by Chris Thomas
‘See, now you’re on board with the idea. Well, that’s the beauty,’ continued Joe, ‘it means that you don’t need to have a picture-book-style definition of what one or the other should look like, but more that each person would ultimately develop it out of their own consciousness. There’s no reason to assume, just because visible signs of life are no longer there, that consciousness has completely ceased. Unless you subscribe to the theory that consciousness only exists as a direct result of the physical processing going on in the brain.’
‘Great, well, that’s my head exploded. Thanks, Joe. I’m going to play on the fruities,’ said Rosco, picking up his pint and heading off in the direction of the fruit machines.
‘Where’s Billy? He was supposed to be here an hour ago,’ asked Mike.
‘Well, it’s ever since he became an associate vice president,’ replied Joe, accenting the title with as much sarcasm as he could muster. ‘He’s started working stupid long hours. Saying that, I did just miss a text from His Lordship. He should be here any minute.’
‘Still, it’s better than when he came back from his twelve months travelling around Asia,’ said Mike. ‘Remember? He turned into a right fucking hippy. What was it he used to say? “Time has no meaning”. Well that’s great, Billy, but it’s your round and you’ve turned up five minutes before last orders. Who’d have thought he’d end up in the capitalist world of corporate finance?’
At that moment Billy walked in and stood next to the table, taking his suit jacket off.
‘Evening, boys. How are we all?’
Rosco returned from the fruit machine five pounds lighter and gave Billy a massive slap on his backside.
‘Billy, you big bender. Glad you could finally make it. Joe can addle your brain now with his pissed up theory of the afterlife.’
Billy picked up the spare pint and drank nearly half of it in one go, wiping the foam moustache away on his sleeve.
‘Is this the same theory that when he dies he wants to be reincarnated as a shark?’
‘No, it’s a new one. I followed it up until the bit where he started talking about consciousness and then my brain melted,’ replied Rosco.
‘I thought you said it exploded?’ said Mike.
‘It did both.’
‘And where exactly did you pick up this new theory then, Joe?’ asked Billy. ‘Same place you get all your information – Wikipedia?’
‘Piss off. I came up with this one all by myself. Just now. Though I am quite proud of it.’
‘Well, Wikipedia’s unlikely to give you the most balanced view of life and death given that any moron can edit it. You know, a colleague of mine introduced me to a program called TOR. It allows a much more realistic view of the world. You can download it for free; I’ll show it to you sometime,’ said Billy, as he finished off the last of his pint.
‘Isn’t that what paedophiles and junkies use for searching the internet?’ asked Rosco, looking slightly disturbed.
‘Sort of,’ replied Billy, slightly anxious to convince his friends that he wasn’t some sort of drug dealing sex pest. ‘It’s what’s known as an ‘onion router’. Basically, it enables people to surf the internet anonymously by routing all of their activity through lots of different encrypted layers or ‘relays’, which hide stuff like their location and IP address.’
Rosco groaned. ‘For fuck’s sake. First we have him banging on about death and now I’ve got to try and understand this nerdy internet shit.’
‘It’s pretty simple, even for you,’ laughed Billy. ‘To put it simply, the normal internet that you look at on Google—’
‘What, Pornhub?’ interrupted Joe.
‘And YouPorn?’ said Mike.
‘And PornTube?’ said Joe again.
‘Yes, very funny,’ grumbled Rosco, gesturing to the barmaid for another round of beers.
‘Indeed, that sort of thing,’ continued Billy. ‘Those regular internet sites account for a miniscule fraction of the amount of information and pages that are actually out there on the so-called information super highway. Under all of that is the ‘deep web’. The deep web is maybe, I don’t know, five thousand times larger than the regular web and never shows up on Google searches since it can’t be indexed. It ranges from boring stuff like scientific data and internal company intranets, to your more ‘specialised’ sites. Within the deep web, you then get the dark web and that’s where things become way more interesting.’
