Chaos on CatNet Read online

  “This really is like the Catacombs,” Nell says. “But with more sin and less prayer.”

  “Is that the site you mentioned using at home?”

  “Yes. It’s the only social media my mother would allow. And it was a good way to talk to Glenys, the girl I told you about. But I wanted to ask you about the homework. Have you started the homework yet?”

  “No.” I drag it out of my backpack and take a look. I’m supposed to make a list of things I feel like I have a really solid handle on and things I don’t, and they’ve sent me home with a bunch of stapled paper checklists to help me think of stuff. It’s a mix of academic stuff and adulting skills.

  On the first page, I check off that I know how to cook—not that I’m a terrific cook, but I’ve compared notes with Rachel and Firestar, and I am a solidly adequate cook—but that I don’t know how to ride a bus, use a bank, visit a doctor, or file taxes. I wonder if my mother ever filed taxes when we were on the run and, if not, if she’s discussed that with her lawyer.

  In the chat room, Nell asks, “Are you filling it out honestly?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to lie. “Yes,” I say. “So far, I know how to cook and unclog a toilet, and other than that, I’m 100 percent pathetic. How about you?”

  “I know how to drive. But I don’t have a license.”

  “Same, actually.” I kind of shouldn’t know how to drive: I don’t even have a learner’s permit and was taught to drive illegally by Rachel. Nell would probably think that was cool.

  “Thing Two said my father should take me in to get my license, but Thing One says it would push up our insurance rates, and now there’s a fight going.”

  “Who do you think is going to win?”

  “Thing One. Because my father would have to take me in to get my license, and if in doubt, he just doesn’t do anything.”

  “Where’s their house?” I ask, and look up the address she gives me. “Do you want to come over here to do your homework? It’s not that far. You could walk. I could even show you how to plunge a toilet and then you’d be able to check one more thing off.”

  “It’s dark out.”

  “It’s up to you.” Should walking in the city after dark scare me? I’ve spent years climbing out my bedroom window to explore our towns after midnight, but Minneapolis is A CITY, so maybe I should be worried? But the sun goes down before five this time of year.

  “I’m going to see if I can get Thing One to give me a ride. See you in a minute!”

  I immediately wonder if I should have asked my mother’s permission. I knock on her door. “I’m having a classmate over,” I say.

  I tried to sound casual, but she’s on her feet instantly. “Do you need anything? Should I run out for soda? Order pizza?”

  “No! I don’t need anything.”

  She stares at me for a minute and then nods and says, “I’ll check in when it gets closer to dinnertime.” And closes her door again.

  It’s the first time since Utah I’ve had a friend over, I realize, and she’s trying too hard to be normal.

  Take it from me: trying to be normal, trying really hard to be normal, is an express ticket to absolute weirdness.

  While I wait, I take a look at the other site Nell mentioned, the Catacombs, because I’m kind of curious about whether her church is, in fact, totally a cult. I have to register to look around, so I tell it my name is Arabella Dinglehoffer, although I admit to living in Minneapolis. I don’t have to cross against the light (or pretend I did) to take a look around. It really does have a similar interface to the Mischief Elves but with groups you can join that are all called things like Tribulation Teams Central and Prepping 101.

  I hear a car idling outside and look out to see Nell getting out of a rusty, very small hatchback. Nell walks quickly away from the car and up the steps. She’s so tense. It’s weird how much tension I can see even looking down from above. The car waits until I’ve opened the front door and greeted Nell before pulling away. I try to catch a glimpse of the driver, wondering if it’s Thing One or one of the others.

  “I don’t know how people live in cities,” Nell says. “It took us almost as long to get here in the car as it would have walking. Thing Three said this was normal traffic this time of day.”

  “If you’d walked, you could have crossed against a light,” I say.

  “Did you really actually do it?” she asks.

  “I did. And it gave me a gold star for not cheating.”

  She gives me a sideways look. “Huh. I wonder if I should have cheated less in the Catacombs.”

  “Does the Catacombs give you missions, too?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Bible verse memorizations, exercise, prayer. I mostly just checked off that I did them whether I did or not, unless it was something my mom was checking up on. The Elf site just gave me a mission that’s Make your space your own, which is super weird, actually, because did I tell you about my room?”

  “No?”

  “It’s a huge house, but there are four adults living in it. So Thing Two moved out of her art studio to make space for me, and the walls are the exact same shade of yellow as hot dog mustard. Everyone talked about how we could paint it, but you only paint if you’re staying, and I’m definitely going back to Lake Sadie to live with my mom once they find her.”

  “Right.”

  “But now I’ve got this mission.”

  “Well, you could paint, then,” I say.

  “But painting is a whole thing. You have to move the furniture and cover everything up and there’s stuff with tape and they will probably want me to look at paint chips.”

  “I mean you could just fake the mission,” I say. “Like you did with the Christian site.”

  She bites her lip quietly for a second. “Now I’m wondering if it knew I was cheating,” she says. “Somehow. Because my missions never got very interesting. And I did not get a gold star from the elves in the app.”

