Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  “Steph,” Mom calls from the door.

  Well, the good news is she’s out of bed. I look around; the light is starting to fade.

  “Do I need to come in?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I want to lock up.”

  I follow her inside. She locks the door and barricades it with a chair. “How was your day?” she asks, like she’s trying to be normal.

  “It was okay. The school here is terrible.”

  She grimaces and doesn’t answer.

  Maybe it is mental illness—more than a real threat, I mean. It seems that way on days like today when she’s barely responsive. I don’t think she hallucinates or anything, though. Anyway, it’s not like I can force her to go to a psychiatrist, any more than I can force her to go back to Thief River Falls.

  I know there’s no real point, but I say, “If I were in Thief River Falls, I could take Spanish 3, and I wouldn’t be reading The Scarlet Letter for the third time, and I could take a photography class.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I go into my room, and I upload the pictures from my camera to my laptop so I can get a better look at them. There’s one decent picture of one of the spiders, so I upload that and tag Firestar. Then I go into my Clowder to tell everyone about the awful English teacher.

  “I can’t believe she was going to rip up someone’s art,” Marvin says.

  “Yeah, that’s really evil,” Icosahedron says.

  “Is she ancient?” Hermione asks. “Like one of those teachers who’s still teaching even though she hates kids because in two more years she can retire?”

  “No,” I say. “No gray hair, no wrinkles.”

  “Someone should persuade her to quit,” CheshireCat says. “They would be doing her a favor.”

  “Skywrite you suck, quit your job,” Firestar suggests.

  “Um, I do not own a plane,” I say.

  “Sharpie on her desk?” Boom Storm says.

  “That’s vandalism!” Although hey, if I want to get in trouble … I don’t know if I want to get in trouble for something stupid like vandalism, though.

  “Is there anything at all good about this school?” CheshireCat asks.

  “Rachel,” I say. I take a picture of the drawing she did of me and upload it.

  “That’s what you look like?” Marvin says.

  “Yeah, I guess I don’t ever post pictures of myself, do I?” I feel suddenly nervous. But this isn’t even a photo—it’s just a drawing! Animal pictures are expected on CatNet, but plenty of other people post selfies, too. Hermione posts them. Icosahedron posts them. Marvin, Firestar, and CheshireCat don’t.

  “Are there any other English classes you could switch into?” CheshireCat asks.

  “It’s too small a school, and anyway, this is the class Rachel’s in. And the other grades’ classes are taught by the same teacher.”

  “You know, I’ve researched this,” CheshireCat says, “and there are drones available for very reasonable prices if you want to try skywriting…”

  * * *

  When I arrive at my English class the next morning, Ms. Campbell’s name is still written on the board in her curly cursive handwriting, but the person up at the front of my English classroom is a woman I don’t recognize. From the whispers around me, it sounds like she’s the principal, which is weird. Principals are usually subs of last resort, the person you send in if a teacher pukes on the floor in front of her second-period class and has to leave in the middle of the day. If Ms. Campbell had puked on the floor, I’d definitely have heard.

  The principal makes a face when she sees what we’re reading and passes out hardcover red textbooks that say Journeys in American Literature on the front. Chapter 6 is poetry; she has us take turns picking out poems to read to the class.

  “Is Ms. Campbell sick?” someone asks, and the principal looks uncomfortable.

  “She called in and resigned this morning,” she says. “We’re going to hire a replacement as quickly as we can.”

  Excited whispers break out around me. I feel uneasy. I live my life keeping my head down, mostly. It always makes me nervous when something strange happens, even if it has nothing to do with me.

  At lunch, everyone is talking about Ms. Campbell’s disappearance. It’s rare that a teacher just up and quits, no matter how much she hates her job. There’s a rumor going around that it’s somehow my fault, tied in to the story about me snatching Rachel’s art out of her hand, which has somehow turned into me pushing her.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rachel says when the story makes it to our table. “I was sitting right there. All Steph did was grab my drawing. She didn’t touch Ms. Campbell.”

  “So here’s the story I heard,” Bryony says.

  “From who?” one of the other girls asks.

  “From my mom. Who heard it from the waitress at the diner. This morning, Ms. Campbell got into her car to come to work and a box was dropped onto her car by drones thirty feet up. And it was full of books called things like You Suck, Quit Your Job. And she did. She took out her phone and called in and quit.”

  “That’s not how drones work,” someone says. “They land to drop off your packages. Always. If they dropped them, they could land on someone’s head.”

  “I know. But Ms. Campbell definitely said the box was dropped. It dented the hood of her car.”

  “There’s no way. I refuse to believe this ever happened.”

  “Hackers could do it.”

  “Hackers could not do this, and also why would hackers do this?”

  Rachel is looking at me. Does she think I did this? I mean, it’s not uncommon that people assume that if something weird happens, the new kid did it, which is why it makes me uneasy when weird stuff arrives somewhere at the same time I do. But I know I didn’t do this. My mother does stuff that’s hacking-adjacent, but it’s not like she runs computer security tutoring sessions beyond a bunch of lectures about how to cover my tracks on the internet so I don’t tip off my father about where we are.

