Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Water? Tea?”

  “I’m good, I promise.”

  I go back into my room and open the window to stick the cat outside, but when I reach for him, he dives under the bed, into the far corner where he’s hard to reach. I glare at him for a minute, but there’s rain coming in the window and I can kind of understand why he doesn’t want to go out. “You’d just better not pee on my bed,” I whisper furiously and shut the window again. This is going to be terrific fun to walk in. Do I even have an umbrella these days? I think my last umbrella may have been left drying out in the bathroom in our apartment in Thief River Falls.

  I grab the septawing screwdriver and the one other thing I will need: the WingItz Internet Everywhere USB drive that came out of the package, onto which I’ve loaded a set of programs given to me by Ico, following some instructions to make sure there’s nothing on there saying “Steph Taylor Made This.” (“If the FBI gets involved and has a search warrant for your actual laptop, they’ll still be able to identify you, but since you’re just hacking a robot and not confessing to being a serial killer, that’s pretty unlikely,” Ico said.) If I can get this plugged into the robot’s USB port, the files on the thumb drive should take it from there.

  * * *

  I come out of the house, pulling up my hood and bracing myself to go out in the rain when I see that Rachel is waiting outside my house in her car.

  I wasn’t expecting this. I’m not expecting my reaction, either; when I see her car, I feel a flush of warmth all over, even as my stomach flips over because what if Mom sees someone hanging out waiting for me? That seems like the sort of thing that would make her paranoid. Except, I want her to move. Right? Isn’t that half the point of the hacking? I’ll get in trouble, she’ll move me, I had a plan here, and seeing Rachel’s car has made me realize that I like Rachel enough that I’m suddenly unsure that I want to leave New Coburg.

  She rolls down her window a crack and calls, “Want a ride?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I run out to her car, almost stepping in a large, deep puddle. How long was she waiting? Will she come again? Will Mom notice if she does? There’s a big wire-bound sketchbook on the passenger-side seat, which I move to my lap as I slide in. “Thank you.”

  “I figured, you know, it’s raining pretty hard…”

  “Yeah.” I glance at her and grin. “Yeah, I’d have gotten really wet.” Rachel usually drives to school, which means she normally leaves later, which means she must have gotten ready really quickly just so she could come get me.

  I shift the sketchbook so it doesn’t get damp from the raindrops rolling off my backpack. “You can stick that in the back, if you want,” Rachel says.

  “Is it your sketchbook?” I ask. This is probably a dumb question, as it says SKETCHBOOK on the front. It’s bigger than a lined notebook like we’d use in math class and as thick as a full three-ring binder.

  “Yeah,” Rachel says, glancing at it in my lap instead of keeping her eyes on the road.

  “Can I look?” I ask.

  “Please don’t,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say. We stop behind a delivery truck that’s blocking the road. She’s tapping the steering wheel with her thumbs like she’s really uncomfortable. I wonder if I should just stick it in the backseat. “Would you rather I put it in the back? Seriously, I won’t look if you don’t want me to.”

  “I trust you,” she says.

  When we get to school, the rain has started coming down in sheets, and we’re early, so she pulls into a parking space and turns off the motor, and we wait to see if it stops or at least lightens up. She plucks the sketchbook out of my lap and rips out three pages, tucking them into a folder in her backpack. “Now you can look,” she says, handing it back to me.

  I open it. There are sketches of flowers, of cats and dogs, of people. There’s a really beautiful one of a spider in her web. “I have a friend who’d really love this,” I say.

  “From your old school?”

  “No, from this online site I go to.”

  “Does she like art?”

  “They like spiders. And pictures of spiders. Especially orb weavers, you know, the kind that make webs like this one.”

  “Are you talking about one friend or more than one friend?”

  “One friend. They use singular-they pronouns because ‘they’ is non-gendered and my friend is nonbinary.”

  Rachel makes a face, and I wonder if I’m going to have to explain nonbinary genders. But instead she says, “Bryony said last year she wanted everyone to use xie instead of she, but her father threw a fit and told the teachers at the school they weren’t allowed. They didn’t want to, anyway. Does everyone just call your friend ‘they’ and it’s not, like, an issue?”

  “Bryony is nonbinary?”

  “I don’t know. She stopped talking about it after her father threatened to kick her out.”

  I mull that over. “I think Firestar gets misgendered a lot, actually, but not on the online site.”

  “Do you know if they’re really a girl or really a boy?”

