I was lying on my bed late one Friday evening, scrolling through my phone.

A pile of schoolbooks and papers sat in the corner of my room and,

although I had a mind-numbing amount of work to do, I refused to start that night.

I was in the middle of a video about a golden retriever, saving a baby from a fox when Dylan,

my best friend, FaceTimed me. I accepted, and an image of Dylan appeared.

His face was washed out with the harsh light of his computer screen.

His phone appeared to be propped up behind his keyboard.

He said,

I was watching a dog save a kid, but you interrupted that.

Dude, I don't want to scroll through all the drugs people can buy on the dark web right now.

It gets old. A few months prior, Dylan and I had tried our hand at exploring

the dark web. We did the research, downloaded the necessary browser, and started our dive into

the most mysterious corners of the internet. At first, we were disappointed.

The dark web was nothing like what people had described it to be, at least not at first glance.

It just looked like a shittier version of the internet, with more broken links and useless

information. Then, we did a little more research, and learned how to find the more interesting stuff.

We had no interest in the horrifying videos people had talked about. In fact, we took care to

stay away from anything like that. The furthest we ever came down the dim path was to a site called

The Silk Road. This was a dark net black market. Here, you could buy almost any illegal thing

imaginable, but the main commodities were drugs and weapons. At first, we were excited by the novelty

of it all, pumped full of adrenaline from knowing that we were a few clicks away from having something

we shouldn't. Of course, we would never actually buy anything. We were just curious to see what

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