The first time I saw the old machine was when Benny’s father gave Benny a lecture while standing in the doorway of his study. It was already a relic then, a heap of beige plastic from a bygone era. The monitor was a beige box with a screen made of thick glass. It must have weighed a ton. It sat on a big beige case that I was told was its thinking guts. Peripherals included a keyboard, a mouse, and most interestingly: an old rotary phone.

  The phone was not a flat screened supercomputer the way the phones of today are. It was a simple speaker and receiver, with a rotating dial instead of buttons. Technically it was capable of making calls, but this was not its purpose

  Its true purpose was to make communication between the internet and the old machine possible. It did this through the magic of sound. According to Benny, who heard it from his father, the data from the internet came in the form of audible sound. You would “call” the internet, and then place the phone on a special stand so that it could translate the sound into something the old machine could actually understand.

  My imagination stirred at the idea of “hearing” the internet. I could put something tangible to the invisible force that allowed me to access the world’s knowledge, or chat with friends on the other side of the country. Benny probably more than me. He lived with the damn thing.

  Thing is though, his dad said it was off limits.

  As much as we wanted to hear the internet, Benny’s father would not have it. His study was entirely forbidden to us, and on the few occasions when he had allowed us entry to give us a word of sage advice or to admonish us for childish antics, he would use himself as a physical barrier between us and the old machine. His physical language was such that neither Benny or I had ever thought to ask for permission. Neither of us believed he would even consider the idea, and the most likely outcome would be that he would make it all that much harder to do so behind his back.

  So we waited. Bided our time. Time being the one resource that kids in abundance that adults didn’t. Eventually, our patience paid off.

  It happened on a very unusual day in Benny’s house. Usually it was Benny’s mother who kept the house clean and made all the meals, but outstanding circumstances meant that she was forced to take the day off. If I’m remembering it right, it was because something happened to Benny’s maternal grandmother, and his mom had to go help her out. But that’s neither here nor there. The important thing is that Benny’s father had to take over the daily run of the house. Part of that was buying the groceries for that night's dinner, so here was a rare moment where the house and the study would be left completely unattended.

  The moment we heard his father’s car leave the driveway, we went into action.

  The door to his father’s study, where the old machine was kept, was locked, but we had prepared for this. At first, Benny had tried looking for where his father kept his keys, which as it would turn out, was always on his person. He even took it with him in the shower. You would think that would be that, but Benny was smart, observant, he learned that every door in his house, including the study door, had the same exact lock. All he had to do was learn to pick it, which he did so by practicing on his own bedroom door. He was able to get the study door open just as fast as if we had had a key.

  We threw the door open, and perched on the desk, was the old machine, in all its pristine beige glory.

  It sat there, decades old at least, and yet somehow it almost seemed new. At the time I thought Benny’s father must have taken very good care of it.

  As Benny and I approached the thing, we found ourselves being wary of it, like it was a dangerous animal. The black abyss of its thick glass screen was like the giant dark eye of a predator, and as we neared it I felt a kind of pressure in my head that came in and out, like breathing. The pressure was such that you could feel it in the base of your skull, and much more lightly, around your head and in your ears.

  “C’mon,” said Benny, his voice shaking, summoning enough bravado to finally touch the thing. He jumped onto his father’s chair, and reached for the chunk beige phone on the desk, bringing it to his ear.

  Apparently, while the screen had been turned off, the phone had been left on a call to the net, and had been feeding information into the computer before Benny ripped it off its stand. I only guessed this much, because as soon as Benny had put the thing to his ear, his eyes had gone wide. His face lost color, and for a moment I thought he might keel over, but then his face scrunched up with joy.

  “Ooh!” he said, smiling. “That’s creepy!”

  He held it to his ear like that for a minute or so, wrinkling his nose from time to time before smiling again and throwing me a conspiratorial smirk. His giddy enthusiasm, despite the sound being what he called “creepy” seemed to calm me down some. Benny always had a way of doing that to me. Suddenly I was excited. He saw this, and offered me his place on his father’s seat.

  “Here,” he said, still smirking. “It’s terrible!”

  I took his place on the seat, and picked up the phone. It was heavier than I expected. Heavier than any smart phone I had ever held. There was a cord that attached it to the communication stand, which added some heft to it. I imagined it felt like picking up the meaty tail of a crocodile or a komodo dragon. I felt a sudden hesitation, but Benny was still brimming with joy, goading me to have a listen.

