The Dark Net Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Percy

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Percy, Benjamin, author.

  Title: The dark net / Benjamin Percy.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016038367 (print) | LCCN 2016044231 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544750333 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544750579 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Horror. | FICTION / Technological. | GSAFD: Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.E72 D37 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.E72 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038367

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover image © Shutterstock

  v1.0617

  For Lisa

  What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,

  Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,

  And plunge us in the flames; or from above

  Should intermitted vengeance arm again

  His red right hand to plague us?

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

  —William Gibson, Neuromancer

  Prologue

  HANNAH WASN’T BORN BLIND, but sometimes it feels that way. She has retinitis pigmentosa, what she calls RP. Like, I’m so sick of this stupid RP. Which makes the disease sound like one of those jerks she goes to middle school with—the BGs and BJs and RJs—who talk too loudly and wear chunky basketball shoes and toss French fries dipped in mustard across the cafeteria and draw dicks on people’s lockers with permanent marker.

  She was diagnosed at five. She’s twelve now. But she acts like she’s forty. That’s what everyone tells her. “An old soul,” her mother says. “Stick in the mud,” her aunt Lela says. If she had a smartphone, if she had boyfriends, if she hung out at Starbucks and Clackamas Center Mall, if she didn’t rely on her mother’s help to pick out her clothes, if she didn’t prod the sidewalk with a stupid cane or wear stupid sunglasses to hide her stupid absent eyes, if she could see, maybe then she wouldn’t be such a boring grump, maybe then she would act more like the rest of the giggling, perfume-bombed lunatics her age.

  At first she couldn’t see at night, crashing into walls on the way to the bathroom. Then her sight fogged over. Then her peripheral vision began to decrease, like two doors closing slowly, slowly, over several years, until there was only a line of vertical light with color-blurred shapes passing through it. If she held something directly in front of her face, she could get a pretty good sense of it, but one day, within the next five years or so, darkness will come. She’ll live in a permanent night.

  Hers was an accelerated case. And there was no cure. That was what the doctors said. So her mother prayed. And gave Hannah vitamins A and E. And restricted her intake of phytanic acids, so no dairy, no seafood. Hannah tried a dog, but she was allergic and got sick of cleaning up his crap. And she visited a school for the blind, but that felt like giving up, despite the crush of bodies at her middle school, the eyes she could feel crawling all over her while the occasional BG or BJ or RJ whispered a Helen Keller joke.

  Then a doctor at OHSU approached her about an experimental trial. Would she be interested? She knew all about gene therapy and about the retinal transplants that had so far failed to develop synaptic connections with their hosts, but she didn’t know about this, a prosthesis built by a Seattle-based tech company. It converted video images captured by a camera into electrical pulses that bypassed the diseased outer retina and poured into over one thousand electrodes on the inner retina. They called it Mirage.

  “It’s all very Star Trek,” the doctor told her, when describing the device, not glasses so much as a silver shield that wrapped your eyes. She liked his Indian accent, the buoyancy of the vowels, making his words sound as if they were gently bouncing.

  Her mother worried that people would stare, and Hannah said, “They already stare.” At least they’d be studying her now with awe and curiosity rather than pity. “I’ll be a cyborg, a Terminator!”

  Her mother could never afford the surgery—the removal of the post subcapsular cataracts and spoke-wheel pattern of cysts, the insertion of the casing and array and antennae along the periphery of her sockets—which didn’t matter: the tech company would pay for everything, so long as she agreed to serve as their lab rat and advertisement.

  Now, three weeks after she went under the knife, it is time to take off the bandages. Now it is time to wire up the Mirage. To see. The doctor tells her it might take time for her brain to process this new sensory experience. “Think of it like this. What if I gave you a new set of lungs that allowed you to breathe underwater? The first time you jumped in the river and took a deep breath, your body would fight the feeling, thinking you were drowning. There will be a little bit of that at first. A little bit of drowning. But I believe it will pass quickly.”

  Hannah knows the sun is a yellow ball of fire—she can still see the smear of it—but the image has been replaced more by a feeling of warmth that tingles the hair on her arms and makes her turn her face toward the source. Yes, a pine tree has a reddish trunk and green needles and cuts away the sky when you stand beneath it, but for her the sensory analogue is the smell of resin and the feel of scabby bark plates beneath her palm and the sound of the hushing, prickling breeze when it rushes through the branches. The ability to see has become an abstraction, something she can only vaguely imagine, like time travel or teleportation.

  She sits on an exam table with the doctor leaning in and her mother hovering nearby. He tries to make small talk—asking how’s school, is she excited, will she do anything to celebrate—but she can barely manage a response, all of her attention on the tug of his hands, the wounded ache of her eyes.