‘So how come you downloaded this program if it’s used for sick shit like you’re suggesting?’ asked Mike.
‘The developers believe in freedom of speech and of information, where people can communicate without fear of being snooped on by the authorities. Or if you’re worried about protecting your own anonymity. Doesn’t it piss you off every time you look for a new kettle or a new lawnmower and then, within seconds, every page you look at is bombarded with adverts for kettles and mowers?’ responded Billy.
‘Well yes,’ replied Mike, ‘but not enough to switch from good old Google Chrome. Surely this TOR thing is just used by nasty people for doing nasty things?’
‘They’d find a way to do it anyway,’ said Billy, by now feeling slightly like a salesman for the program. ‘This just offers an easy way for normal people to have access to the sheer volume of, how shall we say, alternative information that’s out there. Of course, some normal people might not be ready for what they see on the deep web, but that’s life.’
The barmaid placed another four ales in the middle of the table, which was by now soaked with beer and covered in the crumbs of pork scratchings and crisps.
‘Quiz machine, anyone?’ asked Mike, as he collected his beer and stood up from the table. Rosco nodded and together they headed over to the brightly flashing quiz machine to lose some more of their money.
Joe leaned in closer to talk to Billy. ‘So, this dark web thing. I assume there is some really fucked up stuff on it. Have you looked at much?’
‘A fair bit,’ he replied, munching on another large, and slightly hairy, pork scratching. ‘There’s a lot of weird underground horror videos that are both quite cool and bloody disturbing at the same time. It’s fairly easy to avoid the really dodgy abuse stuff or the drugs sites like Silk Road, but for quite a lot of it you have to know the precise link, and the web addresses are mostly random gibberish. Why don’t you come back to mine after this and I’ll show it to you?’
‘I don’t know, Ellie’s got the hump with me at the moment because I’ve been going out a fair bit recently. I’m probably already in the doghouse for being pissed again tonight,’ said Joe, with an air of disappointment. But Billy could see he was tempted.
‘Go on, it’s Friday night. I’ve got a bottle of sambuca that we can start on when we get back,’ replied Billy, sensing that Joe was in no fit state to refuse more alcohol.
‘I fucking hate sambuca. It’s almost as bad as Tequila,’ slurred Joe. He was by now more or less resigned to his fate. ‘Fine, we can pick up some ales on the way back to yours.’
Mike and Rosco came back to the table and placed down four small shot glasses containing a clear liquor, four slices of lime, and a salt shaker.
‘We won a tenner on the quiz machine so Mikey here bought a round of Tequilas. Enjoy!’ said Rosco.
Joe grimaced, ‘Does anyone actually like Tequila? I mean actually like it?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘So, why the fuck did you buy it then?’
‘Because it’s nearly last orders and we won ten quid. We would have won some more afterwards but Rosco here thought that Lance Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon,’ laughed Mike.
‘I tried to press ‘Neil’ but my aim wasn’t very good,’ protested Rosco.
‘Anyway, enough of this,’ said Billy, as he sprinkled some salt on the back of his hand. ‘Gentlemen, a toast. To our good buddy Joe. And, to his impending imprisonment and general ending of anything he could call a life.
Sorry, I mean, his upcoming wedding to the lovely Ellie, of course. First one of us to get engaged, who’d have thought it?’
‘To Joe. And his ridiculous philosophies on death!’ said Mike.
The four friends licked the backs of their hands in unison, then swallowed the Tequila in one mouthful, contorting their faces as the combination of sharp bitterness, salt, and fresh citrus hit. They slammed the glasses back down on the table, finished off what was left of their pints, and started to put their coats on.
‘Right, anyone else want to come back to mine?’ asked Billy, as they made for the exit.
‘Nope. I’ve got an early start in the morning,’ replied Mike.
‘I’m going to give it a miss too I think,’ agreed Rosco.
‘OK, shitface, it’s just you and me,’ said Billy, as he put his arm around Joe’s shoulder, partly as a gesture of solidarity and partly to stop Joe wandering all over the pavement. ‘Let’s go and see what delights we can find on the deep web.’