  I put the phone to my ear, and heard whispers which I could barely understand, but worst of all, I felt their hot breaths on my ear. I yelped in surprise, dropping the hunk of plastic as my body recoiled away from it. The whispers had been quiet, yes, and nearly unintelligible, nearly.

  The whispers had painted a picture to me, somehow, that was clearer than a dream, but not as vivid as a movie. It came in flashes. A sticky red room. A friend, who was here and not here. And the old machine in a new home, with a willing thrall taking care of it.

  You would think that that would have been the most terrifying thing for me in that moment, but the truth was I was still a child, and something far, far scarier had just appeared. We had been caught.

  Benny’s father stood in the doorway, and he looked pissed.

  It is difficult to speak ill of the dead, which is funny, because it’s not like they care, but that’s just the way it is. Benny’s father had always been a kind man, and if not a kind man, then a dutiful father, but on occasion there was a glint of something sinister behind his eyes. It appeared sporadically, mostly during conversations with other adults. Somewhere in the middle of a conversation between the tragic loss of a child in another state or several towns over, or in discussing the statistic and calculus of death such as a mass shooting, that furtive sparkle behind his eye would manifest, and he would become, for a fraction of a second, someone else. That spark was there now, and it was aimed at me.

  Benny’s father saw that I had had the phone in my hand. He saw Benny at my feet, and that spark behind his eye turned into a barely controlled inferno. I never imagined I would see so much hatred directed at me.

  “Benjamin,” said Benny’s father in a deathly calm voice, in a heavily restrained voice. “Please tell me this isn’t what it looks like. Because it looks like your friend here convinced you to break into my study.”

  “He didn’t, dad, he didn’t,” answered Benny. “It– It was my idea.”

  Benny was beginning to stutter, and seeing his father in such a maddened state, attempted to take the entire blame on himself to spare me his father’s wrath.

  Benny’s father looked at me, and sighed. I wasn’t off the hook, but I was a problem for later. Or never, considering what happened a little later.

  His attention now completely on his child, Benny’s father knelt down in front of Benny, and with a face full of tears that was somehow scarier than his barely controlled rage, asked Benny if he had listened to the phone.

  “Please tell me you didn’t put that thing up to your ear,” he said, his voice shaking, his hands gripping tightly to Benny’s shoulders.

  “Of course not dad,” Benny lied, matching his father tear for tear now.

  Relief washed over his father’s face. He let go of Benny’s shoulders, and wrapped his arms around him, squeezing him tightly. Then his eyes settled on me, with renewed anger.

  “Get out,” he said quietly, I think barely managing to say without breaking into more tears. Then again, when I had found my ass rooted to the seat, he said it louder, “GET OUT!”

  I was still too stunned to move, even after the second shout, but then Benny’s father rose– with Benny still in his hands. The menace I felt. I bolted from the study, running past Benny and his father.

  I learned from Benny at school the next day that we weren’t allowed to play together anymore. Benny’s father didn’t even want to see me anywhere near him. It was ridiculous. We were neighbors for crying out loud! Benny was my best friend, who else was I going to play with? And for what? But it didn’t matter. Benny’s father had laid out the law, and Benny had to abide. At least we still had school. Benny’s father couldn’t dictate who he spoke to there.

  Benny and I sulked for that whole school day, unable to enjoy the little time we were going to have together. We sulked like that together at school for ages. And in this way, the strange whispers that we heard in the phone were almost forgotten, overshadowed by our forced separation.

  Every day after school I hoped and prayed that my exile from Benny’s home would end, and in a roundabout and terrible way, my prayers were answered.

  A year later, Benny was pulled from class, disappearing for a whole week. Later that day, when I came home, his house was cordoned off by yellow police tape, and there were people in plastic suits going in and out of his house.

  When I saw him again, Benny had somehow managed to age, terribly.

  The broken shell that had been Benny stumbled into class. He said nothing, and looked at no one. It wasn’t until lunch period that I finally got anything out of him, and when I did, I don’t think I could ever have been ready to hear it.

  That day that Benny had been pulled out of class was the day that his mother had been arrested for the murder of his father. She was found in his study, and according to police, was basically mid act. How the police had managed to interrupt what had seemingly been a crime of passion in progress was a small mystery that was not revealed to Benny personally, but a news report later confirmed that it had been an anonymous online tip that had sent police to Benny’s home.

  Benny’s mother, oddly enough, claimed she was innocent all the way to the end, but the fact that she had been witnessed by police in the middle of committing the act made it indefensible. Her trajectory to the lethal injection room was one of the swiftest the state had ever seen.