  “Does it matter if it knows you’re cheating?”

  She lowers her eyes and mumbles, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, worst case, you have a room that’s not mustard yellow anymore. What color do you want?”

  “Blue, I guess. Some sort of sky blue.”

  I have literally never picked a color for a room, and I find myself looking around at the apartment, speculatively. Are we allowed to paint? Mostly the walls in our many apartments have been white and beige, although I do remember the one Mom called the Circus House where every room was something incredibly bright. My room in that house was sort of an electric lime. By two weeks into our stay there, I wasn’t even noticing the colors anymore.

  We sit down with the questionnaires and work for a while. I feel like I’m on steadier ground when we get to academics. As promised, I show Nell how to plunge a toilet, and she checks that one off.

  “Do you maybe want to come over to my house tomorrow?” she asks. When I look up, her cheeks have turned sort of pink, and she adds, “That way, you could see I’m telling the absolute truth about the mustard color.”

  “Okay,” I say, and she looks relieved.

  When Mom comes out to offer pizza, Nell rockets to her feet and says, “What time is it? I should call someone and get a ride home,” and my mother’s admittedly klutzy attempts to assure her that she’s welcome to stay for dinner do not persuade her to stick around.

  “Is it dangerous to walk in Minneapolis?” I ask after Nell’s gone.

  “Not particularly,” Mom says. “A lot of people don’t like walking at night for one reason or another, though.”

  “Am I allowed to walk at night?”

  Mom gives me a narrow-eyed look. “Since when have you cared whether I allow you to walk at night?”

  “I mean at 6:00 p.m. When you’re still awake and I’m not going to be able to sneak out without you noticing.”

  “Yes, you’re allowed.”

  We sit down to eat pizza, and I think about Nell’s mission. Is it personalized, or does
it just seem personalized?

  Over on the Catacombs, there’s a message from someone named Sister Eloise. Dear Sister in Faith, you’re in my neighborhood, which means you’ll be in my squadron. No pressure, but if you’d like to get together for the group workouts, or need support with a mission or a quest, just let me know.

  I feel the prickle of intense paranoia and my heart rate shoots up, and I stand up and close the blinds without really thinking about it and then try to sort through this rationally. There’s probably an automatic notification feature. This is creeping me out because I’ve spent years running and hiding along with my mom, not because there’s any real reason for this to creep me out.

  Okay, the quasi-military terminology here might also be legitimately creeping me out.

  My phone buzzes with a text from Nell. The app gave me another mission. Walk at night. This is ridiculous.

  So this app is definitely eavesdropping on us. But it could be a human listening in—or the sort of AI that’s really just a complicated algorithm. This doesn’t mean I have found the other AI.

  I don’t want to tell my mother about this, but one side of a conversation should be easy to fake; CheshireCat has mentioned several times that they can almost always hear what we’re saying but often can’t hear our conversation partner if our phone is in a pocket. Mom is setting up her laptop on our dining room table and pulling up the coding project she’s debugging, so I withdraw to my bedroom, close my own laptop—just in case anyone’s looking through the camera—and then very quietly ease the door closed. I shut off CheshireCat’s app so they won’t interrupt, and then I stick my phone under my pillow and lie down on my bed. Anyone listening in will hear my voice, muffled, and won’t think it’s strange they can’t hear anything else.

  “I tried a new app today,” I say, trying to mimic the conversational tone I’d have if I were actually saying this to my mother. “This girl at school, Amelie, talked me into installing it. It gives you these projects, which is kind of neat but sort of feels like more homework.” I pause, like my mom’s saying something. “Yeah, I’ll probably just delete it.”

  I leave my phone under my pillow, go to the bathroom, and then come back.

  I have a push notification from the Mischief Elves showing me the Potential Rewards of Mischief, which include “Fun and friendship!” but also possibly a camera that’s specialized for night photography.

  When I sneak out at night, one of the things I like doing is night photography. Wildlife photography. I’ve never in my life gotten a good photo of a bat, not that it’s stopped me from trying, and this is the camera used by people doing photography of fast-moving nocturnal wildlife. I know this because I looked it up a year ago. I haven’t looked it up recently. Anyone who knows me, who’s spent time and effort and intelligence prying into my life, would be able to guess that I want this. It’s not something you could glean from casual prying.

  I turn CheshireCat’s app back on, then log on to CatNet and send CheshireCat a message: “It’s possible I’m being paranoid. But I think I might have found the other AI.”

  5

  • CheshireCat •

  The internet is filled with ways that humans can connect with other humans. There are old-school social media sites filled with photos of gardens and grandchildren and birthday greetings, and there’s a site someone started up the day before yesterday that’s apparently for dating and allegedly they match people by way of chemical testing and you have to pay them money and send them snippings of your hair, saliva, and … oh, never mind, on closer inspection, that’s clearly a scam to harvest DNA.

  But there are games, there are chat rooms, there are games with chat rooms, there’s video and simulated environments and virtual reality. I thought that CatNet was the only social network that was run by an AI. But maybe I was wrong.

