The Undernet
The dark half of the net. Same cables, same protocols, and completely out of sight — you do not browse to it, you get onto it, and getting onto it is a skill, a contact, or both.
The Undernet is part of the net, in the way the dark web is part of the internet: it is not a second network on separate infrastructure, it is a layer riding on the ordinary one. The traffic goes over the same relays that carry the Feed. What makes it the Undernet is that nothing on it advertises — relays that do not announce themselves, nodes that move, addresses passed by hand, and no index anywhere that will lead you in.
So it is invisible rather than distant. Everyone knows it exists, most people have never been on it, and the ones who have do not discuss it on the Feed.
Two things live here — the nodes, where people claim things, and the market, where people hire.
What is on it
| What you find | |
|---|---|
| Nodes | Where the Undernet talks — leaks, wiretaps, whistleblowers, hobbyists and cranks, all posting to the same places |
| The Board | Work. Jobs open, jobs taken, jobs nobody wanted |
How the nodes behave
- Threads fork by physics. A discussion on two worlds is two discussions, and when the light catches up they merge into something neither side wrote. Duplicate posts, contradictory edits, and arguments with people who have not read the reply yet are normal
- Reputation is local and gameable. A poster with standing on one node is nobody on another
- The good stuff is indistinguishable from the bad stuff at the moment you read it. No amount of skill fixes it — skill gets you in, not right
- Dates are mostly nines (see Timekeeping). Anything genuinely sensitive arrives with no provable timestamp, which is exactly what a fabrication also looks like
The Undernet is not the truth tier. It is the claims tier. Everything on it is someone asserting something, and the assertion is real whether or not the content is.
The contract market
Work is posted here because work posted anywhere else is licensed, insured, and taxed. A job on the Undernet board has no client name on it until someone takes it, and often not then.
Related
- The Net — the lit half of the same network, and what it does not carry
- The Compendium — the articles the nodes spend their time contradicting
- AstraCore — owns the cables this runs on, and has never said so
Status
Reachable, deniable, and the only place the Sphere argues with itself in public.