Layers

She sat, crouched over the screen of her laptop; she had been there for hours.

She had no idea how many… It started when she’d logged on just after tea to do a quick search on an old friend. That afternoon, right out of the blue, she’d received a call from her. She’d been getting on the bus after work in the city when her mobile sounded. It was from her best girlfriend from her school days. A decade ago they were the best of buddies, but they had both moved on. Since her caller had moved away from her home town, she must have looked her up on the internet to find her number. It was such a lovely call, and she had been so pleased to think that she’d gone to the trouble of tracking her down. So, it was for this reason that at about six in the evening she had hopped on her machine to do the same.

As it turned out, she never found her.

The reason for this being the common dallying that occurs when on the net, it had been a case of getting side tracked. She had started by going to the website of her old school. In doing so, she found an unusual message coming up in a tiny text box. It seemed to be telling her how much more information she would receive if she followed the link it contained. She hadn’t seen anything like it before and wondered if it had been something her brother had done. He had used her laptop on his last visit. He’d probably downloaded stuff that gave him access to it. Out of curiosity, she clicked on it.

It was quite fascinating, really. She was looking at a number of strange-looking websites, with even stranger messages. It was like nothing she’d seen before. It wasn’t until she noticed that so many of them were accompanied by warnings, about anonymity and security, and regular links asking whether she wanted to proceed, that she realised she was actually on the Dark Web. She found it exciting. She became engrossed. For the first several hours she trawled the content, seeing what had been hidden from the common user. Then, around midnight she had found herself in the Deep Web. She was barely aware that the deeper she went, the more she was losing herself, being pulled under.

So intrigued with it all, she ignored the warning signs and continued to delve down. She seemed to sink with it until, in the early hours of the morning she entered the lowest of the low; the Shadow Web. She was falling through the layers. This was something usually talked about with a deal of scepticism. People only surmised that such a thing might exist. But she was now drowning in the unseen sub-layer of the net and gasping for air without realising what was happening to her. The world of digital shadows was slowly taking her. She was becoming a shadow, she was being surrounded by the darkest of them and dragged down to the lowest depths of the web. She was becoming a digital ghost.

At a little after three in the morning, she was completely wrapped up in the web and swallowed!

Meanwhile, in another town, her old school friend was using what she had been given over the phone to find out what her old friend had been doing since their schooldays. She started by googling her, but came up empty. She tried more searches, again and again. Nothing. As far as the internet was concerned she didn’t exist!

Naturally, they never did catch up.