  “We don’t go out to restaurants very much, but we’re going to one tomorrow,” her mother says. “Benedikt’s. For lunch. To celebrate. With my sister. She writes for the paper. Maybe you’ve read her articles? She writes about other people’s problems, but let me tell you, she has plenty of her own. Anyway, as long as Hannah is feeling up for it, that’s what we’re planning.”

  “That’s nice,�
� the doctor says. “Almost done.” Then the last bit of bandage pulls away and he says, “There.”

  A part of Hannah feels lighter, more buoyant, now that she’s unrestricted by all that gauze and tape, but another part of her feels more panicked than ever—as if, when he said, “There,” a light switch should have turned on in her head. For now there is only darkness. Her brain churns. She can taste her breakfast in her throat.

  He leans in and thumbs aside her lids and shines a light on the still-sore incisions and nudges the outlet. “Good, good. Okay. I think we’re ready for Mirage.”

  Hannah has worn it before, more than a month ago. She ran her fingers along the shape of it then, the sleek silver shield that wrapped her eyes. But that was just playing pretend. This is real. The doctor fits it into place, tightening the band around the back of her head and neatening her hair. Two bulges, almost like the nubs of horns, swell next to each of her temples. These are the brains of the thing, a cluster of microprocessors. The right one carries the small power switch. The doctor asks if she’d like to do the honors.

  She nods and blows out a steadying breath and snaps the switch.

  “Well?” the doctor says.

  “Hannah?” her mother says. “Did it work? Is it working?”

  There is a game she sometimes plays. The wishing game. She’ll say, “I’m looking forward to our trip to Costa Rica,” or “I’m riding a horse across the Scottish Highlands,” and then, as if a spell has been cast, an image will crystallize. She is on a white sand beach with coconuts thudding the sand and dolphins arcing from a lagoon. She is pounding across a bog, through swirling mists, while the horse kicks up divots of mud and bagpipes honk and wheeze. No matter how expensive or distant or impossible the dream, the wishing game makes anything possible.

  “I can see,” she says. She has said this many times before, has whispered it into her pillow and coat collar and closet, testing the words in quiet places to see if they spoil once released to the air. But this time it’s true. She can see.

  It is difficult for her to comprehend images, her frame of reference so far limited to her other senses. What she sees is like an echo. And inside the echo there is another voice. There is a blazing white above, and a muted white all around, through which things—people?—move. Her mother asks, “Can you see me? Hannah?”

  She sees something, but is it her mother? It must be. But everything is mixed up. She can’t forge colors with shapes or shapes with distance or distance with texture, every different input temporarily fizzling her brain, making her want to shout, “Does not compute, does not compute!” As if someone put a banana under her nose and a shark in front of her face and jazz in her ear and a broom in her hand and said, “What a beautiful sunset.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t tell what’s real.”

  Chapter 1

  LELA STARES AT her reflection in the dead computer screen, a black cutout against the fluorescent blaze of the newsroom behind her. Her face appears an oval smear with hollows for eyes, a gash for a mouth, as if she were looking into some haunted mirror. She lifts the phone to her ear and dials the number for Alderman Robert Dahm. The ring purrs. Her pen hovers over a yellow legal tablet. There was a time when she found it impossible to concentrate at her desk, one of forty cubicles surrounded by glass-walled meeting rooms and editorial offices here at The Oregonian, where she has worked Metro the past five years. But she has learned to focus, to crush down her attention and blur into white noise the copy machine whirring, the printer and fax machine bleeping, the cell phones and landlines ringing, the televisions blaring, the voices calling all around her, just as she has learned to tolerate the smell of mildew that clings to the walls and the taste of the burned black coffee in the lounge.

  She has never heard of the company Undertown, Inc. That’s who City Hall says bought Rue Apartments, the four-story stone building in the Pearl District, long ago condemned and surrounded by chain-link. The Rue was one of her first big stories at the paper—back when she was freelancing—a feature about the ten-year anniversary of Jeremy Tusk’s death. She’s since become a staff writer at The Oregonian, and Tusk has become a celebrity serial killer. Plug his name into Google and a long list of hits will come up, including leaked crime scene photos and occultist conspiracy theories. There’s a display dedicated to him at the Museum of Death in Los Angeles and at least two direct-to-video horror films have cited him as an inspiration.

