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 gray-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.