SSID by E.S. Raye

 

There it was again.

The Wi-Fi network with symbols for an SSID.

I’d tried connecting to it before, but the signal strength was so low, it always failed. During most classes it wouldn't appear at all, but those odd little symbols kept me sitting in the back corner of this dark lecture hall every week. Waiting. Hoping.

When it appeared again, I did what I always did—I clicked. After an agonizing pause and an endlessly spinning cursor, it connected. It took everything I had not to leap out of my chair in triumph. Even so, one or two of my more diligent classmates threw me a dirty look. I settled myself and opened “Network Properties” to see what I’d discovered.

It was a local network—one with no internet connection. But it was connected to the library database. With just a few clicks, I found what appeared to be backdoor access to the entire medical journal database—including restricted files usually unavailable to undergrads! It was everything I needed for my thesis, “Determining the Exact Moment of Death: Identification and Documentation of Complete Brain Activity Shutdown.” A bit morbid, maybe, but it took daring to get ahead in Miskatonic University’s medical program.

It was a subject I had been fascinated with since the accident left my sister an empty husk with a beating heart. The doctors called it “brain death,” but as long as she was on the ventilator, some force, some drive buried deep in that decaying flesh kept her heart pumping.

Where was the line between life and death, and just how malleable was it? Could it be bent? Twisted? Even broken?

Eager to begin exploring, I clicked the search field. In response, the network dropped out and the SSID vanished.

 

The faculty and staff denied the existence of the network. My biology professor claimed no one had ever mentioned it to her before. But I saw the shadow that fell over her features when I asked about it. She turned her back on me, trying to hide her reaction. When I prodded further, she made an excuse about grading papers and rushed me out of her office, locking the door behind me.

My roommate, on the other hand, had more information. Such as it was.

“It goes back to ‘99 or 2000 or something, when the university started digitizing the library,” she told me. “It was originally set up for scanned documents to be uploaded to the database. Long story short, they say the TA scanning the restricted material went crazy and took off into the Arkham Woods. They never found him. My uncle was here in ‘03. He says he knew a guy that asked their professor about the network. Two weeks later he was gone. The school said he dropped out, but…” She paused. “My uncle says the network’s cursed. Anyone that accesses it goes bat-crap crazy and disappears.”

Spare me.

I didn’t have time for curses; I was pre-med, for Chrissake. But her story did at least confirm where I should start: the library.

 

After weeks of searching the stacks with my phone held out like a Geiger counter, the network finally reappeared as I approached a dusty corner of the library basement. I followed the signal through a door hidden behind a haphazardly placed shelf and down a damp hallway.

Equally dank thoughts plagued my mind.

Was my sister truly gone, despite the beating in her chest? Could more have been done to bring her back from the brink? It was my mistake. My responsibility. Could more have been undone if the doctors had had a clearer understanding of the veil?

Finally, I came upon a long-forgotten microfiche room. The odd SSID glowed from my screen. At last, a full signal! I brushed about an inch of dust from a table, opened my laptop, and clicked to connect to the network. The cursor spun endlessly, until I was sure it wouldn’t work.

Suddenly, I was in.

The entirety of the university’s knowledge was at my fingertips. I was sure to find answers. Minutes melted into hours as I fell down the rabbit hole with only the glow from my screen to guide me. Anything that even remotely connected to brain activity at the moment of death went into the download queue.

As if you could even call it a queue. Decades of medical journals downloaded in an instant, at speeds I would not have expected from a system more than two decades old.

Soon it was as though the network knew what I was looking for, and it started giving it to me without a request. As the research came faster and faster, it grew darker and bent more towards the fringes of moral science.

My pulse quickened. My breath caught in my throat. My eyes, glued to the screen, strained against the urge to blink for fear of missing some macabre detail.

Finally, with an ear-splitting buzz, the flow of information came to a screeching halt. In its place, a warning glared at me from the screen:

The following Restricted Access Files have been quarantined for deletion due to ethically questionable methodologies and experimental practices.

My fingers hesitated; my cursor hovered over “Yes.” I swallowed hard and reminded myself I believed in science. I put my faith in things that could be proven, not occult technology or cursed Wi-Fi networks. Still, with my roommate’s words ringing in my ears, I faltered.

I shook away the ridiculous thought. It was preposterous. Crazy TAs, indeed! I reached forward to click “Yes,” but before my fingers could touch the trackpad, the cursor clicked on its own.

Once again, information flowed. Experiments, articles, and studies, performed by alumni of Miskatonic’s illustrious medical school and beyond. Unbidden, studies in torture, dismemberment, and eugenics rose to my screen—complete with grainy videos of the “participants.” In one, the pale body of a young man—adorned with the characteristic Y-incision of a postmortem—was injected with a glowing green liquid. His fingers twitched, tremors rocked the body, and his eyes fluttered open. I wanted to run back to the bright lights of the library’s reading room, but felt rooted to the chair like a new, permanent fixture in this long forgotten room.

I blinked, and my screen displayed an elderly woman as her cranium was sawed into. Her eyes were wide and glassy like a lamb before the slaughter. Her mouth quivered with a scream that never reached her lips. Somehow, she remained conscious as the top of her head fell away and clattered into a waiting tray. The exposed hemispheres of gray matter beat with her pulse as her face twisted with an unforgettable mix of agony, terror, and confusion.

The faceless doctors, careful to keep her eyes and optic nerves intact and attached, pulled her brain from her skull like a cork from a wine bottle, and placed it in a jar of bubbling amber liquid. Once it was sealed safely inside, the image zoomed in on one bobbing eyeball. As light fell on it, the pupil contracted. My body spasmed at the implication.

The browser chimed as a download began. The folder—named with the same form of esoteric symbols as the network itself—was immense. Its arcane file names flew by in a blur, and I understood.

All the answers I sought, and everything I deserved, was but a moment away.

 

© E.S. Raye 2024

_______________________________________________

E.S. RAYE

E.S. Raye was born in the Zeti Reticuli system and came to Earth as a young isopod with stars in his eyes. After quickly mastering the child-like dominant language of North America, he is now just showing off…

Okay, not really. But the real story is far more mundane.

E.S. Raye was actually born in California’s Bay Area. During high school, he moved from California to Southern New Hampshire.

Now living in southern Ontario, Canada with his amazingly patient wife, two cats, and one stubborn French bulldog, he is a reformed marketing and content writer that has decided to clean up his act and pursue his dream of making a living writing fiction.

Read the rest of his bio here esraye.com and find him on social media.