What Happened in Strasbourg

Chapter nine: The New Dark Web

That night after dinner I went up to my room and told my mom I was going to watch a movie Imogen had recommended to me. "You're always welcome to watch it down here on the big TV," my mom called up to me as I walked up the stairs.
"No, it's fine," I said. "Watching on my computer screen hurts my eyes less anyway."

Finally I was alone. My headphones were tight around my ears, my computer was at 100 percent charge, and Ginger was sleeping on the floor next to my bed. I opened the lid and a cold light flooded my face. How to do this? I took out the scrap of paper and typed in. .

Nothing happened -- nothing except my computer started heating up, making my hands sweat. Then a screen popped up: "WWW.Shar is a restricted site. Please enter access code before proceeding. Thank you. NOTICE: you will only have one try before your code's validity will be permanently terminated."

My hand's shook. I was overthinking every letter and number I chose. What if my hand slipped? What if I accidentally put in a letter O instead of a zero and I'd be locked out of Trench forever?

Downloading WWW.Trench.Shar 44% complete

You will be online shortly

WELCOME TO THE SHAR BROWSER

You will now be free to browse the web without the restrictions of the AIMA Firewall.

NOTICE: ***THIS BROWSER IS NOT HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY HARM DONE TO ITS USERS WHILE USING THE PLATFORM. SURF AT YOUR OWN RISK.***

THANK YOU!

I sighed in relief. I was on. Some angry AIMA employees hadn't burst through my bedroom door with stun guns and handcuffs, my computer hadn't exploded, nothing had gone catastrophically wrong. I searched around for a "Terms and Conditions page" and I found none -- this was anarchy after all. I clicked away to view the rest of the site.

Trench was nothing like any place online I'd been before. The screen wasn't white with chic fonts and logos like on Acheron's many websites. The web designer had picked a muddy green color for the background and there were double the amount of fonts there probably should've been. My mom was a graphic designer, and I was no stranger to being told what bad taste looked like, but something about the imperfections of this chat room was appealing to me. I had only been staring at the webpage for a few seconds and I already saw three options to choose from. "Trending Forum Discussions," "Trench Chat Private Conversations: Talk to Strangers," and "Trench Reports: What Landry doesn't want you to know about Acheron."

I wondered if I should text Imogen to ask her what she thought I should spend my time on first, but then realized that even saying "Trench" through my private messages would probably show up as a red flag for AIMA, and I couldn't risk it. I was on my own now.

I clicked the "Trench Chat" option. Maybe I'd meet someone else who'd show me around this site and give me pointers. I was surprised to see my own face pop up on a cam -- faded makeup, pointed nose, sunken, sleepy eyes. So much for "anonymous activity." If chatting with strangers meant they could see your face, I didn't know how much chatting I wanted to do. In a second "self view" was pushed off into a corner of my screen by the pixelated face of a teenage boy in a dark bedroom. "Privet," he said, which I knew was hello in Russian.
"Privet?" I mumbled.

The boy started talking to me in enthusiastic Russian and only caught on a couple minutes later that I had no idea what he was saying.
"Oh, I am sorry about it," he said. "You -- I thought you were from here."
Before I could say anything else he had disconnected and another face popped up on the screen, this time, a girl who looked younger than me. I could hear her friends giggling in the background. "Hi!!" the girl said, "Are you Russian?"
"No--"
"Awww, nobody on here is Russian, this is boring...."