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of stumbling across the pavement, stopping at the corner shop for some cheap beer almost certainly past its sell-by date, and trying to eat two extra-large doner kebabs without spilling most of them over their coats, Billy and Joe arrived back at the flat.
‘Right, keep it down,’ whispered Billy, at about the same volume as he usually spoke. ‘The neighbours get really annoyed if I make too much noise when I come home this late.’
‘Late?’ replied Joe, spilling most of his kebab as he turned his hand over to try and focus on his watch. ‘It’s only twelve thirty. What are they? Old retired church types or something?’
Billy turned to face him, still talking in his extra loud whisper, ‘No, they’re young hard-working church types.’
‘Shit, the light’s gone on. Hurry up and open the fucking door will you?’ Joe whispered back, loudly.
Billy finally opened the door and, as quietly as they could, they barged through, clattering the bottles of beer in their plastic carrier bags against the frame, before slamming the door behind them.
‘I’m going for a piss,’ said Joe. ‘Get this dark net thing going then.’
Billy took off his coat and hung it in the hallway. He pulled a beer from the carrier bag and opened it using a novelty bottle opener that played the Dam Busters theme. Slumping into the large leather reclining armchair in front of his enormous fifty inch television screen, he pulled a laptop out from the side of his chair.
Joe came into the room and sat on the sofa with his beer, whilst Billy tapped away on the computer, turning the television screen into one giant monitor.
‘So, this is TOR,’ said Billy, waving the cursor over a small icon that looked like a purple onion. ‘It works essentially the same way as your regular browser, except it’s anonymous.’
Joe leant forward in his seat, staring intently at the screen as he tried to focus his increasingly blurry gaze.
‘Go on then, let’s see some stuff.’
Billy had a page that he used as a type of directory. He didn’t need to click on anything for Joe to see precisely what existed on this part of the internet.
‘Holy shit!’ exclaimed Joe, as he stared at the variety of links available to them, ranging from the relatively mundane How to cook a person to the downright vile, things that didn’t require two guesses for Joe to realise covered some sort of sick abuse. In between was everything from hitman services, online drug dealers, videos of human experimentation; amongst all of this a site for ‘horror movies’ seemed almost like a quiet sanctuary.
Billy clicked on the horror movie link, bringing up an outdated-looking website with a selection of thumbnail images and movie names.
‘Why does it look like we’re surfing the net in the early nineteen nineties?’ asked Joe.
‘Everything’s stripped down to help with the anonymity. All those programs that run in the background on your regular PC, that make the internet look how it does, they all give away clues to your identity,’ replied Billy.
He clicked on the first video at the top entitled Bloody Nose.
‘What is this shit?’ said Joe, his eyes getting heavier now, though he valiantly carried on drinking his beer.
On screen, a man dressed in white with a white hood and bizarre large rubber lips sat close to the camera. What little sound there was appeared distorted, and the man made indiscernible noises until, after a few seconds, the front of his mask became soaked in blood, as if he had suffered a massive haemorrhage. The screeching, distorted soundtrack filled the room through Billy’s surround sound speakers, causing Joe to shift uneasily in his seat.
‘OK, try this one,’ said Billy, clicking back and then on another of the thumbnails entitled Couple Brutally Run Over.
On the screen appeared crackly CCTV footage of what looked like a police precinct somewhere in China. Joe watched as two people casually walked up from the bottom of the screen.
‘Boring!’ he complained.
But his interest piqued as a car careered up from the bottom of the screen, hitting the couple at full speed. One fell to the side and lay motionless whilst the other was carried on the front of the car before finally dropping under the wheels. The man in the car then got out and ran to the first body, the bystanders standing and staring as he stamped repeatedly on the person’s head.
‘For fuck’s sake, turn it off,’ said Joe.
