The year was 2022, and Ari Winters was pulling another all-nighter. She did this so often that sometimes she thought she’d be better off reversing her days and nights, but instead she let her sleep schedule ebb and flow in a constant state of flux. It drove her brother Aro crazy, as their small flat was about the size of a two-star hotel room. But, they had a roof over their heads and money coming in, and both knew it could be much worse.
Even if both of their jobs were, well, less than legal.
After the Internet Censorship Acts of 2018 were passed, with 112 countries signing a UN accord to adhere to them, many things had changed for the youth of America. Most of the popular websites had been shut down for various fabricated violations. YouTube was now a state-run website, with all content screened before posting. Reddit and other forum-style sites were banned immediately, as it was too easy to pass information through them. Dating sites and social media were either shut down or strictly monitored for copyright violations and falsified identities – identity fraud, as it was now officially called – and many were prosecuted for misleading their followers. Only Netflix remained untouched. Even those who fully supported the Acts couldn’t imagine life without Netflix.
But the people prevailed. The biggest failing of the Acts was its inability to control the youth, the demographic beginning with the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. These children were the first to be raised on the Internet, the ones who remembered it in its early incarnations, and couldn’t imagine life without it. They were Ari and Aro, and all of their friends. They were not the ones who passed the Censorship Acts. They were the ones who fought them.
The Internet as it was known in the early to mid-2000s, the Surface Web, was now a desolate place, filled with censors disguised as spambots and federally sponsored sites. With freedom of speech no longer protected, independent companies began to fall, and the government swept in to fill the void. After Google declared bankruptcy in 2020, less and less of the constantly growing Internet was catalogued, and most sites became completely inaccessible to the average user.
But not to Ari and Aro, and not to their friends, and their generation. They simply deserted the main Internet for a place the elder generations had no understanding of, and no way to track: the Deep Web.
The Deep Web was not a new invention. It was as old as the Internet itself, originally created by the U.S. military for passing classified intel and state secrets. Then the fugitives, the criminals, the whistleblowers, and the oppressed learned the secrets of the Deep Web, accessing it through the surreptitiously spread software known as Tor.
And that is how Ari and her brother kept themselves alive. They dealt in bitcoins and illicit transactions, buying and selling on the underground online markets. The Deep Web was a well-known secret, but so vast in its usage that even the most enthusiastic governments hadn’t managed to shut it down.
A bustling trade of goods, money, and services passed through the Deep Web. Aro ran an online black market, mostly facilitating filesharing. In the current era it was almost impossible to physically pass information via USB drives or discs, so all information was spread on underground sites like Aro’s. His was not the largest site by far, but still popular.
Ari, however, engaged in an antiquated and dangerous form of work known as catfishing.
In the early days of the Internet, lying about yourself in order to make a romantic connection with a stranger was easy, and occurred far more often than anyone cared to admit. Some people were sued and a TV show exposing catfishers gained popularity, but in 2020 the practice had lost all sense of fun or adventure. In light of the danger posed by strangers on the Internet, a significant portion of the Acts was devoted to forcing everyone to be honest about themselves in their online profiles. Any sort of personal misrepresentation, intentional or otherwise, was punishable with prison time in most countries, and life imprisonment in a few.
Since even before the Acts, Ari had mastered the art of donning a fake persona and engaging the unsuspecting masses, and it had served her well after she and her brother were forced underground. Her trick, as she explained to Aro one day, was to pick a niche market.
“It wouldn’t work nearly so well with just any old stranger,” she told him, shoving Pringles into her mouth and wiping greasy fingers on her shorts. “You’ve got to learn your audience, and stick with it.”
“So what’s your audience gonna be, then?” Aro asked, snagging a chip from the handful in her lap.
She grinned. “Bandoms.”
Aro raised one eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” she nodded. “Every band out there has a fanbase just waiting to be exploited.”
“And just how are you going to exploit them?”
“Easy!” she said. “I just pretend to be the daughter of one of the band members, and they’ll give me anything I want!”
“Holy shit, you think that would work?” asked Aro.
“I know it works,” she said, biting her lip. “I’ve kind of been doing it already. For a while.”
Aro’s eyes narrowed. “How long is a while?”
“Two years?” Ari shrugged. “Give or take. I started with the old Blink-182 fans, pretended to be Tom DeLonge’s daughter Ava. It’s how I got my laptop. Some sucker sent me $600 when I told him my “dad” wouldn’t let me on the Internet unless I could pay for it.”
“Holy shit,” Aro repeated. “Holy. Shit. I am impressed, really, I am.”
“Thanks, bro,” Ari smiled triumphantly.
“Who else have you done?”
