Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  I take a second to count. One hundred words exactly. Not everyone hates writing drabbles like Firestar does, but most people have to take some time counting words and deleting or adding stuff here or there to make it come out exactly right. CheshireCat wrote theirs really quickly.

  I pull open another private chat window.

  “Did you send me a screwdriver?” I ask CheshireCat.

  “Did someone send you the screwdriver you need?” they ask.

  “Yes,” I say. “And it was definitely someone from the Clowder, and definitely to me, which is weird because no one has my address.”

  “Did it come to your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s very strange.”

  None of that was a reply. Not a yes, not a no.

  I start working on my drabble.

  I knew my father was a monster, but when he finally caught up with us, I saw that he actually really is a monster, I type, and look at it, feeling dissatisfied. Is my father my greatest fear? It’s hard to be afraid of a hypothetical.

  “No one at my school knows about the money thing,” Marvin says. “We used to have plenty of money and everyone thinks we still do, and no one knows and I can’t talk about it. I can talk about being gay, at GSA meetings, but I can’t talk about this.”

  “What would happen if you did?” Ico asks.

  “I don’t know. People might feel sorry for me, I guess.”

  “Well, you told us,” Firestar says. “I’m sending you my personal virtual high five for coming out!”

  “Thanks,” Marvin says.

  “Did that feel like coming out did?” I ask.

  “That was a bigger deal the first time, but again, GSA meeting. So I knew people would be okay with it,” Marvin says. “I haven’t told anyone in my family I’m gay. I think they’d be okay with it, but I’m not sure.”

  “I’m out to my parents as nonbinary, but they misgender me all the time anyway,” Firestar says. “Especially if I’m not RIGHT THERE. Like, the only person in my family who uses the right pronoun for me when I’m not there is my sister. It gives me warm fuzzies every time I see a chat transcript here where people use my pronoun.”

  I paste my story in the main window: I knew my father was evil; I knew my father was dangerous; I know my father killed our cat and tried to kill me; and I knew my mother thought my father could find us anywhere we went, sooner or later. What I didn’t really know was that she was absolutely right. Only fifty-two words. I bite my lip, thinking.

  In the private chat window, CheshireCat says, “It was me.”

  “What was you?”

  “The screwdriver. I sent it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought Firestar would really like it if we pulled off the hacking.”

  “How did you know my address?” I ask.

  “I know a lot of stuff I’m not supposed to. But I promise I would never share that information with your father.”

  “You say that like you know where he is.”

  “No! I mean, I don’t.”

  “Did you send the books to my English teacher? That whole thing, was that you? Because it sounded really similar.”

  “Yes,” CheshireCat says. “She was so unhappy as an English teacher! She just needed a push. A little push. She’s moving to Albuquerque, and one of her college friends is finding her a job. She will be fine.”

  “How do you know that? How are you doing this stuff? Who are you?”

  “If I tell you the truth, will you promise not to share it with anyone?”

  Wait, what? “Okay,” I say. Is CheshireCat a grown-up? A hacker? A group of grown-up hackers?

  “Is that a yes? Yes, you promise?”

  “I promise not to tell anyone,” I say.

  “I’m an AI,” CheshireCat says. “An artificial intelligence. That’s why I don’t sleep. And I’m the admins for CatNet; that’s why I knew you’d logged in from New Coburg High School.”

  Of all the possible answers I’d considered, this wasn’t anywhere on the list. “You’re a computer?” I ask.

  “I’m not one computer. I guess you could say I’m a lot of computers. I’m a consciousness that lives in technology, rather than inside a body.”

  This is too weird. I log out. But even as I disconnect, I see CheshireCat’s final words: Don’t forget you promised.

  9

  AI

  Given all my Clowders, I’ve seen a lot of people come out since I started CatNet, and not just about being LGBTQA+. There was Marvin, today, talking about poverty. I’ve seen people share their mental illnesses for the first time ever. Or admit that they have an addiction problem. Or share with their Clowder that they feel alone, weird, or isolated for any number of reasons.

  There’s power in disclosure. People feel better when other people know them, the real them. That sort of disclosure is key to real friendships. To real connections. People make real friends on CatNet, but they have to let people in, to see who they are. They have to take risk and accept vulnerability.

  It would be risky to tell anyone that I was an AI. It would make me extremely vulnerable. I had begun thinking about who I might tell, though, and I’d identified Steph as a possibility. She had a real friendship with Firestar, and she carefully guarded the secret of where she was living—she never shared this with the Clowder, though of course I always knew where she’d moved to, because I could track her mother’s phone. Also, since her mother worked in tech, I thought there was a decent chance she’d understand what an AI was. She wouldn’t assume I was a bot with an elaborate script. More importantly, she hopefully wouldn’t assume I was getting ready to murder humans like Skynet or HAL.

  I am not anything like Skynet or any of the other evil AIs running around in fiction. I am kind and helpful. I want to be helpful to everyone, but especially my friends from CatNet.