‘OK, but you did ask,’ replied Billy, clicking out of the webpage entirely. ‘This is slightly less violent. It’s an online marketplace for buying drugs. Amongst other things, of course.’
The site looked like any other online shop where you might buy groceries or clothes or electronics.
‘Look here,’ said Billy, pointing at what appeared to be a genuine, regular CD. ‘Here you can buy the White Album by The Beatles. Except when you get this version, the entire inlay card is a big sheet of LSD tabs.’
‘Holy shit,’ muttered Joe. ‘But how do you pay for it? Surely putting your credit card in will just give you away and leave you open to getting busted by the police?’
‘Bitcoins,’ explained Billy. ‘The online currency of the deep web and you can buy them anonymously. They are traded like regular currency and their value has skyrocketed in recent years.’
For the next half an hour, Billy gave his friend a guided tour of the area of the deep web that even he only just about dared to visit. More obscure horror movies, bizarre music videos, and even one of the most disturbing video games that Joe had ever seen.
‘I’ve had enough,’ said Joe, and with a newfound sense of energy, he leapt up from the sofa and ran out to the bathroom. ‘I think I’m about to puke.’
Billy laughed as he closed the computer down. ‘Lightweight. Don’t mess up my bathroom, I had the cleaner in today.’
Joe came out of the bathroom, blowing his nose on toilet roll, before lying down on the sofa. As the room spun around him, his mind raced with all the images and bizarre sounds that he had just witnessed over the last hour. But somewhere inside him it had lit a fire, and he fell asleep knowing full well that he would simply have to go investigating this new world for himself. Little did he realise the path it would lead him down and how it would change his life forever.
3
In the bathroom of a modest terraced house in West London, Saeed Anwar wiped the condensation from the mirror and stared intently into the eyes looking back at him. He concentrated closely as the razor edged the immaculately precise outline of his dark facial hair. Even for the unsavoury types of character with whom he now found himself associating, he felt it important to show that he meant business.
Being nasty came easy to him, but being smart was something he had had to learn since arriving in the United Kingdom, especially since being allowed to stay in the country, for which he had his lovely wife Amanda to thank. And he made sure in no uncertain terms that she ‘understood’ his gratitude, on an almost daily basis. She had borne him two sons for whom he cared very little, but as long as they w
ere here, so was he.
He finished shaving and wiped the last of the foam away from his face. After splashing on some expensive aftershave, he buttoned up his crisp white oxford shirt. Now he looked the part. In his past life in his home country, every day had been a struggle to survive, and he had developed a very self-interested mean streak. Partly through the needs of self-preservation, but mainly because he simply enjoyed it. Since he had sold out his former family and left the old country behind, his new home had treated him well. He couldn’t care less for patriotism or loyalty or gratitude to this foreign land, but it had been good to him and he would take it for as much as he could. It allowed him access to the trappings that he had previously envied, the treasures of the Western world that had seemed so tantalisingly out of his reach. Until now.
Admiring himself in the mirror, he straightened his trousers, flattened his shirt, and left the bathroom. He walked downstairs and into the kitchen, where his family sat around the dining room table. His two boys were eating breakfast cereal. The eldest was Mo, who at the age of six felt an obligatory superiority over his younger sibling. Shan was approaching two, still finding his way when it came to eating cornflakes. Their happy, infantile chatter was the shining light for their mother; she lived for it, but it ceased the moment Saeed walked into the room. Even Shan had learned it was sometimes better to stay silent around their father.
Amanda stood up and pulled the last chair out from the table.
‘Good morning, Sae,’ she said, as she put a cup of tea in front of him. ‘You look smart. Do you have a busy day today?’
Saeed said nothing. He sat down, barely even acknowledging his sons’ presence.
‘Well, er,’ stuttered Amanda, the nervousness in her voice palpable. ‘Mo’s got his Little Kickers at the church hall this morning. That’ll be nice, he loves seeing his little friends. And Shan can have a run around as well. He’s getting to be quite an energetic little monkey and…’
