Chapter 5
Five
Tabitha
‘Hey, dumbass. Aunt Claudia said you need to put your bike in the garage because she nearly drove over it.’ Tabitha barged into her brother Brian’s room.
As she caught him reducing his computer screen, she stood there with her mouth open rubbing her eyes in the hope that what she’d just seen wasn’t real.
His table lamp lit up the sides of his and his equally dumbass friend Curtis’s face.
They turned around, pretending to look all innocent.
Had she really seen what she thought she’d seen? No, surely not.
‘Have you ever heard of knocking, dipshit?’
She shrugged and walked up to where they were sitting. Curtis grabbed his coat and nudged past her. ‘Catch you tomorrow, Bri.’
Brian sighed as he looked at her and yes she was being judgemental, and to add to that, she was disgusted. ‘What?’
‘What were you looking at?’
‘Nothing.’
The door slammed which meant that Curtis had left. ‘You were. I saw and I know you shouldn’t be looking at things like that.’
‘Tabby, just get out. You’re not welcome in my room, ever.’
‘Fine, I’ll just tell Aunt Claudia that you and Creepy Curtis were checking out some really disgusting stuff together.’ She went to leave but Brian beat her to the door and slammed it before she could step out onto the landing.
‘What I do in my room is nothing to do with you so keep out of it.’
‘Are you an incel?’
‘What? Where do you get this shit from?’ He scrunched his brows.
‘I’m not stupid. I know what I saw. I thought you were better than the Tate-loving dickwads at school but wasn’t I wrong, golden boy? If Mum and Dad were still alive they’d be so proud – not.’
Their parents had idolised Brian and that had narked her.
Although disgusted at her brother, she couldn’t help but sneer at him.
Perfect Brian with the best grades until he took his GCSEs – the favourite and firstborn had a secret that he wouldn’t want anyone to find out about.
Her stomach rolled. That wasn’t porn as she knew it to be.
She’d caught Brian looking at porn before and this was far from it.
She’d even looked at that trash with her friends and they’d laughed their heads off at the theatre and fakery.
‘You saw some stupid AI video. I came across it by accident. It’s nothing.’
‘Don’t believe you.’ She tilted her head and stared.
‘I don’t care. Just keep your trap shut.’
She walked up to her brother who’d sat back in his gaming chair, then she sat beside him.
It was still warm from Curtis’s wide butt.
Brian’s phone rang and he grabbed it. ‘Curtis… iPad… err… I’m sure you had it when you left.
’ Brian stood and began searching around his room for his friend’s iPad.
‘No way. The toilet. Really? I don’t wanna touch that thing now…
’ Brian left the room and stomped across the landing.
Tabitha moved the mouse and clicked on one of the reduced tabs to reveal what her brother and his friend had been looking at.
There was no sound. The video had been muted.
That’s when she saw the man in the morph mask standing over the brown-haired woman who looked to be in bed, sleeping.
The light coming from his phone barely lit up the room.
The woman didn’t move or open her eyes but her chest rose and fell as she lay in the large bed covered in a pink flower print.
Just as he began to pull the blanket down, exposing the woman’s naked breast, Tabitha scrunched up her nose and reduced the screen again, then she opened the next one.
A man was stripping off in what looked like a very ordinary bedroom.
At the bottom of the video there was an eye symbol and the number 4965.
She knew that was the amount of people watching.
She flicked back to the one with the woman but that didn’t have the eye in the corner.
It wasn’t live. She selected the other video again.
The man on the screen began walking around, tossing clothing out of his drawers until he found a T-shirt he liked, then he posed in front of his mirror, flexing his muscles.
The reflection of his eyes caught hers. She gasped and reduced the window again.
After a count of ten, she opened the window up again and it was as if his torso filled the screen, then he backed off and went back to the mirror to put an earring in, a bar type that left a spike out of the hole at each end.
He hadn’t seen her. He’d wanted the earring.
None of what she was looking at was AI, it was people’s lives, some in real-time, and it was sick.
Her gaze led her to the banner. The platform wasn’t TikTok or YouTube, it was called OpenMeSmiler and there was an option to take a walk down a dark path.
She knew what it was. The dark web. Without thinking, she clicked the enter button but a box to enter a code popped up in the middle of the screen.
She hit the go back button then took it back to the home screen and could see that her brother’s virtual private network was on and she didn’t need to know he was using that to look at things he wasn’t meant to be looking at.
A sick feeling welled in her stomach. She turned to run out of Brian’s bedroom but he came back in and nudged her hard onto his bed. ‘Why are you running off like that?’
‘Why are you accessing the dark web and looking at people being abused? You know that makes you complicit, dumbass?’
‘I told you, I’m not. It’s AI and you say anything to Aunt Claudia, I will tell her about the time I had to collect the morning after pill from the chemist for you.’
At fifteen, that wasn’t her proudest moment and she never wanted anyone to know. She’d gone online, answered all the questions the pharmacist asked but she’d been too mortified to collect her prescription. Their aunt would freak and never let her out again. ‘You promised you’d never tell.’
‘Yeah, well if you say anything, I’ll shout it so loud that boy you have the hots for at number ten will hear.’
She glanced at the screen and back at her brother. His fair hair and fleshed out face reminded her of the brother he used to be – her best friend. ‘Why? Just tell me why you look at that. It’s weird.’ She pointed at his computer.
‘I just came across it, okay.’
This wasn’t the Brian she knew and loved.
That Brian had left the room over a year ago, since he’d started hanging with Curtis.
Curtis had to be behind the dark web, voyeuristic stuff.
He’d already been in trouble at school for taking photos up a girl’s skirt when he was at school.
She had to get her brother back, save him from going down this dark path – literally.
The path that led to what she imagined was some deeper level of depravity.
Her hands trembled as she imagined what might lie at the end of the path?
As soon as Brian hit eighteen and flunked his exams, he changed.
‘You don’t just come across that kind of stuff and you threw me on the bed. You’ve never pushed me before.’
‘I’m sorry, Tabby, okay. Me and Curtis were being silly, playing about online and we came across it. As you burst in, I was trying to get rid of it. I’ll get rid of it forever, I promise. Okay.’
‘But what about the woman in the video, and the man. They need help.’
‘They don’t need help. They’re actors. It’s all about clicks. I promise I’ll never go there again.’
Clicks? She wasn’t convinced. One thing she never saw was a single advert and they were everywhere, but what could she do? If she spilled his secret, he would spill hers. ‘Swear a pinky promise like you used to when we were kids.’
‘I pinky swear.’ He linked his little finger in hers. She so wanted to believe him because she loved him, but she knew he was lying. As soon as the heat was off him, she knew he’d be back on the dark web getting into trouble. She made a vow to herself – she was going to watch him like a hawk.