Bad Glass

“Static?” he said, glancing up. There was a perplexed look on his face. “Like white noise? Hiss?” I nodded. “That doesn’t really make any sense. There’d be nothing like static on a network like this. Unless …” The lines on his face softened as a new thought erased his confusion. “Unless this network connects up with a broadcast node somewhere else, somewhere outside the range of interference.”

“So this could actually contact the outside world?”

“Maybe. If the cable …” He lifted it toward me briefly before plugging it into the side of his notebook. “If the network and the hubs lead all the way outside of Spokane—miles and miles away—if it’s hooked up to some type of broadcast antenna or a satellite somewhere. If that’s the case, this thing could be linked almost anywhere. Anywhere on the planet.” Charlie paused for a moment, and we both let that sink in. Then he continued. “The military’s using something like that for their data traffic, but according to Danny, it’s all aboveground, stretching straight down the middle of I-90. And they’ve got a fleet of engineers maintaining the lines.”

“So what is this shit?” I asked, but I didn’t really expect an answer. I was just giving voice to my confusion.

“It’s a darknet,” Charlie said.

“A what?”

“A darknet. A private, secret network—something not hooked up to the world, isolated and secure, running on its own wires, using its own protocols.”

“Who would do that?”

“I have no idea,” he said, once again bending low over his computer. “But there’s a … fanciful notion out there—nothing real, you understand, nothing concrete, just whisperings—about a shadow Internet. A network running parallel to the Internet we know, but somehow different, and very, very secret. Controlled by financial giants, the people who’d have the resources and the power to do something like that. It’s all real illuminati stuff, you know, just paranoid speculation. But if it existed, I imagine it would be something like this—all hidden wires and clandestine hardware.” Charlie looked up from his notebook and smiled slyly. The computer had finished booting up, and a multiwindowed program now filled the screen. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Perhaps it’s just a couple of lines connected to an antenna outside of the city. Hell, maybe it’s just feeding someone’s addiction to NPR.”

I knew better. I’d been down in the tunnels. I’d seen the wires sprouting out in eight different directions.

Charlie was silent for several minutes as he scrolled past screen after screen of numbers and acronyms, arcane listings that looked like nothing but gibberish to me. “It looks big,” he finally said. “I don’t know how big. Depending on what type of router they’re using and how many they’ve got, I might only be seeing a small corner of the network here. But there’s traffic … a fair amount of traffic.” He opened a command window and typed in a string of letters, and a media player appeared in the center of his screen. After a couple of seconds, an error message popped up, accompanied by a soft bing. “It’s encrypted. I can’t get at it.”

Abruptly, he unplugged the network cable and slotted it back into the radio. “The radio’s just a very specialized computer, set up to isolate and decrypt an audio feed that’s been meshed inside the network traffic, and maybe broadcast back out. There’s got to be hardware decryption somewhere inside this thing.”

He turned the radio on and immediately jumped back, startled by an insistent voice that leaped from the speaker. Beneath the voice there was a whisper of static, a low ebb and flow, like water and gravel echoing down an empty pipe.

“—three things we need to look out for: an expanding border, changes at a cellular level, and communication. If it breaks through to the populace, we need to know immediately. It’s getting worse—that much is certain—but we’re not quite sure how it’s getting worse, we’re not quite sure in what manner, and we have no idea what that might bode for the future.”

Charlie shot me a startled glance. “That’s Devon,” he hissed. “That voice, I’m sure of it … but what he’s saying, that doesn’t sound like him, not at all.” I nodded in agreement. I’d only spent a matter of hours with Devon, but I recognized his voice. And this clear, quick delivery couldn’t have been further from the stoned, incoherent ramblings he’d subjected us to at the house.

After a pause, Devon continued, his disembodied voice filling the room. “Containment is another matter. One we can actually do something about.”

“Don’t worry about Charles.” This was a new voice—a man’s voice—barely rising above the hiss of static. It sounded faint and distant, a trickle of words beamed from the other side of the world. At the sound of the new voice, Charlie blanched, literally blanched, his face turning a sickly shade of gray. The voice continued, “If it comes down to it, we’ll deal with Charles.”