Her Last Tomorrow by Adam Croft

dining room chair was the only incongruity in this place of flashing lights and high technology. He had four flatscreen monitors, two side by side with another two on top, leaning forward slightly to provide a nice curved effect.
    ‘That’s bad that they’ve not given you your laptop back yet,’ Alan says, rummaging in a cupboard.
    ‘Yeah, tell me about it. I’m going stir crazy not being able to write, too. It’s the only thing keeping me distracted at the moment.’
    ‘I can imagine, man,’ Alan replies. His upbringing had been very middle class, but he still had a bizarre manner of using colloquialisms and street talk which jarred with his voice. ‘We’ve all got to have our creative outlets, you know what I mean? Ah, here we are.’ Alan emerged from the cupboard with a black laptop, the power cable wrapped around it.
    ‘Used to be my baby, this one. Quad-core Sandy Bridge processor and Radeon HD graphics. What a beaut. Getting on a bit now, but still good. Don’t worry about rushing it back to me, I don’t use it any more.’
    ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Actually, do you reckon I could get some work done here for a bit? It’s like a mad house back at mine,’ I lie. ‘Phone going every five minutes and journalists knocking on the door. Just be nice to get back in the zone, you know?’
    ‘Yeah, sure, no probs,’ he says, slapping me on the back. ‘Sit yourself downstairs at the dining room table if you like. Probably get some peace and quiet down there.’
    ‘Actually, you might be able to help me,’ I say, cradling the laptop under my armpit. ‘I’m trying to write a cyber thriller. I’ve got a character who’s meant to be one of these shady online arms and drugs traders on the dark web. I don’t want to do too much poking around for obvious reasons, but I’d like to at least get the technical side of things right. Reckon you could run me through the basics?’
    ‘Course. It’s actually pretty simple,’ he says, grabbing the laptop from me and flipping open the lid before switching it on. ‘This has already got TOR on it, if I remember rightly. It stands for The Onion Router. It’s basically a browser you can use to access the dark web. They called it that because it creates layers of different connections around your browsing, to mask who you actually are and where you’re connecting from.’
    ‘And people use this for trading illegal stuff, right?’ I ask.
    ‘They sure do. It’s all kept pretty untraceable, especially when they use Bitcoin as their currency. It’s a digital currency so there aren’t any registered bank accounts or anything. Keeps it all anonymous and more or less untraceable.’
    ‘That’s mad,’ I say, smiling and pretending that I don’t already know this and am truly amazed.
    ‘Yeah, totally. There are these places like the Silk Road, which is basically like an illegal version of eBay, where people just sell drugs and guns and people’s credit card details and stuff.’
    ‘Wasn’t that shut down? I thought I saw something on the news.’
    Alan laughs. ‘Nothing’s ever shut down on the dark web. It’s a cat and mouse game, man. They shut it down, someone opens it again in a different place. No problem.’
    ‘Crazy,’ I say. ‘What other stuff do people do with it? I mean, if they’re trading stolen credit cards and guns and stuff, surely the sky’s the limit for these sorts of people?’
    ‘Yeah, totally. There’s some really fucked up shit. If you thought the internet was bad, the dark web is something else. If you think of the most fucked up thing you can think of on the internet, that’s basically pre-watershed compared to this shit.’
    ‘How’s it policed?’ I ask casually.
    ‘It isn’t really. Well, I mean there’s obviously coppers on there, knocking about trying to get information on who some of these people are but the ones who are really careful can’t be identified. That’s the beauty of the dark web — you can only ever really