  It was tragic. Benny was out both parents, and it was all the more tragic because Benny didn’t have any other family. His last grandparent had passed the year prior. He was due to go into foster care, but God bless my parents, because they took him in. Benny got to stay in town, with a family that loved him nearly as much as his own.

  Benny stayed in my life, it was the reverse of what had happened the year prior when his father had found us listening to the internet on the old machine. Now Benny was in my life more than ever, but also not.

  Physically he was there. Benny and I shared a room, and we hung out all the time. Mentally, or perhaps even spiritually, Benny just wasn’t with me anymore. His soul had left him.

  It wasn’t until later, much later, years later really, when Benny and I were well into our teens that I felt like I saw the real him again. His home, and everything in it, the things that had once been his father’s, were his. He’d never cared much about that. He’d never even mentioned his not exactly meager inheritance beyond the vague idea that he supposed he would move into his old home once he became an adult. Other than that he made no mention of his old home, which sat dim and forgotten next to mine. He hadn’t so much as stepped inside of it since he left for school on the day of the murder.

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  But one day, on the porch, while the sun was beginning to die on the horizon, Benny asked me if I would go into his old house with him. We were pushing seventeen, and college bound so I supposed at the time that he was seeking a kind of closure. Despite the vast chasm that Benny’s depression had carved between us, I wanted to be there for my best friend and adopted brother, so I agreed to go along with him.

  Once we were at his old doorstep, Benny produced a small, unopened, envelope. He tore it open, and produced his father’s old keys.

  I watched him do this and felt a pang in my heart that was something more than sadness. I didn’t have a name for it. I just knew that it was coming from Benny. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Benny looking behind him to see me, and flashing me the barest hint of a smile that was filled with the same sadness that panged in my chest a moment ago. It was the tiniest crease on the corner of his mouth, but it broke me. That crease was the most genuine thing I’d gotten from him in years.

  I wish I had been brave enough to cry, but I swallowed those tears. Drowned out all emotion, because I thought that was what the burgeoning man I wanted to become would have done.

  We entered the house, which was dark and smelled awful. There was a rot in there that had settled into the very foundation.

  “Augh,” I let out, “what is that?”

  “I– Uhm… I don’t now.” That’s what he said, but something told me that he did know. He just didn’t want to say it out loud for some reason.

  In my role as supportive best friend, I still hadn’t asked why Benny had wanted to come back here. So I decided to do that then, but as he ascended up the stairs I knew there was only one destination he had in mind. His father’s study. The old machine.

  I kept my mouth shut, but I wonder sometimes if maybe I should have started protesting. I wonder if maybe I should have dragged Benny back out the door, kicking and screaming, but those are just what ifs and meaningless regrets. Even if I dragged him out then and there, so what? He would just come back without me. If I had barred him in any way he would just choose a different time and place, and he would be doing it alone. No. I had no choice. It was inevitable. There’s no stopping the inevitable. So I did nothing.

  We ascended up the stairs together. The smell of deep seeded rot grew heavier. It was in the stairs, in the walls, in wood and the furniture. Apart from the smell, everything looked normal, as if frozen in time. I could practically envision us running down the hallway playing tag.

  That changed in the study.

  Benny and I reached the door. Yellow police tape from when this was an active crime scene was still there. The rot was strongest here. Had the site of the murder never been cleaned?

  As Benny turned the knob I swallowed back some anxious energy, and stowed it away in the same place that I threw that soul breaking pang in my heart.

  Inside we found the desk, the books shelves, his father’s office chair. All of it was as it once was, except that now every inch of it was covered in a film of something that was muddy red. The sticky red room.

  There was only one part of the study that was– disturbingly –clean.

  The old machine.

  It sat perched on the desk, slumbering and waiting. It was pristine. Its comically mundane beige casing, and every piece and peripheral like the keyboard and attached phone were in mint condition. It was alien, how clean it was compared to everything else in the room.

  Benny took a heavy breath, and stepped forward. He approached the old machine, examining it in the dying light of the sun.

  “I’m going to need your help carrying this back home,” he said.

  This would have been my second opportunity to say “no”. I should have, but again, why? All it would mean was another trip or two for him on his lonesome, and then I would just be the friend that bailed out on him halfway through something that seemed must have been important for him. So I said “Okay.”

  We gathered up the odd ends of the old machine. Benny carried the monitor, and I carried the thinking guts, and between us we shared the weight of the peripherals.