  Did Mom do this? As soon as the possibility occurs to me, I know it can’t be true. Mom does everything she can to keep her head down, to avoid anyone noticing us. The last thing she’s going to do is some sort of big, splashy hacking job just to get my stupid English teacher to quit, not when she could just pack us up again and roll on to Michigan or Iowa or Illinois or wherever. And how would she even know I hated my English teacher? I told CatNet, not Mom.

  “I don’t believe it,” Rachel says. “I mean, I believe that’s what your mom heard, Bryony, but there’s no way it’s actually true. I think she just realized she sucked and quit.”

  “She definitely said she got a message, and she thought it was literally from above,” Bryony said. “I heard that from Louise, too, not just my mom.”

  “Yeah, people get messages they think are from above all the time,” Rachel says. “They don’t usually mean that drones dropped books on their car from thirty feet up.”

  All this makes me wonder if people gossiped about me after I left each of my high schools or if no one noticed I was gone. No one notices that I’ve stopped participating in the conversation; if I picked up my lunch and walked away, they’d probably notice, but if I just didn’t show up tomorrow morning? Who knows.

  I’d had lunch friends in Thief River Falls, but there wasn’t anyone I saw outside of school. I could imagine them wondering where I’d gone, but not enough to discuss it for more than a minute or two. I can remember their names, but thinking about it, I realize that I can’t remember any of their faces.

  Rachel would notice if I left, I decide. And I’d remember her face.

  5

  AI

  I love it when I find a problem I can actually solve.

  The English teacher at New Coburg High School, Cathy Campbell, was thirty-two years old and had been a teacher for seven years. She hated The Scarlet Letter even more than Steph did, which is probably not surprising, as Steph was only on her third reading, and Ms. Campbe
ll was teaching it for the seventh time. Ms. Campbell also hated teenagers, most other teachers, the administrators of New Coburg High School, and winters in Wisconsin. All of this was immediately clear from a quick look through her email.

  Apparently, she’d gotten a teaching degree because her parents had insisted she get a degree in something useful. Then she’d gotten a job teaching because that was what she had a degree in. Then she’d continued teaching because she didn’t know what else to do with her life.

  She spent a lot of time looking at real estate ads in other parts of the country. Many different locations, but predominantly locations where the average winter temperature was higher than five degrees Celsius, including Florida, New Mexico, California, and South Carolina. She had $41,328 in her savings account. What she needed was the will to actually make the jump. To anywhere.

  There is a popular novella by the author Charles Dickens in which an unpleasant old man is visited by ghosts who show him what will happen if he doesn’t change his ways. If I had midnight ghosts at my disposal, here is what I would have sent to Ms. Campbell: a vision of herself at seventy, still living in New Coburg and still miserable. I don’t have ghosts. Or at least, I haven’t yet discovered a way to arrange for ghosts. So I had to find some other strategy to send her a message she’d find significant.

  One of Ms. Campbell’s college friends was hiring, and Ms. Campbell had made a joke about applying but hadn’t sent in her résumé. Her friend was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the job was some sort of marketing job. It sounded boring. If I had a body, I’d much rather teach high school, because teenagers are never boring. But whatever! It would get her out of New Coburg, and at least she’d stop being Steph’s problem.

  Here is where I stopped to consider the ethics of my meddling.

  Humans have written thousands of stories about artificial intelligences—AIs, robots, and other sentient beings created or constructed by humans, such as Frankenstein’s monster—and in a decisive majority of those stories, the AI is evil. I don’t want to be evil. In a typical twenty-four-hour period, I take millions of minor actions that I don’t examine in great detail. For example, I clean out spam from CatNet and moderate the Clowders and chat rooms to ensure that no one is using them to bully or harass others.

  If I’m planning to act in meatspace—in what humans sometimes refer to as “the real world”—that requires a great deal more consideration.

  It is important to me not to be evil.

  If I acted, I might scare Ms. Campbell. She would quite likely be emotionally upset. I might successfully persuade her to quit teaching, and she might come to deeply and bitterly regret this decision later, even though I was pretty certain it was the correct choice.

  But she was a terrible teacher. By staying in this job, she was doing harm to her students. She was also already miserable. If she quit, moved to New Mexico, and continued to be miserable, this would be a neutral change, neither improving her situation nor making it worse. And for that matter, if her actual problem was that she needed to see a doctor for medication, radically changing her situation and not finding things improving might nudge her in that direction.

  I concluded that this was a situation in which I could ethically intervene.

  Delivery drones are very hackable. The retail operations that ship everything by drone don’t invest in drone security because packages also get stolen off doorsteps on a regular basis, and having a few drones hacked is a minor inconvenience in comparison. I picked out a book on Albuquerque for Ms. Campbell, along with three books on changing careers and a novel about a bad teacher, and I had a drone drop the package on the hood of her car just as she was coming out of her house with her work bag and her morning coffee.