“I had a short run as Joel Madden’s kid Harlow,” began Ari. “But it’s been awhile since Good Charlotte was popular and I couldn’t keep it up. I was able to stick with Matt Wachter’s kid Sailor Mae for a bit longer, but 30 Seconds to Mars isn’t big either. Right now I’m Bandit Lee Way.”
“Gerard Way’s daughter?” exclaimed Aro. “Didn’t My Chemical Romance break up like a decade ago?”
“Ten years next March,” Ari nodded. “But they’re the most passionate fans I’ve ever seen. Still completely obsessed, it’s totally crazy.”
“So what’re you getting out of this one?”
“Mostly cash in exchange for some vintage merch that’s totally been signed by my dad, obviously,” she said matter-of-factly.
Aro shook his head and stood, shaking the Pringles dust from his jeans. “You’re evil, sis, and I love it.”
She blew an exaggerated kiss and returned to her laptop.
Life continued. They rarely left their apartment, instead relying on a steady flow of Bitcoins to pay for their shipments of food and other supplies. Every week one of the siblings would head down to a local pickup point run by another Deep Web enthusiast and retrieve their orders. It was one of the only reasons they had to leave their hideout.
It was during one of Aro’s runs that he was taken. Government agents snatched him off the street, his profile matching the description from an unknown informant, and his laptop provided incriminating evidence of his illicit activities.
When he didn’t return that day, Ari suspected what had happened. It was every Deep Web user’s worst nightmare, and there was nothing she could do but wait. Her contacts eventually ratted out the informant, a frequent shopper in Aro’s store who was picked up herself and, facing imprisonment, traded information on Aro for leniency from the courts.
One week after he was taken, Ari received a notice to her state-issued email address. It listed the whereabouts of her brother, the price of his bail, and the deadline for his release.
$50,000.
Fifty-thousand dollars. Where was she supposed to come up with that kind of money? It was utterly impossible. Insane. A totally ridiculous amount of money. Not only that, she only had a week to post the bail before the deal expired.
She couldn’t just leave Aro in prison until some unspecified future date. She couldn’t let him rot in a cell with God-knows-who for company. He was her brother, her best friend, her only family.
She took a few deep breaths and turned back to her laptop. She could handle this. It was getting easier every day to fool idiots on the Internet for cash, and so far she had been going for small change. She had focused on old bands, with strong fanbases. It was time for a bigger haul, a more dangerous con, something that could get her a lot of money, fast.
With a paranoid glance around her, she pulled up the files she had on one Jakob Danger Armstrong. The youngest son of Billie Joe Armstrong, she had slowly been compiling pictures and information on him. Although now considered a classic band, Green Day had only grown in popularity since the Acts were passed; ever the mainstream rebels, they had quite a rabid fanbase on the Deep Web. Ari had never tried to catfish as a man before, but Billie Joe only had sons. Born in 1998, Jakob was only four years older than her in real life, and she had studied him for the past two years as practice, and also as a backup in case she ever needed a big haul.
Well, she certainly needed one now.
Two days into her endeavor, she felt more stressed than ever. The rush of the game was more overwhelming than fun with such high stakes. She spent all her free time attempting to roleplay in her head, wondering exactly how Jakob would react in any given situation. It got to the point that she was dreaming about him, and not in a pleasant way.
But it was working. So far, she had befriended three different potential victims on various band sites, and one was even sending her selfies already. She had some recent shots of Jakob that she had screencapped from a public appearance he’d made a few weeks earlier, and she was planning to send them as proof of identity in a few hours. But the selfies were highly important to Ari, as she could feed them through a bootleg software program that would run facial recognition and give Ari proof that her targets were real people.
She focused on the most eager of her new contacts. It was a girl by the name of Sara, 18 years old, self-proclaimed Green Day mega-fan from Arizona. They’d been chatting constantly since Ari first started posting in this particular forum, and Sara was eager to please. Even better, Sara made it clear she didn’t get along with her parents, a trait Ari found to be shared among most of the young fans she encountered. Ari’s software gave her proof that Sara was a real person, and her parents were quite wealthy – they owned a chain of supermarkets throughout the entire southwest. Sara was a prime target: young, rich, and desperate for attention. As long as she could keep up the ruse, all Ari needed to do was convince Sara to hack her parents’ computer and bank account, and then Aro would be home free.
Ari figured she could do it in three more days. This was a much quicker timeline than any other con Ari had pulled, but she didn’t have any time to spare. She could only hope that Sara was as stupid as she acted.
Ari laid out her timeline: after tonight, Sara should believe she was really Jakob, and then maintaining the cover wouldn’t be too hard. It would take at least another day to convince Sara that Jakob really, really needed her to do this, then one more to teach Sara how to hack, and finally a third day to secure the money, sever ties, and disappear.
