The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  He wipes a hand across his face. Checks the side mirrors. Whispers “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Raises his hand as if to strike the steering wheel, but then pauses. Because the side mirrors flash with light. There is a car behind him, closing in fast.

  More than an hour ago, when Juniper loaded up the Ram and readied to depart, he got underneath the hood and beneath the dash, disconnecting radio, Bluetooth, roadside assistance, the GPS, the alarm, the warning and airbag systems, the wireless transmitter, the fuel efficiency and emissions detector, automatic locks, even the cleaning fluid and air conditioning and heating. Almost all of this was housed in the brain of the vehicle—the engine control unit, a computer attached to the side of the motor—and several were paid services he didn’t subscribe to, but he erred on the side of paranoia and unplugged everything, everywhere, that still allowed him to drive. Because most cars are now riddled with one hundred million lines of code, more than a smartphone, more than all of Facebook, more than a nuclear power plant. This makes cars better, safer—with their low-emission sensors and forward-collision warnings and automatic emergency braking—but it also makes them as vulnerable to cyber-threats as any computer.

  Which is why Juniper isn’t as surprised as he ought to be when the Jetta that thuds his rear bumper, that roars its accelerator and pulls up alongside him, turns out to be driverless. If he chainsawed through the dash, he knows the guts of the vehicle would stream with red code. The virus is in laptops, in phones, in tablets, in cars, in people. It is like terrible birdsong heard by someone that is then whistled and then sung by another and then becomes a marching tune for the military or a rural song fiddled around a campfire or a lullaby hummed by a mother. The infection is spreading, mutating, and will continue to, unless he stops it.

  The car swings into him—two light taps, then a scraping shove—meant to force him off the road. Juniper experiments with braking and gas-gunning acceleration. He can’t outpace the Jetta, but the Ram is nearly three times the size. So long as Juniper muscles the wheel, he can hold a steady course.

  They approach a four-way stop. It is heaped and puzzled with cars that have crashed into each other. All around it the asphalt is made even blacker with ribboning skid marks. Juniper waits until the last second and then jerks the wheel left, bashing the Jetta with enough force that it momentarily hoists onto two tires. It recovers, but not soon enough to avoid the snarl of cars impeding the intersection. Its brakes shriek. Then comes the sickening crunch of metal crashing into metal.

  Juniper dives down side streets and mazes his way through a residential area, guessing the way, missing his GPS and worrying about his sense of direction. He cuts across lawns and even a park, never stopping, rarely slowing, feathering the accelerator, hunting for a clear passage. He tries not to look at the bodies. They slump on park benches and sprawl across sidewalks and hang out of windows. There are people alive out there, too, he reminds himself. People who need him.

  In the near distance, a spotlighted billboard advertises a retirement community. A middle-aged man rests his hand on the shoulder of his bent-backed, silver-haired father. “Roles change,” the billboard reads. Roles changed when Juniper claimed to have visited heaven and he became a sudden celebrity and everyone needed him: his parents for money, the congregations for his false assurances. And roles changed when the cancer overtook him and he drove north to Oregon, handing out cash, intent on dying well. And when instead he lived, roles changed again, as he became a kind of servant—to the city, to Sarin. Now he can once more feel roles changing, everything changing. And maybe this time, if he dies, he’ll stay that way.

  He can’t remember how old he was—maybe twelve or maybe ten—when the tornado hit Tarn’s Brook, Oklahoma. A category-five funnel sucked up trailer parks and flattened farms. FEMA flew over the disaster area and ordered 150 body bags. But as it turned out, only three people died. Juniper remembers—after he came to town for a prayer service—seeing all those body bags lined up in the Safeway parking lot, like black pupae ready to be claimed. Everyone who saw them imagined their own body fitting into a bag, had they not gotten to the basement in time, had a stray brick flung through their window listed a few inches to the left, had a meeting they thought about canceling not taken them to the other side of town. They had met death, but death had spared them. For now. The body bags wouldn’t lie unclaimed forever. Theirs were waiting. His was waiting. Unzipped, gaping like a rotten mouth. Maybe tonight it will finally claim him.