  Lela is thirty now, she was twenty-four then, when she toured through the weed-choked lot, the thirty-unit building with the broken windows and a gnarled tree growing on its roof. In her article she described its shadow-soaked hallways as palpably dark. She described Tusk’s two-bedroom apartment, still cobwebbed with police tape, as tomblike. She quoted a detective as saying, “Up to me, we’d burn the place down, raise a barbed-wire fence, keep everyone the hell away. Cursed ground.”

  The alderman’s secretary answers and patches her through. “Lela Falcon?” he says, and she says, “Yes,” as though he’s the one bothering her. His voice, a nasal whine, asks what he can do for her this afternoon.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the Rue building?”

  “The Rue—you mean that the property sold? Why does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. You know it matters.”

  “So you can write another story about that demon-worshipping psychopath cutting people up and making their skin into curtains? Maybe I don’t want you dredging up all those bad memories. It’s not good for the city.”

  “It is good. It is good. That’s the story. A new chapter. Portland moves on.”

  “You write a story, you bring up all those nasty details, people get upset.”

  “No. Don’t be stupid. You’re wrong. It’s the opposite spin. New building, new city, new era. Bluebirds and hopefulness and all that happy crappy bullshit.”

  His sigh makes a wind in her ear. They talk another five minutes. Due to a tax foreclosure, the property belongs to the city, and last she heard, they were going to convert the lot to green space, landscape it with trees and shrubs and grass and benches. Last she heard, from the alderman’s own mouth, it was not “appropriate” to develop the lot for residential or economic purposes due to what had happened there.

  Now the city of Portland has sold the lot to Undertown, Inc., for an undisclosed purchase price. A generous one, the alderman says, one they couldn’t refuse in these lean times. “It will be a good boost. We need a good boost.”

  “And construction is already underway? I’m hearing about this how many weeks later? Who are these people? What are they going to do with the lot?”

  Robert doesn’t know. Something about the Internet. She asks him for contact information—she wants to reach out to Undertown—and he says she’ll have to figure that out on her own. All this time her pen gashes paper, scratching out notes.

  “You know, you should smile more,” he says, and she says, “How do you know I’m not smiling?” and he says, “You never smile. It might help you—that’s all I’m saying. Professionally. Personally. Try it sometime.”

  With her pen she stabs down a period that tears the page and says, “You’re no help,” and hangs up. She plugs the pen in her mouth and gnaws on it. The plastic is already scored from her teeth. Dozens of yellow legal tablets surround her, wrinkled and torn and coffee-stained and stitched with her handwriting, much of it a coded shorthand illegible to anyone but her. Their leaning piles are decorated with empty coffee cups and chip bags and crumpled blobs of cellophane dusted with muffin crumbs. She has tacked to the foam walls of the cubicle a photograph of her standing alone before Multnomah Falls and a film noir calendar with every square darkened with reminders about meetings and deadlines.

  She is pale. So is everyone else in Portland, but she is particularly light-skinned and freckled, which makes the black bags beneath her eyes all the more obvious. Her gingery hair she keeps knotted into a braid that might be called churchy or grandmotherly bu
t that she thinks of as classic. Men, usually men in bars who have drunk too much to know better, have called her face everything from elfin to pointy to fawnish. She didn’t let any of them stick their tongues in her mouth, though they tried. She has lost track of her latest coffee—one of twenty she might drink in a day—and spits out the dregs of two cold cups before finding the one that goes down lukewarm.

  She pushes out of her chair and leans over her cubicle and asks the Metro intern—an acne-scarred kid named Josh, a com-jo major at Portland State—to do some digging. “Undertown, Inc. Get me whatever you can on them.”

  “Ever heard of Google?” he says. His voice still has a crackly pubescence to it.

  He knows she hates using computers. Everybody knows and nobody will shut up about it. They all think it’s the most hilarious thing in world history. Calling her a Luddite. Asking her if she’s updated her stone tablet with the latest software. “Do what you’re told. That’s what interns are supposed to do.”

  “Fine.”

  A minute later, he has the company website up on the monitor. “Under construction,” it reads.

  “Exactly,” she says. “Under construction. Nothing else?”

  “That’s all. No phone. No email. I also searched the domain name—to see who’s paying for the site—but whoever it is, they dropped the extra fee that buys anonymity.”

  “Why would they do that?” she says.

  “Because they’re shy?”

  “You’re no help either.”

  She calls City Hall and asks a favor of the clerk in Records. Promises to buy him lunch so long as he digs out the file on the Rue Apartments, gets her the contact info for the buyer, Undertown, Inc. She waits with the phone clamped against her shoulder until he rattles off an email and a number with an area code she doesn’t recognize. “No billing address?” she says, and he says, “Nope. Paid for through an anonymous escrow account.”