In many small towns of America, you’ll find the Internet is now run by the utility companies which might be the phone company, the electric company, or even the cable company but there was a time when we all dialed up to the web through independently owned internet service providers through our phone lines.

The web was in its infancy then. While people had been using homegrown bulletin board systems and peer-to-peer networks for years, a privileged few were running on satellite or the university networks. Being the secluded little town it was, the only chance at internet services in Sandcastle in the 90s was the use of the phone company.

Pete Downs thought it was a crime they were subjected to such isolation. He wanted to explore this strange new world of life. He wanted to bring the world wide web to Sandcastle in a way that no one had thought of. And when Pete Downs wanted something, he got it.

Typically in small towns, there are one or two families that pretty much own everything big. The Downs family owned much of the town including two restaurant franchises, a gas station, a small retail store, and of course the long-running Cravings thrift store which is how the family got started after people began leaving for bigger cities after the Gold Rush ended. They didn’t take their money and run, no. Marshall Downs was smarter than that. He offered to buy people’s goods and land for pennies on the dollar when they left and, knowing they would need to sell since the money flow had dried up.

From this, he built the little town, but it wasn’t without a trade of his soul. Marshall’s greed sold his soul for a huge ransom. For as long as he was peddling the old goods of evil, the possessed items of the past, his family would be allowed to prosper. And prosper his family did.

Pete knew nothing of his great grandfather’s deal with the devil. He only knew that carrying on the family legacy would do him well. Now Pete had one son that he barely knew that he would pass down the legacy to. He paid into his child support monthly but never knew the lad for he wanted nothing to do with family after the pain he suffered from his father.

Pete was a homely man. He stood roughly six foot tall with mousy gray hair even in his 20s. His overbite was extreme and when he looked at you, you could never tell how to look back because his lazy eye would decide to travel in whichever direction it wanted to take which was usually to the bottom right. When he walked, he leaned in a little to the right due to a bum leg he suffered from a fall at the water tower. Due to his drinking habits and dying liver, his belly protruded out from the rest of his body. People typically just dealt with him quickly because he made them nervous. No one could figure out why he hadn’t died yet because he looked like he was always about to croak over.

And with all of that, he could never find love. Pete met the mother of his son on the internet of all places–through the slow, monotonous trenches of dialup on a bulletin board system that had been converted from a dialup BBS to some strange website with no domain name. Similar to a deep website for those familiar with the Deep Web. People got there by typing in the IP address and port number 666, which was a running joke for the creators of the board.

For months they shared their lives through email and chat rooms. They passed pictures of themselves back and forth. Pictures that would make even a porn star blush. He thought she was a fake until one night they agreed to meet at the Sandcastle Inn by the Shores–a hotel owned by the Downs family.

Oh yes, the sordid tales of Sandcastle. But here, we don’t want to go off on a tangent of another story, now do we? Just know that Pete Downs finally realized the internet was far too slow and that he should capitalize on the market as it blossomed in the late 90s and the turn of the century for him, his son, and the family name.

Pete smiled as he installed the new router into the rack at the data center situated in the back of the Cravings Thriftstore. As remote as Sandcastle was to the world, he supplied them with efficient, fast internet service. What was once a VSAT dialup system through satellite now was a completely wireless service. Pete invested millions into placing towers in town to provide quality wireless, not just 4G like the cell companies promise, but a huge upgrade that was more akin to wired speeds. If people wanted 4G they could have it everywhere else, but as far as Sandcastle was concerned, he would put a tower wherever possible to create a huge network for his customers.

He then plugged in the second network router, this one far less known. The first network was connected to the backbone of the world but the second? It was Pete’s delight! The second did not connect to a DNS service nor was easily traceable by anyone. With one IP address that changed frequently and special software, you could get into Pete’s dark little world of the deep web. It didn’t take TOR or anything well known, it was Pete’s little gem that he created–a spinoff of the global network where he hosted porn sites, bootleg movies of original blockbusters, a few forums selling contraband, and other illegal material. He knew about most of the websites that infiltrated his system and some he turned a blind eye to while pretending not to know. He wanted no part of that world of the sick, disgusting perverts but knew if he brought them down they would bring him down.

Sitting down and ready to accept calls just in case anyone couldn’t figure out why the web was down for a few minutes, Pete opened up his browser and began to watch some movie he hi-jacked for his deep web customers from a movie website. The hair stood up on the back of his neck when as he watched a video of himself going into the shop. This was a video of Sandcastle and he was the main star.

The camera followed him into his shop where he sat behind the counter and ran the bills while people began to come in and buy trinkets and heirlooms from the past.

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