  His eyes jog constantly to his side mirrors, knowing it is only a matter of time before headlights brighten them again. By the time he finds a thoroughfare with signs leading to I-5, he is being pursued—by two, then three, then six vehicles as he barrels up the on-ramp and hopes like hell the freeway is passable.

  He winds his way through the cars and semis, some abandoned, most ruined. He guns it to seventy, eighty, ninety, bombing through Multnomah, through Hillsdale, to the Terwilliger curves, a six-lane section of freeway that has long been the most dangerous in the state. He skids along its perilous corners, foot off the brake, leaning into the turns, feeling all the blood in his body pulled in the opposite direction. Two of the cars catch up with him and bash him until he knocks against the safety railing, which carves into the Ram and throws up showers of sparks. He jerks the steering hard enough to run over the hood of a BMW Roadster. The truck’s tires lift on the left side, and just when he wonders if he will tip, gravity brings him crashing down again. When he regains control and checks the mirrors, he sees the BMW upended and skidding on its side, the broken axle spearing from its undercarriage.

  Up ahead, a logging truck has overturned and spilled its trailer, and the road is dirty with bark and messed with twenty-foot sections of pine that scatter in every direction. One of the cars meets its end here, striking a fat log with such force that it burrows beneath its tonnage, half-flattened as if by a rolling pin. Another bursts a tire when it runs over a shorn logging chain. It tries to continue on for a hundred yards or so, the tire flapping like an old black sock, the rim throwing up intermittent fans of sparks, before giving up.

  Near downtown, the traffic gathers thickly, and he barely makes it onto the Ross Island Bridge, headed for another data center in Milwaukie. One of the cars loses traction on the exit ramp and hits a concrete stanchion with a punch of flame. Then there is only one left—a ghost-white Mercedes—as he rumbles across the bridge, over the Willamette River. The water is chevroned with whitecaps. A lit-up apartment building on the farther shore looks like a stack of digital bytes. The Mercedes appears in one mirror, then the other, a phantom. It tries to nose past him, but he blocks it each time with a nudge of the wheel.

  At the last moment, he sees the abandoned motorcycle. He cuts right and slams the brakes and skids at a violent diagonal. The tires wail as they burn away their rubber. The Mercedes uses this opportunity to zip past him, unaware of the bike until it is too late. They collide with a screech. The motorcycle goes pinwheeling in one direction, the Mercedes in the other, striking the guardrail, spiraling off the bridge, plummeting through the air and into the river below.

  ❖

  Crows gather on top of Big Pink, the U.S. Bancorp building. Dozens of them, flapping their wings and spiraling in the air. A man stands among them, the axis around which they spin. Lump is dressed in clothes as black and ragged as their wings. They land delicately on his shoulders, and he whispers to them before hoisting an arm to send them fluttering off in every direction.

  He knows that Josh is dead. He knows that without help Juniper will soon join him. Crows take to the air, cawing while down below headlights flash on and engines rumble to life and inject themselves into the streets to pursue the black Ram.

  One crow and then another and then another—and then still more—come bombing out of the night, striking windshields hard enough to crack the glass, clogging up the grilles, and slicking the tires with their guts and feathers. They are joined by rats and possums and then a doe and even a black bea
r. They clamber out of storm drains and from beneath porches and Dumpsters. They pour out of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and the Reed College campus and Westmoreland Park and Eastmoreland Golf Course. Some of the cars try to dodge the animals, but this spins them off the road, so the rest plow through and their windshields fissure and their tires pop. Owls and bats and swallows. Raccoons and squirrels, cats and dogs, a herd of thirty deer, their eyes candled by the headlights and taillights, charging toward the brigade of vehicles.

  Sensors go wild. Airbags go off. Emergency brakes scream. Tires pop. One car careens into a McDonald’s, and another smashes into a parked van. A street sign bends and clangs and skids the undercarriage of one car, and another sideswipes a fire hydrant that geysers a white stream. And through all of this—the pursuant current of cars and animals—Juniper passes unmolested. He doesn’t know whether the plan will work, but he remembers too well the last words he spoke to Sarin, “Or die trying.”

