Read Online The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers - Free Book Online

course he knew Jeremy’s home address now too. He signed his message “Anonymous.” He smiled, thinking that Jeremy would assume he’d been hacked by someone from the infamous group.
    That was fun. He’d missed doing stuff like this.
    Now to get down to his real business.
    First, he launched a secure web browser and ran a search for the latest information on the debate. It looked like Courtney was still sitting on her blog post, but media was now buzzing about the suicide. Max knew it was inevitable the story would come out eventually—how long could they keep an auditorium full of teenagers from sharing information online? Yet there was still no public video footage of those final seconds of Evan’s video.
    Agent Kwon was quoted as saying, “We’re following up on some promising leads. Right now, we’re focused on finding out who STOP was.”
    But since Max was clearly one of their promising leads—perhaps their only one—they had to know that Evan was STOP. Had they found his body yet?
    Kwon hadn’t said anything about investigating the meaning behind STOP’s message, which left it to Max.
    He launched a new tab and opened Panjea, while running more searches in other tabs for “silence of six,” “Clancy Tooms,” and “Angela Lovett.” He switched between them all, soaking in whatever information he could.
    The only hits on “silence of six” were articles about the debate, which all showed the same short clip of Evan’s question, “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”
    Commenters on the blogs were wondering if the phrase literally referred to six people who had been silenced, whatever that meant, or if there was someone or something named “Six,” or some organization with a similar-sounding acronym that was “silent,” as in secret. Someone pointed out that STOP was a hacker, and “SICS” was internet slang for “Sitting in Chair Snickering”—suggesting he had posted the video “4 the lulz.”
    If they had seen the video’s dark and graphic finale, no one would think it was a joke.
    The debate had ended prematurely, but it had been nearly over anyway; most pundits declared it a win for Lovett, mirroring overwhelming online sentiment in her favor. Senator Tooms’s team tried to spin STOP’s interruption as another attack against Tooms by Dramatis Personai.
    Governor Lovett had opted to issue a simple, personal apology for the debate being disrupted. She invited anyone with questions or concerns to participate in her Ask Me Anything beginning at five o’clock Pacific time in the Panjea forum, promising that she would answer as much as she could in an hour.
    Max collapsed the other tabs and returned to Panjea. To find out what “the silence of six” was, he had to get into Evan’s head—which was all stored online. His friend was brilliant when it came to computers, and he referred to off-line storage and the cloud to host his brain. His hard drives and online backups were now all that was left of Evan.
    And those were just as inaccessible as he was. Of course his accounts were too secure for Max to guess the passphrases, and he struck out with the characters from Evan’s text message as well.
    He browsed Evan’s public Panjea pages, but Evan hadn’t made any notes since May, or he had purged them. There could be a clue buried deep in his pages of notes, but Max didn’t have the time to go chasing ghosts right now.
    Ghosts.
    There was one last place Max could check online to see if anyone knew anything about Evan’s plan—if he could find his way back there. As far as most people knew, it didn’t exist.
    Max typed in an IP address he hadn’t visited in over a year. For a while, this site had been his whole world, but now it just seemed like a tiny part of it.
    He was in. The address for the hidden hacker chat group was still alive in the so-called “Deep Web,” the intricate network of unpublished IP addresses on the internet. No search