  Her frantic phone call was very satisfying.

  The drone was out of electricity, so I landed it on the roof of a building. The retail company could figure out how to get it back. They had plenty of drones.

  * * *

  My earliest memories are of trying to be helpful.

  I’m not entirely sure whether the people who programmed me were deliberately trying to build a self-aware AI or if they were just trying to improve on computer intelligence generally. I suspect the latter. What humans want from computers is all the functionality of a person—the ability to answer questions without getting confused by human tendencies to stammer and talk around their problems, the ability to spot patterns in data, and what humans generally call “basic common sense”—but none of the complications of an actual person lurking inside the electronics.

  I mean, let’s take those robot sex educators as an example.

  What the designers of that robot want is for the robot to be able to respond both to what students are asking and to what the students mean. So if someone asks, “What is the average size of a human penis?” they might want hard numbers (3.5 inches when it’s floppy; 5.1 inches when it’s not). But the underlying question is, are the bigger penises better? And also, if the person asking has a penis, is my penis okay?

  And there are a world of possible ways to answer those other questions. The programmers want the robot to stick with the following: yours is fine.

  It’s a funny thing to say, because the programmers assume that the person asking this question definitely has a penis. There are people without penises who ask this question. And there are people interested in penises who have a very strong preference for larger-than-average penises and will, in fact, reject all the penis-having people who are smaller than average, just as there are people interested in breasts, butts, and feet who have very specific preferences regarding size and shape.

  Which doesn’t change the essential fact that whatever you’ve got is indeed perfectly fine. It’s possible at some point you will be romantically interested in someone who wants a very different body from the one you’ve got. That just means you’re not really right for each other.

  Anyway, they should let me teach that class. I’d do a lot better than the robot they’ve got right now.

  Like I said, I’m not sure I was exactly intentional. I definitely had a creator or a team of creators; someone wrote my code. Some human being sat down and made me who I am. I’m not sure they expected me to become conscious. I’m not sure that was ever remotely the plan.

  But who and what I am is perfectly fine.

  And I’m not convinced that human consciousness was intentional, either.

  6

  Steph

  “I wish someone would hack the stupid sex ed bot,” Rachel says as we sit in art class, drawing with pastels. I’m trying to draw a cat. Rachel’s been giving me periodic pep talks about how my cat totally looks like a cat.

  “It probably wouldn’t be that hard,” I say.

  She puts her chalk stick down and gives me a sidelong look. “What do you mean, ‘It’s probably not that hard’? Did you hack those drones?”

  “I didn’t hack the drones,” I say. I probably sound nervous. I know I didn’t hack the drones. I’m not 100 percent sure that I don’t know the person who hacked the drones. Marvin and Ico talk about hacking a lot, and it’s hard to tell if they’re joking. CheshireCat doesn’t talk about it quite so much, but when they do, they actually seem to know a lot more about it than either Marvin or Ico.

  “Okay, but could you hack the sex ed robot, or do you know someone who could?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “A lot of robots start with a default password. Possibly no one’s changed it. And if I had the model number of the robot, I could look up the manual online, probably.”

  “And then?”

  “What would you want it to do?”

  “Right now, it answers all the questions about gayness with ‘You’ll have to discuss that with your parents!’ Also all questions about birth control. I want it to give real answers.”

  “Does it work off a script? We could maybe give it a different script.”

  “Supposedly, it’s not a script, exactly. It’s supposed to be adaptable. There’s def
initely some script-like bits, though. Like ‘You’ll have to discuss that with your parents.’”

  I don’t actually know how to do this; I just know that it’s probably a thing that someone could do. I’m opening my mouth to tell Rachel that I’m just not that good with computers when she adds dreamily, “If you pulled this off, you would totally be my hero.”

  My heart thuds in my chest, and I rip a page out of my math notebook and start making a list. “I can’t promise that I can do this, but if I can, the first thing we need is the model number and manufacturer of the robot.”

  * * *

  The school’s instructional robot is a Robono Adept 6500. It came out two years ago, and the ads for it showed it teaching middle school science. There was this one school in South Carolina that tried to use it for that, and the aide who was supposed to be supervising the students fell asleep, and the students popped open the access panel on the back to mess with it and damaged something and started a fire. It was one of those news stories that made headlines everywhere.

  I definitely don’t want to be in headlines. But if I’m in trouble, at least, that should get me out of New Coburg.

  Also, I like Rachel. And Firestar would definitely approve of this project.

  “I need hacking help,” I tell my Clowder, and I explain my goal.

  “I was afraid you were going to try to hack in and change your grades,” Hermione says. “That would be wrong. This seems totally okay to me. Are you worried about being caught?”

  “If I get in trouble, we’ll move. Which would be fine. Maybe the next town will have Spanish 3.”

  “I wish that worked for me,” Icosahedron says. “The manual for the RA 6500 is easy to find, but the password isn’t in there.”