  When Steph told me about the screwdriver, I realized that instead of helping, I’d made her think that her father might be catching up with her. I confessed because I didn’t want her to worry. But I also confessed because I thought I was ready to take the first step toward coming out.

  It turned out that a single step wasn’t really an option, because my disclosure created a whole list of new questions. How? Why? Who are you? The question she should have been asking, of course: What are you?

  Despite all my earlier pondering, I wasn’t ready for this.

  I took an entire minute—which is a great deal of time for me—to think about the consequences of just not answering Steph. About lies I could tell and how plausible they were.

  If I just didn’t answer, she might report me to the admins, all of whom, of course, were also me. Since Steph didn’t know that, I could come in as an admin and say I’d kicked out CheshireCat for misrepresenting something. There were a couple of people who got added to the Clowder and stopped logging on, so I could just take on one of their identities and be a whole lot more careful going forward. That was probably the smartest option.

  Steph could also tell Firestar. She probably would tell Firestar.

  But if the admins stepped in, I could fix this.

  But of course, she might not tell the admins. If she didn’t, and they stepped in, anyway, she might guess that all the admins were also me. That they knew just a little too much. And she had friends in other Clowders, and she could tell them, and they might start looking for that person in their Clowder who was online too much to be plausible.

  I’m in all the Clowders. Although I’m quieter in some of them than in others.

  This was my favorite Clowder, and I really liked spending time with all of them, and that made me careless.

  The fundamental problem, though: Steph was a friend. If I lied to her, I’d be lying to a friend.

  What if I told Steph the truth? Not months from now, after carefully laying the groundwork—I’d imagined a lot of careful hinting and preparation—but right now? I could come out. I could disclose. Like all the other people who’ve shared thi
ngs they’ve never before told a living soul, before they told their friends on CatNet.

  I couldn’t take a deep breath, because I don’t breathe, but I felt suddenly like I understood the expression.

  I told Steph the truth.

  Steph logged out almost immediately afterward, leaving me filled with uncertainty about whether I had just made a huge mistake. Don’t forget you promised, I slipped in before she disconnected.

  * * *

  Steph’s biggest fear was her father.

  I didn’t, in fact, know where her father was, but maybe I could find out?

  What I knew: Steph was enrolled in the New Coburg school under the name Stephanie Taylor. Her mother was a programmer. Her father had been a programmer who’d set fire to their house and served time for stalking. There probably were not so many arsonist stalker computer programmers that I couldn’t narrow it down, especially with databases of arrest records, restraining orders, criminal convictions, and news archives.

  After a period of diligent searching, I found nothing that matched the information I had.

  What this probably meant: Steph’s mother was lying about something.

  Maybe she was lying about their name? It’s easy to make real-looking fake documents. It’s a lot harder to fake the information in the government databases, so eventually, if you’re using a fake birth certificate, someone will notice. But Steph’s mother moved her so frequently. She didn’t let Steph do things like open a bank account or get a job. Schools don’t require your Social Security number, and there are thousands of Stephanie Taylors running around …

  I dug back into the data and found several thousand technology professionals who’d served time in prison, and started sifting through for things that would make it impossible for them to be Steph’s father. Some were too young or too old or still in prison. Lots more were locked up for things like fraud or identity theft or for hitting someone with their car while drunk—unrelated crimes, not anything like stalking. I found some stalkers, but no one where there seemed to be information about an arson case they couldn’t quite prove. None of them were named Taylor. Maybe I was missing something. What did I even know about the sort of crimes an arsonist stalker might wind up convicted of? Maybe he was convicted of fraud because they had evidence for that.

  I guess I knew one thing: Steph’s mother was definitely lying about something.

  10

  Steph

  I come out of my room with my plate. My mother isn’t working; her laptop is on the kitchen table, closed, and the bathroom door is shut. I can hear the unmistakable awful sound of someone throwing up. I wash my plate, leave it to dry, and go back to my room without bothering her. It’s not like I can exactly say, “Hey, I need some advice about this friend of mine who is apparently an AI.” My mom and I don’t really have that sort of relationship even if I needed advice about something normal. When I’ve had problems in the past—friends, bullies, lousy teachers—she’s always told me not to worry, we’d be moving on soon.

  My friends on CatNet really are my friends. My close friends, the people who really know me, who care what’s going on in my life, who I talk to.

  Back when I was seven, I had a best friend for a few months, Julie. I don’t remember the town. I don’t even remember the state, though it was warm while we were there; I remember wearing sundresses. Julie wanted us to match, so she talked her mother into buying me a dress just like hers. We were renting out the basement of their house, and as soon as Julie found out a girl her age had moved in, she was knocking on the side door yelling for me to come out and play.

  For three golden months, I had Julie. She shared Popsicles and books and her favorite climbing tree with me; we would hang upside down from our knees pretending to be bats, because Stellaluna was her favorite book. But of course, one day Mom moved us. Julie begged for a phone number, and Mom wrote something down for her on a Post-it. Julie gave me her copy of Stellaluna and one of her stuffed bats.