  Once we were home, Benny got to work putting the thing back together. He seemed to fly into a manic fugue state. He worked rapidly to put the old machine together, connecting every odd end, beginning to sweat as he did so. His eyes became deranged, and then suddenly, with only the power cord left to plug in, he stopped.

  He stared into the black abyss of the old machine’s monitor, and did nothing for a long minute that stretched into half an hour. Benny put the power cord down and shoved it into a box. I didn’t question this. If anything I was relieved. I hadn’t realized it until just then, but as Benny was putting the thing together I had started to feel a deadly pressure building in the back of my skull. I didn’t dare ask why he stopped, worried that I might accidentally reignite his resolve.

  Together we chose to forget the old machine.

  Or so I thought.

  The last few months of our senior year passed, and they were the best months I’d had with Benny in a long long while. I think collecting that beige heap of plastic, that old machine, it had brought something to a close for him. Whether it was simple catharsis or something more I’ll never know, but I’ll cherish those last few months for the rest of my life. It was the last I’d ever see of him.

  With college came real distance, and although we kept in touch through video and text, we never met in person, the times just never lined up. Benny was his own man, and although it brought a small amount of heartbreak to my parents that their adoptive son never seemed to find the time to visit them, they were more than anything glad to see that he at least seemed to be enjoying life. That was definitely the facade he sold on social media.

  It was nearing the end of our first year at college that I got the first wisp that something was wrong with Benny. He sent me something, a file that I couldn’t open, in a format that I didn’t recognize. I thought it must be some kind of obscure meme, but when I couldn’t decipher it, I got a pit in my stomach and I sent him a brisk “wtf?”

  He never replied.

  It was the last of anything I would ever get from Benny personally. A few weeks later my parents contacted me to tell me that Benny had killed himself.

  What followed was a rapid procession of life. That I somehow managed to continue to turn in my school work for the next week or so, was a fact. That I then used the following fall break to attend Benny’s funeral was also true. Mixed in there was a meeting with a lawyer that let me know that I was the sole inheritor of Benny’s estate. This all happened, and I have a very superficial recollection of it all. But in truth I was half a ghost. My body– no –my soul, had gone into a form of catatonia. I became an unchanging statue, a rock in the ever flowing stream of life. Things happened, but they seemed to flow past me in a ceaseless stream of almost memories.

  On the last day of the fall semester, in a fit of pique depression, looking for something to occupy the void of my soul, I remembered the message that Benny had sent me. I redoubled my efforts to decipher the unknown file type, and scoured the internet for a decoder or playback device that would be able to read it for me. Eventually I stumbled on the answer. It was a type of sound file. With that information it was surprisingly simple to find an app to play it back.

  I brought the file over to my phone, and loaded it into the app, and hit play. What came out were whispers. I dropped my phone like it was made of hot iron. The phone clattered to the floor, but kept playing the whispers, which remained just at the edge of audibility no matter how far away I retreated from them.

  When it finished playing I was relieved. I also realized I had understood none of it. Unlike the whispers I had heard in my childhood, these had been unintelligible, and despite my fear, I tried them again. The whispers came again, but still I couldn’t understand them, but I knew a way that I could. The old machine.

  The next opportunity I got, I went home. I went back up to my room to look for the old machine, but of course it wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for a long time. Benny had taken it with him when he went his own way during college. I had to ask my parents to help me find it, and they directed me to the garage, where boxes of Benny’s old things were piled up. Things he had taken with him and things that he had acquired while he was away at college. The old machine was packed into one of those boxes, with a sticky note on the screen. A phone number, possibly left there by Benny himself.

  I took the box up to my old room and got to work putting the old machine back together. Slowly it came alive, and bit by bit I felt that dreadful pressure building in the base of my skull. As I connected the monitor to the thinking guts I felt a spark of awareness, as if I was suddenly in danger or being watched. As I connected the peripherals, the pressure around my skull grew heavier and I began to sweat. The feeling only intensified as I plugged the thing into the power, and it came to a pique when I finally connected the strange phone stand to the internet. It’s alive! Gods of all faith and creed, help me! It’s alive!

  I turned it on.

  The screen lit up, and I noticed that I’d forgotten to remove the sticky note that had been placed there. I ripped it off and crumpled it in my palm as I watched the old machine finish its startup sequence.

  I’m not sure what I expected. I certainly hadn’t expected it to feel so normal, or look so mundane. The operating system was definitely proprietary but other than that it felt no more alien than Windows, or Apple. Navigating it felt as natural as anything.