Ari still hadn’t heard any more from Aro or the authorities. They were supposed to offer him a phone call, but he wasn’t stupid enough to try her cell. It would be too easy for the authorities to monitor the call, or at least record the number. And they probably suspected that she was involved in the same business as her brother, or at least in some form of illicit activity.
They were right, of course.
That evening came and went and Ari successfully passed along the stills of Jakob as real selfies. Sara was more intrigued than ever, and Ari’s plan was on schedule. She almost felt bad for this one, really. Sara seemed to be a genuinely nice girl, and this could ruin her future. Her parents would be furious that she’d stolen money from them, and they could easily turn her in to the authorities. And, of course, “Jakob” wouldn’t be there to defend her.
But Ari couldn’t worry about that now; she had a brother to rescue.
Another day and sleepless night passed. Sara was still playing into Ari’s hand. The unsuspecting girl had agreed to help Jakob out; Ari spun a sob story about Jakob and his older brother, Joseph, accidentally breaking one of their father’s expensive vintage guitars, and needing the cash to replace it before their dad found out. He’d repay Sara, of course, the moment he could, but Jakob needed the money now, and Sara was his only hope.
The only problem with the situation was that Sara wanted to meet.
This wasn’t the first time someone wanted to meet up with Ari’s catfish persona. She had managed to put it off before, but it was a sign that she should start the process of abandoning that victim (and possibly the persona entirely). Some were understanding of Ari’s caution in this day and age, but often the young and the impulsive – the ones like Sara – were eager to throw caution to the wind. Ari could usually gently manipulate them away from that urge, but not always. Unfortunately Sara fell into the category of young, impulsive, and stubborn.
I want to help you, J. I do. I just need to know you really care about me, Sara had just typed in their private chat.
You’re so amazing, I wish I could, Ari wrote back. But you know how hard it is for me. People recognize me everywhere. I can’t risk it.
Not even for me?
Ari’s cursor blinked in the chatbox. How should she handle this? Continue laying on the flattery and hoping Sara understood? Agreeing and jeopardizing the entire mission? It all seemed so risky. Ari didn’t want to tip her hand, but she also really needed Sara to trust her. Immediately.
Sighing, Ari made a decision.
Okay, let’s meet, she wrote. But after you get the money. Then, if it’s not really me, you don’t have to give it to me.
A pause.
Okay, J. How do I do it?
Ari would worry about the meeting after she walked Sara through the hack.
It took most of the next 24 hours to get Sara proficient enough to do learn the hack and steal the money. She lived in western Arizona, and Ari in southern California, so they agreed to meet at a Cracker Barrel on the state line.
Ari’s plan mostly consisted of snatching Sara’s laptop when she was looking around for Jakob to show up. It wasn’t a great plan, but Ari only had two more days to get the money back to Aro. She couldn’t afford any more delay.
She rented a car with a fake ID and hurried off. Once she arrived, Ari settled in a back booth and waited, sipping on mediocre coffee. Right on time, a young woman with dark hair and a backpack walked in, looked around, and sat at a table in the corner.
Go time, thought Ari, steeling herself.
She had barely approached the table when Sara’s head whipped up. Ari froze.
“Sit down,” hissed Sara.
With no other option, Ari sat down gingerly in the chair across from Sara.
“Nice to finally meet you, Jakob,” Sara said.
Ari’s façade wavered. “How did you know it was me?”
“Are you kidding?” Sara laughed. “You should have picked someone else, sweetheart. Jakob Danger Armstrong is my cousin. I knew from the start you weren’t him. But I wanted to know what you were up to, so I played along.”
“Did you tell?” bit out Ari. She felt fury, and panic, and so much fear.
“Certainly not the authorities,” Sara raised one eyebrow. “But my family, yes. And we want to know why you did this.”
“I had to,” Ari said quickly, latching on to the opportunity to explain and maybe salvage the scenario. “I’ve been catfishing for a while, and it was the only way I could get a lot of money at once. It’s to save my brother, he’s been taken.”
“Wow, that sucks,” said Sara, unimpressed.
Ari faltered. “Yeah, it does.”
“All right, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Sara said, settling back into her seat. “My parents have been in on this the whole time, and they don’t need the cash. We’ll help you save your brother. But in return…”
“What do you want?”
Sara waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, nothing much. Just your services in helping my family take down the government.”
“That’s…they’ll kill you!”
Sara shrugged. “My family is powerful. The supermarkets we own are a front, and my parents have been running Deep Web operations for nearly a decade. It’s time I pitched in, and I need people to do my dirty work. Your brother can work for me too, once we get him out of jail.”
Ari gaped. This had gone about as far south as she could possibly have imagined. And of course, Sara wasn’t going to give her any way out of this.
“So, what do you say, Ari Winters?”
Ari’s blood ran cold. Her options were limited, and there was nowhere to run.
“Deal.”
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