  I register for the Mischief Elves site and pretend I’m a teenager in Minneapolis like Steph and Nell. I tell the Elves I’ve crossed against a light, and I take a look around. There’s a discussion area to get help with tasks, which lets me see what sorts of tasks the site gives out, and everything I see looks innocuous. Maybe it was a coincidence that Nell’s fit her situation so specifically.

  If I had stumbled across this site on my own, I never would have looked around and thought, This seems excessively personal and like some overly involved consciousness with a lot of information is designing the environment.

  But Steph did.

  I back out and come in from a different angle—I look for the app on the phone of my friends who’ve given me permission to snoop on them. Firestar has the app, and Firestar takes me everywhere and gives me access to everything, and they’re actually on the app right now so I can just … watch over their shoulder.

  There’s a party tomorrow, the app says. Bring party supplies! There will be balloons and helium in a tank. Your job is to bring glitter. Can we count on you?

  Firestar taps a confirmation. COUNT ME IN.

  Bring your glitter to the flagpole outside of school fifteen minutes before the first bell, and the Elves will tell you what happens next!

  I want to know what happens next. But I’m going to have to wait until tomorrow, when I can listen through Firestar’s phone.

  Am I seeing this as sinister just because of Steph’s suspicions? I don’t even know. I did notice that this app assumed that Firestar would have glitter. That is an assumption I would also make. Firestar seems like the sort of person who probably has glitter on hand at all times. This seems like something I know because I know Firestar fairly well, but I’m suddenly unsure.

  I could just reply to the message I got: the I know who and what you are message. I could.

  I haven’t, because there’s something about that message that feels like a threat. If the sender knows who and what I am, and I don’t know who and what they are, they have power over me, and any sort of confirmation seems like it would give them more power because they’ll know they’re right—they have information about me that I don’t have about them.

  If it’s not a threat, it feels like a challenge. I found you. Can you find me?

  Have I found them? Or do I just think maybe I’ve found them because I want the answer to be yes?

  I leave Firestar to their texting and homework and go back to talk to Steph.

  “I can’t decide,” I tell Steph.

  “I can keep investigating,” Steph says.

  I hate asking my human friends to do anything that seems at all risky. There are things that seemed like such good ideas that led to so many complications. I resolve to keep a close eye on anything that results from this. “Yes,” I say. “Please do. That would be very helpful.”

  6

  • Nell •

  My father is the one who fetches me from Steph’s house, not any of the Things. “Did you have a good first day at school?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, trying to sound like I mean it. I don’t think I really succeed.

  “Jenny asked me to pick up dinner,” he says. “What sort of food do you like?”

  “Oh, anything at all,” I say.

  “Mexican? Indian?”

  Mom makes tacos sometimes, and they’re okay. I have no idea whether I like Indian food or not. “Mexican, please.”

  This Mexican food comes from a restaurant, and my father orders in Spanish. When we get home, the dining room table that’s been covered with papers since I arrived has been cleared off and set with plates, and my father unloads a stack of heavy cardboard takeout containers and plastic cups of salsa and guacamole.

  The tacos my mother makes have hamburger and lettuce that you scoop into crunchy shells. These tacos are made with wraps and served with lime wedges. I try one, cautiously. I have no idea what sort of meat I’m eating, but the sauce is really yummy. Thing Two pushes one of the containers of salsa across the table to me. “This one’s mild,” she says. “You can try it on some of the chips, if you want.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Hands-Renwick,�
�� I say. She winces a little and tries to hide it. I catch Thing Three shoot her a look like, Don’t pick this fight, and feel a little thrill of victory.

  I mean, yes, the food is good. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that these people took me away from my home and everyone I know.

  When we finish eating, I tell them I’ve decided I would like to paint my room blue, and Thing Two leaps to her feet like we’re going to Disneyland and sweeps me out the door to head to a home improvement store before I realize that she’s using this as an excuse to avoid doing the dinner dishes.

  * * *

  Thing Two insists on buying samples—miniature cans of paint in near-identical shades of blue—assuring me that if I paint the swatches tonight and choose my favorite, she will buy the paint for the full paint job while I’m at school tomorrow. “I’m happy to paint with you,” she says.

  “Thank you, but I can do it myself.”

  I can see her forehead pucker, like she’s worried I’m going to accidentally paint the floor. “That’s fine,” she says.

  Except then I can’t get the paint jar open. It’s a screw-top lid, but it’s as tight as a new jar of pickles. I almost just give up, but I have an assignment and Steph’s got me all nervous that they’ll know somehow. So I choke down my pride and say, “Excuse me, Ms. Hands-Renwick, could you help me open this?”

  She takes the jar with a sort of patronizing smile, but her eyes widen as she tries to open it. “This is really stuck,” she mutters, and gets some sort of fancy jar-opening gadget from the kitchen to pry it open, and then just sort of drifts after me into my bedroom, an old bedsheet in hand to use as a drop cloth. I paint the three sample squares and conclude, reluctantly, that she’s right, one shade lighter than the paint chip I initially picked will be fine.