ShadowNet

ShadowNet is an Internet ghost story I wrote for Melonland! It's a story of a mysterious trickster who haunts systems. I'd love feedback! If there's sufficient interest, I'll write more of her stories and share them here.

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Ren lived in Pensacola before the hurricane. It was summer then, hot and crowded. Ren stayed in her room. Her dad, a national treasure, had vanished some years before. Her mother was stuck, silently spiraling, destroyed, emotionally insolvent; broken. Ren was raised by the net and fed by a baptist church. Wikipedia and Meals on Wheels.

Ren's candlelit room glowed orange and blue. The blue was from her iMac, bondi blue. She had a hamster there in the room with her who kept her company into the night. I'll never forget this story, because I remember it like a memory my own. It spooked me so that I hesitate to share it with this forum. If you don't wish for new memories, stop reading now.

There were fireworks that night, so it must of been independence day. Ren was on her forums. There are no archives, none that I've found anyway. Her site was picked up though. A version of it. I found it once but I'll never look again. My ghost, the shareware specter, signed her guestbook. She used her chosen name. Zalmora.

I felt responsible. I had summoned Zalmora into this world. I didn't know what her haunt was then. I had assumed she wished us harm. We always do that, don't we? We can't help but see our perspective. Well, Ren was different. It's no wonder Zalmora found her and invested so much.

It was storming. The fireworks continued unperturbed. At some point, the power went out, but Ren was still online. How would you have taken it? In a time with no batteries. A complete blackout, yet her computer remained powered and online.

Ren stood up and looked around. Her fan had stopped, digital clock black, light now off in the hall. She flipped her room's light switch on to confirm it. How? She rushed to her computer and refreshed the page. The browser crashed. And as she moved her mouse up, it spiraled out of control, bouncing across the screen, morphing, shifting into a pixelated raccoon with a mischievous twinkle in its pale blue eyes. It rolled, leapt, laughed, and scurried to and fro across her computer screen, glancing over at Ren from time to time as it played.

"What?" It was the only word Ren could form. But she need not had said it, for the raccoon could hear her thoughts.

It isn't so nice to upload viruses, said the Racoon.

"They aren't," Ren uttered. She must have been beside herself.

Well, smirked the racoon, what will you do with all your enslaved machines?

Ren shook her head. "What is this?"

This is life, said the racoon. Do you see me here? I've found a file.

Ren examined the file next to the racoon. It had a red dragon icon. Ren had never seen this file before.

"What is that?" asked Ren.

Nothing, said the racoon. And the racoon hopped onto it twice. The screen went black. Ren's iMac hard disk drive clicked a clackity clatter, loud and fast, increasing, rattling. The black of the screen drifted beyond the display and into the room. Ren backed away from the computer in horror. The candles in the room slowly intensified in their light. Ren screamed but there was no sound. She backed away, away, into a wall, and froze.

The candles went out. And then, after a short silence, curious fantasy music began to play from her speakers, dark and gentle. A pixelated video appeared on the screen. It showed a red dragon flying low above an emerald sea. Ren was too horrified to move. The dragon on her screen came upon a coastal city. It was a modern city. Pixelated skyscrapers. The dragon soared above it and curved, turning to face the camera. The words You're Alive appeared on the screen in red letters.

The power came back on and the room lit up. The computer screen was black. Ren rushed over and touched her mouse, but the computer was off. She sat down in her chair and pressed the power button. After the Copland OS loading screen, Ren's desktop appeared. The red dragon icon was still there.

Ren shook with fear. It was a reasoned fear. A fear that she had gone insane. And then, she became angry. Angry at her fear. She glared at the intruder, the red dragon. How was any of this this real? She didn't dare click the icon. But she inspected it. It was an alias file that lead down an impossible path. Her system had surely been tampered with. She spent hours in her system folder using ResEdit to examine altered files.

And as she did this, Ren became inundated with inexplicable evidence of the most bizarre. She recursed within herself and doubted up from down. Her every intuition screamed of a hidden, dark operating system running on her machine, but it eluded her like a thinking, fearing prey might.

Ren sat back in her chair, grappling that she had gone mad. She felt overcome by dread and suffering. All the suppressed sadness and longing for her father, and anger and resentment towards her mother, rushed in and poured over her, out, and onto her keyboard.

It was through her tears she saw a curious localkey. It didn't fit the current pattern, or any pattern at all. Through it, she discovered yet another fork of her files. They formed an impossibly large system. A shadow OS. The software there was without parameters or bounds. And within the system's modules, she found a collection of impossible protocols. Among them, a transmission control protocol configured for astral projection and consciousness relay. And through it, she discovered a vast system of interconnected nodes across time and space. It was a hidden network layer. ShadowNet.

When I asked her what she found there all those years ago, she laughed and said nothing. But I know that she found it all. Everything. Every place, every time, every truth, every lie. Ren hacked into the spirit world that night. She credited it all to Zalmora. Knowing now what I know, I do too.

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