  Chapter 28

  HOURS AGO, they all gathered around Hannah’s body. Her skin was crisped to ash. Her eyes had boiled in their sockets. Wisps of smoke rose from her mouth. Lela scooped the girl into her lap and rocked back and forth and made a high, keening sound. No one spoke. Hemingway whined and Josh closed his eyes and Derek covered his mouth and Juniper clenched his fists so tightly his arms shook. The basement air was cold. A pipe clanked. The computers fizzled and oozed white where Derek had blasted them with a fire extinguisher.

  “There are ways,” Juniper said, though he hardly sounded convinced. “There are ways of coming back.”

  “Shut up,” Lela told him.

  She said this in a dead voice. All of the abstract emotions—grief, guilt, anger—hadn’t had a chance to take form. Lela was owned by the purely physical. She had her arms around her niece, and it felt as though they were falling together, through the concrete floor, the brick tunnels beneath, the tangle of sewer pipes and power cables, the black dirt, the clay as red as wine, farther and farther still, beyond the miles of bedrock, all the way to the molten core of the earth, where they would burn up and Lela would feel grateful because then she wouldn’t have to feel or think anything more.

  She wouldn’t have to remember Hannah—earlier, at the shelter, when Lela promised to take care of her—saying, “If we’re all going to die, I hope I die first, because then I won’t have to miss you.”

  “Don’t say that,” Lela had said. “I’m here for you. You’re here for me. And we’re going to look after each other for a long, long time.”

  It felt true when she said it. It felt true even now. As if she could will her niece back to life.

  A chime sounded in Lela’s pocket. A text alert. One, then another, then another, then another, like a tolling. She would have ignored it except the sound kept on. She pulled out the phone with the intent of hurling it against the floor. But the lighted screen paused her hand, and she read aloud what she saw there. “I’m still here,” Lela said, her voice unbelieving. “And I know how to stop it.” Followed by a string of characters Derek told her must be an IP address. “XO Hannah.”

  ❖

  Her body was still in the basement, but Hannah was elsewhere.

  When she first plugged in, her vision enlarged, as if she had grown another set of eyes separate from her body. She didn’t know what the right word was—transcendence maybe. She had surpassed her body’s limitations. Become suddenly and expansively mobile. A kind of astral traveler.

  When she first learned Braille, when she complained it was too hard, when she said it felt like a bunch of random dots, her teacher talked to her about symbols. A young woman weeps with pleasure when a gold band is slipped around her finger, and many decades later weeps again before her husband’s gravestone, in both cases moved by the symbol, something representing something else. “They’re not just dots. They’re representations of letters. And the letters add up to words. And the words add up to sentences, paragraphs, chapters, stories. Through your fingertip, you’re ascending so many levels of meaning. You can’t think literally and live in this world. Humans excel at seeing something more than what’s there. Nobody’s born fluent of course. It takes time. We spend our whole life learning what all these symbols around us mean. You’ve learned physical codes, numeric codes, alphabetical codes. You’re learning another code now. A tactile symbology. Be patient with it. Before long it will be as easy as breathing.” And it was. She read until the Braille frayed beneath her fingers.

  And the same lesson applied to the Mirage. When the doctor fitted her, he had warned about sensory dissonance. Her mind would see one thing; her body would feel another, resulting in a confusion over her awareness of space. Virtual reality sickness, he called it. Spatial poisoning. It was like taking off a blindfold and learning you were balanced on the tip of a skyscraper. A second before your footing felt sure, and then you became a wobbling mess. The first few hours she wore the Mirage, she hit a neuro wall. Being blind felt easier. There was too much to take in, and none of it made sense. But then, as the hours passed, she calmed. The dizziness ceased. Her mind and body felt aligned.

