CreepyPasta Story Night

Perfection

So like every other edgy, bored teenager during the peak years of Internet freedom, I got myself into some stuff I had no business poking around in. People talk about the glory days, when Internet anonymity was real and you could do all kinds of illegal things, but those people are full of shit. Anonymity, online or otherwise, is a fucking joke. I learned that the hard way the summer I graduated from high school.

I was held back in the third grade after a really serious illness kept me hospitalized for almost six months, so my friends graduated the year before me. My senior year sucked, I was alone and it was too late to make new friends, so I skipped a lot of classes and spent most of my time online playing games and talking to my friends through AIM. It was actually a really dark period of my life that I try not to think about too much, and because I haven't ever tried to repeat my deep web exploration I've forgotten a lot of the stuff I did. I do remember, though, that it was my friend Brian who got me into deep web exploration.

We were all obsessed with 4chan, /b/ specifically, and an anon had taught him how to use Tor safely. He'd been mentioning it for a while and I got curious. I asked him about it and he made it sound like a utopia for people like us, who were tech savvy and, well, nerdy. You could find anything, he said. Any porn you could imagine was yours for the viewing. There were sites offering drugs, which you could purchase and have delivered anywhere in the world. He'd been a part of a few raids too, and I admit it all sounded like a lot of fun. So I downloaded Tor and he taught me how to access the hidden Wiki and some other neat sites. It ended up taking over my life. It was like being a kid in a candy store. Suddenly I had access to unlimited movies, games, porn, information of any kind. I stayed away from the really nasty sites, like Violent Desires and anything that had even the slightest hint of containing child porn. Of course, it's impossible to avoid that kind of thing down there, and I saw a fair share. If I'm being honest, it never bothered me much. Neither did all of the very graphic gore. I'm not ill-adjusted or anything, but I've never liked kids much and I'd long since been desensitized by gore. I made it a point to report what I could and move on but it never stuck with me.

After the school year ended I had three months to pass before going off to college, and I basically became a shut-in. I spent almost all my time hopping from site to site, seeing what was down there. Most of it was just back-doors to existing sites, but it was still fun to fuck around with things and be a general asshole. I still talked to my friends but they'd moved on to WoW and Brian in particular spent less time on the deep web than I did. However, one evening he messaged me and told me he'd found a way to view sites based on location. I have no idea how he did this and if he told me I quickly forgot. I assume it was some kind of script, but maybe that's not right. Either way, he showed me how to use it and I started poking around sites that were registered in my state. Most weren't anywhere close to me, so I was just opening tabs, browsing quickly, and moving on. Eventually I came across a site that was registered to someone about two hours from me and I opened the page.

Whoever had created the site didn't know much about design. The layout was wonky and incredibly ugly, and it took me a while to figure out how to navigate around. The links were the same color as the background, which was just a black screen with the words '#1 Devotee' repeating over and over, and highlighting had been disabled, so I had to tab to find any of the links. One took me to a chat that was very active, with people posting every couple of seconds. The usernames were all generic male names, like Brad or Tim, and they were all talking about someone they called 'Perfection.' It was really bizarre. I read the chat for a while, and literally all anyone talked about was how amazing Perfection was and how they admired everything he did. I wondered if I'd come across some kind of weird community that idolized a celebrity. It made me laugh a little, so I kept poking around while keeping the chat open in a separate window.