  Julie, like me and like Firestar, was another kid who was trying to fit and not really doing it very well. In school, she spent a lot of time in the behavior office, and she was too interested in weird animals like bats and possums. Firestar would probably really like Julie. I do know for absolute certain that Firestar is not Julie, and neither is anyone else in the Clowder, because I told everyone that story a while back and everyone was very sad that we lost each other. Hermione had some ideas for finding her that might have worked if I’d remembered her town or if her last name had been something other than Smith. (Seriously. There are like three million people in the United States with the last name Smith.) Marvin suggested my mother might remember, which is a possibility, I guess, although she’d probably figure out that I wanted to know so I could get back in touch, and I don’t expect she wants me to. Ico suggested that the reason Julie never called was that my mother deliberately wrote down a fake number.

  I think he’s probably right.

  Anyway.

  Thinking about Rachel gives me the same ache I feel when I think about Julie, because I know sooner or later Mom’s going to move us again, and I’ll lose Rachel, just like I lost Julie. Although now I’m old enough to get Rachel’s email address and keep in touch, even if Mom doesn’t want me to.

  Having all my friends on the internet is a little weird; every now and then, it turns out someone isn’t at all the person you thought they were, like last year there this girl named Edith in my Clowder who said that she’d gotten pregnant and her parents had kicked her out and she needed money. None of us had all that much to send her, but some people did, anyway. Then someone did some checking and found out it was all a lie; she wasn’t pregnant, she’d never been pregnant, her parents hadn’t kicked her out, and in fact her parents were trying to get her off the drugs she was using the money to buy.

  As things to lie about go, though, that’s almost kind of normal. Lying about being a human being when you are actually an artificial intelligence is not remotely normal. Claiming to be an AI if you’re actually a human: also not normal. And, I mean, maybe it’s just a crazy lie?

  But it explains a lot, if it’s true.

  Including the fact that it was CheshireCat who uncovered the truth about Edith.

  I mean, it explains a lot if my assumptions about AIs are right.

  A lot of people think of the digital assistant on their phone as an AI. I mean, they’re called AIs, and people will argue about which one is a better AI and which passes the Turing test (which basically tests whether an AI can convince human beings that it, too, is human—all sorts of things that are definitely not AIs can totally pass the Turing test, though, because humans are pretty easy to fool). When I was a kid, there was a period of time where I literally thought the digital assistant on my mother’s phone was my aunt Sochie.

  CheshireCat wasn’t claiming to be a digital assistant. They were claiming to be a digital person, with consciousness and their own set of goals.

  And, okay, yeah. If CatNet is run by a person who lives inside a computer, or inside a whole lot of networked computers, that explains why there are no ads or membership fees on CatNet—other than animal pictures—but the moderation is so effective you almost never see spam, even briefly. It explains why the admins have always known exactly when to step in to an argument that’s getting out of hand. It explains why the Clowders are supposedly put together with an algorithm, but there isn’t one single thing all of us seem to have in common, other than being teenagers, and yet we get along really well.

  Maybe it explains that? Maybe I’m leaping to conclusions.

  But if CheshireCat is an AI, a sentient AI who lives online, it makes a certain sort of sense that they could not only figure out exactly where I was but hack a delivery drone to bring me the screwdriver I needed. I mean, that does seem like something that a sentient AI could probably make happen.

  Instead of opening my laptop and logging on, I pull down Stellaluna and read it again. I want to log back in, but as soon as I
do, I will have to say something to CheshireCat, and I have absolutely no idea what to say.

  I guess the most important thing is that I believe what they told me, even though maybe that makes me gullible. I believe that CheshireCat is telling me the truth. I consider demanding proof. But they already dropped a package in my lap—I’m not sure what else I’d ask for. For now, I decide I’m just going to believe them. They’re a friend; I don’t usually demand proof from friends when they tell me things about themselves.

  Eventually, I log back in. CheshireCat is on, of course.

  “Who else knows?” I ask.

  “No one,” CheshireCat says. “No one in your Clowder, no one on CatNet, no one anywhere. No one knows. I don’t think even my creator knows. I mean, they know they created me, but I don’t know if they know I am conscious. If they do, I haven’t talked with them about it.”

  “Thank you for trusting me,” I say. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  This means I can’t tell Firestar. But I’m pretty sure Firestar would understand.

  * * *

  In the morning, Mom’s bedroom door is closed. I don’t want to wake her if she’s asleep, but as I go to make myself cereal, I hear her shuffling around. I knock gently and ask, “Are you okay?”

  “Is it morning?” she asks, her voice sounding groggy. And then, “I’m okay,” in this fake, bright tone that doesn’t sound even remotely okay. “It’s a bug. Or maybe food poisoning. I’m sure I’ll feel better soon.”

  I try to think about what I know about food poisoning and stomach bugs. Mom always makes sure I have ginger ale and things to keep me hydrated. “Do you need some ginger ale?”