  And now she struggled similarly in cyberscape, slowly overcoming sensory dissonance, escaping the bonds of physicality and literality. She would see more than what was actually there. She was accustomed to projecting the world onto the black theater of her mind. The blizzard of ones and zeroes, the metrics, hexadecimals, source lines and function points, pound signs and ampersands, the competing languages of Perl, PHP, Python, Node, Visual Basic, and ADA—they all solidified into a holograph she could stand in, run her fingers across, navigate, manipulate.

  And the way she saw it, the Dark Net was a vast haunted house. There were long hallways that startled her with unexpected cobwebs. Creaky floors that threatened to give her away. Locked doors behind which stood another locked door behind which stood another locked door, each lock more complicated than the previous. Shifting staircases. A kitchen full of cleavers. A fireplace in which dried corpses were heaped to burn. A pool table with clawed feet and lacquered hearts for balls. Pipes that spit black water. Basements that had no bottom and attics crammed with bats. Torture chambers hung with rusted tools. A solarium tangled with dead plants. A walled-in garden ornamented with topiaries shaped like beasts. A room mounded with thousands of television sets that played movies she had to turn away from. Ghosts hid in closets. Monsters roamed freely. And everywhere—sprayed on a mirror and stitched into the curtains and splattered across the floor and messily stamped onto the keys of a grand piano—she found the markings of a red right hand.

  Every few weeks, her mother would drop her off to spend the night at Lela’s. She and her aunt would stuff their faces with pizza and ice cream, crank up Taylor Swift too loud, and dance until they felt like they were going to puke. And sometimes her aunt would tell her scary stories. Stories her mother thought were wildly inappropriate. Such as this one. Once there were two college roommates. One was a straight A student and the other was a party girl. On the night before midterms, Party Girl—of course—goes out to slam Jell-O shots at a frat bash. When Party Girl stumbles home around 3 a.m., she finds the lights off and her straight A roommate face-down at her desk. In the darkness Party Girl digs around for her books, pops a few caffeine pills, and takes off for the library, spending the last few hours before dawn cramming for her exams. Maybe she actually does okay. Or maybe not. She’s too tired to know and still mildly drunk when she gets back to the dorm. Here she finds her roommate still face-down at her desk. “Hey, you,” Party Girl says, and nudges her shoulder—and screams. Because her roommate’s body slumps over. Her face has been clawed apart. Her chest is an open cavity from which her heart has been ripped. And on the desk is a note, inked in blood: “Aren’t you glad you left the lights off?”

  That story had kept Hannah up all night. She felt like Party Girl now. Observed as she roamed stupidly through the dark. A portrait on the wall followed her with its eyes, one moment appearing like an old woman, the next a gra
y-haired devil. Whispers seem to come from a crackling fireplace, from the leather-bound books stacked in a library, from an antique candlestick phone cocooned in cobwebs. There was a phone in every room. Sometimes perched on a desk and sometimes mounted on a wall. A number was printed on its base, what she understood to be an IP address.

  Sarin said they were the same. But though Hannah might be part of some larger tradition, though she might join so many others on the spectrum, she knows she stands apart. The Mirage port has given her access to another world, one absent of light altogether. The old wars were fought purely in the physical world, but a new fight has come to this digital pit. Before, Hannah had wondered if she was old like Sarin, if she had lived other lives, but she feels certain now that isn’t the case. She’s new. Necessarily new, as though fated for this next level of warfare.

  She came to a door behind which she heard children crying. The wood was splintery and wetted with the shapes of red right hands. She didn’t want to open it, but she had to. She had to look everywhere to find what she was hunting for—the source of the infection, the factory of nightmares.

  Just as when she first wore the Mirage in the real world, every time she entered a new space here, it took her mind a minute to catch up, as if she were stuck temporarily between channels. She pushed through the door and waited for her brain to make sense of what she found. Everything she experienced in this coded otherworld was filtered and contextualized within her mind, and this was a room that reminded her of something she’d seen long ago in a movie or picture book. A Victorian orphanage, similar to the one from Oliver Twist. Everything solidified in this context. The beds in the room reached off forever. In them children writhed in torment. They did things children were not meant to do. They cried, but over the top of their cries came snarling voices that threatened to hurt them, to maim or even kill them if they shared a word of this with anyone.