tree, swaying by a rope. And others, dozens of others.

  A building burns in the distance, a pillar of flame. Smoke in the air, blood on the asphalt, but no movement. Not until they spot the sign in the distance, GEEK. Its letters glow red but the windows are dark. A computer supply store owned by Josh’s friend. “Almost there,” Lela says—to the others, to herself.

  Stepping off the sidewalk is the worst. The walled-in canyons of the streets feel somewhat pr
otected, but there is such hollowness to every intersection. As though the blackness of the asphalt were a void they might fall into. Halfway across the road, she hears it, the rumble of an engine. And then the headlights snap on and seize them midstep.

  A squad car. Forty yards away. Lela feels a momentary relief, until the engine roars and the vehicle leaps forward and eats up the asphalt between them. There’s nowhere to go, not with Juniper using her as a crutch. But he already has the .45 in his hand. “Wait,” she says, a part of her still wanting to believe the world isn’t upside down. If they just call out for help, wave the cop down, then he’ll hit the brakes, roll down a window, ask how he might be of service.

  Juniper’s arm wobbles, but his aim is true enough to knock four fist-sized holes in the windshield. The driver slumps against the wheel, and at the last second the squad car veers to the right and jumps the curb and smashes through the plate-glass window of a tea shop. There is a clatter of tables knocked aside and then the steel punch of the grille striking the far wall. The siren gives a brief chirp. Plates and mugs continue to explode against the floor. Even from here, Lela can see a red glow throbbing from the car’s interior, the coded stream of the swivel-mounted laptop.

  “It’s like I said before.” Juniper doesn’t holster the weapon, but keeps it by his side when he hooks an arm around her neck. Sulfur burns her nostrils. “Paranoia. It’s a requirement if you want to survive.”

  They hump forward, reaching the far sidewalk. Twenty more paces and they arrive at the doorstep of GEEK. Lela presses up against the door. The aisles carry coils of Ethernet cables, blister packs of thumb drives, dead-screened monitors and tablets. Like everything else in the Pearl District, the store appears mismatched, a sleek electronics hub crushed between a sex shop and psychic reader.

  They bang on the door—the sign there reads CLOSED—and shiver where they stand. Rain falls, dotting the glass and chilling their skin. Lela puts an arm around Hannah, draws her close. Hemingway yawns beside them, his jaws closing with a clack. The sirens and alarms continue to throb, and she beats the door again, needing to get away from noise, muffle it.