The Mind Virus by Donna Freitas

Author:Donna Freitas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

19

Skylar

city death

I COULDN’T TEAR my eyes from that jar of glass.

I shook my head.

“Sorry,” I said to Adam. “I don’t know what got into me. I need to focus.” I stuck my hand back inside the hole in the wall and out came Trader’s Black Market App Store. I’d known about such Stores for ages, everyone in the City knew about them. Trader warned me once what to expect if I ever called up his, but it was one thing to hear rumors and descriptions and something else to be at the center of one. “Have you ever—” I began, but my voice dropped off as I took in the icons now hovering and darting about in Trader’s living room.

“—seen one of these?” Adam supplied. “No.” He swallowed. “And I can’t say that I ever want to see another one after today.”

The two of us alternated between staring and shielding our eyes.

Some of the icons were violent. Horribly so. They depicted images that I wished I’d never seen but would be burned in my memory forever. Some of the icons screamed and cried. The people they depicted were subjected to various forms of torture, the images repeating vile acts as the icons replayed the horrors they promised. There were Apps for every kind of vicious thing you could imagine and a million things you would never imagine unless you were deranged. They filled every corner of the room and flitted into the adjoining kitchen until it was impossible to turn away and not see another one.

Trader told me once that before the App World came into existence, when the virtual was still something you accessed only through those little devices and tablets, back when people still referred to it as the internet, there was something called the dark web. The dark web was the evil underside of the normal, public virtual sphere. Criminals operated it and used it to trade everything from weapons to slaves and so many other terrible things. You had to know how to access the dark web in order to use it, and lots of people didn’t even know of its existence. The Black Market App Store was modeled after it, apparently.

Not exactly the kind of thing you learn in Real World History Class.

“I don’t see a Death App icon,” Adam whispered, sounding choked.

I nodded. “I suppose that is one good thing.”

There were nonviolent icons too. If you were seeking classified information, conspiracy theories, government cover-ups, you also went to the Black Market App Store. There were Black Market Apps that specialized in underground chatter and traded in illegal information. This was how Trader had become aware that the borders were going to close between worlds before it was announced to the rest of us; how he’d known to get working on an App that would allow people to illegally cross from here into the Real World, and to have it ready once Jonathan Holt made his emergency broadcast announcement that Service was canceled.

I searched the storm of horrors populating Trader’s living room for the icon he told me was the best of them.

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