  I found the program that would allow me to interpret the whisper recording on my phone. It was the same one that would normally connect to the internet, except this time instead of letting the translator hear the bulky beige phone, I would put my smartphone up to the translator while the recording played. I did this, and for a few tense moments nothing seemed to happen, and then I noticed that something had been downloaded onto the desktop.

  The file was called “Dad(1)” and for a moment I felt like an idiot. The “(1)” appearing after the word “Dad” suggested that a version of this file was already downloaded, and of course it would be, this was probably where Benny had sent me the file from. I checked the now translated file and saw that it was a video. The thumbnail showed a man sitting at his desk.

  Benny’s dad.

  My hand trembled as it reached for the mouse, and clicked on the video.

  The video was a top down perspective of the study, and it started at 100, there was no buildup or context to what was happening on the screen. Benny’s father was skinning himself alive. The footage of it was grainy, and was twice as disturbing for it, because the more skin that Benny’s father peeled off the more grainy red pixels appeared on screen.

  It was difficult to tell how much of this Benny’s father was doing of his own volition. Heavily pixelated expressions of agony played on his face. He twisted and squirmed, he writhed in pain and appeared to yell into the ceiling as he striped reels of flesh from his arm, and then his legs, and then his chest, and on and on. I couldn’t look away. As much as I wanted to look away I couldn’t, I was forced to watch by my own horribly morbid fascination. God help me. No. God forgive me. I. could. Not. Look. Away.

  It was his father’s twisted and pained flailing that covered the study in blood, leaving the room red and sticky. How he produced so much blood, and in fact, how he had been able to remain conscious that whole time was a mystery to anyone. The act didn’t stop until a light appeared from offscreen, and then suddenly Benny’s mother barged into the study to see her screaming husband. He tried to skin her alive as well, but she fought back. They began to wrestle each other, slipping in the wet puddle of his blood. Soon the blood itself stopped being the worst thing on display, as the father’s viscera began to spill out of him, the membrane that had held it together inside his abdomen splitting open in the tussle. It was an awful scene, and still, I couldn’t look away.

  The fight continued like that for some time. With the two of them on the ground, fighting for control of the knife that the father had used to skin himself alive. Even with half the father spilt and spread around the room it was a hard won victory for Benny’s mother. She finally managed to wrestle the knife away from the dying man, and plunged it into his chest, just as shadows appeared from the direction of the doorway. The mother broke down as police aimed their guns at her, and then the video ended.

  “Did you like it?” appeared in text over the end of the video.

  “What the fuck?” I remember saying out loud.

  Why hadn’t Benny turned this in? I thought. His mom was dead, sure, but why not clear her name? Why hadn’t he told me straight away what he’d found? Why had he– I didn’t let myself ask that last question. Instead I unclenched my palm, and looked at the crumpled sticky note. If there was a logical answer to any of this, then maybe it was on the other end of that number. That’s what I told myself anyway.

  I put my phone away, and picked up the phone attached to the old machine. It took a few tries to get the method of dialing correct– I’d never used a rotary style phone before, and I didn’t know how to spin the wheel to “dial” the number that I needed, but I managed it. The phone rang for a bit, and then the whispers started to erupt from whatever black beyond I called.

  I placed the phone on the translator, and on the monitor, the desktop came alive. The old machine’s proprietary web browser opened and landed on a bare bones white webpage. It reminded me somewhat of a darkweb directory.

  The darkweb isn’t as difficult to navigate as you might think. The difference between a darkweb site and a regular one is that darkweb sites are unlisted, meaning they don’t show up on search engines, and often they require special browsers and specific URLs. Those URLs are usually kept on some kind of surface web directory. This looked a lot like that. A list of URLs ran down the bare bones page in a ladder of blue.

  They were hyperlinks, all of them, and one of them stood out to me immediately.

  “Do you want to see how he did it?” It read.

  It shouldn’t have freaked me out. There was no way that link could be talking about Benny, which is where my mind went first. There was simply no way.

  So I clicked it. And I guess… there was. Somehow there was a way.

  I won’t say what I saw. It wasn’t nearly as graphic as his father’s death. In that sense it wasn’t nearly as “interesting”, but even still I can’t bring myself to recount it. It’s too personal. In that way it was much much worse, so much worse. The look in his eyes… despair. There was something almost beautiful about it.

  No.

  There was something beautiful about it.

  At the end of the video, a familiar message popped up.

  “Did you like it?”

  A box beneath the video asked for a reply. I typed one in.

  “Do you want to see more?”

  Another box. Another reply.

  I saw more.