  I glance over at Rachel, trying to decide how to answer that. Should I just say no, or should I try to explain why this was a bad question, or …

  “Sorry,” she says, blushing, so I guess she figured out it was a bad question.

  I look back down at the sketchbook. Rachel’s drawn lots of pictures of art that’s wrapped around someone’s arm or leg. “Mostly I just use permanent ink,” Rachel says. “Because henna pens are expensive and the lawsone gets used up really fast. Also, with ink I can do colors. Someday I think it would be fun to be a tattoo artist, although I’m not sure I’d want to jab people with a needle.”

  There’s a feather coiled around someone’s arm. A cat curled up in the crook of their elbow. A lizard climbing up a shoulder blade.

  “Have you done any of these for real? These are really cool.”

  “Yeah, I did the lizard on Bryony for her birthday.”

  “Do you ever get art?”

  “No.” She laughs. “No one else draws well enough to be up to my standards, and it’s too hard to draw on myself. When I’m grown up, I want a tattoo, though.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want a dragon that goes across my back, with its neck wrapping around my left arm and its head in my elbow, and its tail wrapping around my right arm. Red and gold. Although I’ll probably get a small tattoo first, when I turn eighteen, because that’ll be a lot cheaper and easier to hide from my parents and also I’ll know what I’m getting into before I try to get a giant tattoo done because maybe I’ll decide it hurts too much. Do you want a tattoo?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Like of a bat?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Probably. Like a picture on my shoulder of bats hunting for moths near a streetlight.”

  “That sounds cool.”

  “Do you actually think it sounds cool, or are you being polite? I thought you didn’t like bats.”

  “Just because I don’t like actual bats doesn’t mean I don’t think they’d make a cool tattoo. I probably wouldn’t want to get up close and personal with a real live dragon, if I ever met one.”

  The rain is slacking off, so Rachel carefully puts her sketchbook in the backseat, and we run into the school through a side door.

  It would probably be a good time to hack the robot, but I’ve decided I want to stay at New Coburg High for as long as I can, no matter how bad the classes are, so I don’t say anything about it.

  * * *

  The first class with the robot is later that day.

  The Robono Adept 6500 avoids the “uncanny valley” problem (which makes humanlike robots seem really creepy) by not trying to look human. It’s designed to be sort of cute; there’s a head with a kind of face, with a hinged jaw and light-up eyes. The jaw moves in time with the speech, and the head swivels so the eyes are looking at you if it calls on you. The eyes don’t actually see; I can s
pot the cameras farther up on the head, and they are evenly spaced around the head so it can see to the sides and behind it. I’m pretty sure the light-up eyes are entirely decorative.

  It rolls around on wheels, like a Dalek, and has little grasping tools at the end of tiny useless T. rex arms. In the commercials, they always have a pointer or a dry-erase marker in their hands, but this one doesn’t have anything.

  “Welcome, young men and women,” the robot says. The jaw is synced up pretty well to the speech. It’s weird how much more alive robots look when they have that synced-up mouth movement. “Please attend quietly to this instruction. There will be a period for questions and answers in the last ten minutes of the class.” It delivers a lecture on the reproductive system, sticking strictly to baby-making with a brief detour into menstruation and wet dreams. There’s an aide here to keep an eye on us and make sure we don’t vandalize the robot, but our usual health teacher apparently spends this month doing mental-health screenings of ninth graders.

  “The lining of the uterus is called the endometrium,” the robot says. If I had a human teacher this boring, I might call them robotic. That’s entirely redundant when it’s an actual robot, of course. Rachel is drawing a picture of a girl battling a giant ocean wave. Partway through the class, she gets out a red pen to make it a red ocean wave. If the aide notices, she doesn’t care.

  With exactly ten minutes to go, the robot announces, “I will now take questions.”

  “Will there be a question box this year?” someone asks.

  “If you wish to ask a question anonymously, you may submit it through an internet form you will find on your school’s website.”

  “That’s not actually anonymous if they want to know who submitted it,” someone else mutters.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that question,” the robot says.

  “Mr. Robot Teacher, please tell us about robot fetishists,” one of the boys calls out. “Would you date one?” That results in a whole lot of giggling, followed by the robot saying, “I am afraid you will have to ask your parents if you have questions about robot fetishists.”

  This sets off a whole flurry of questions as my classmates try to figure out exactly what the parameters are of the questions the robot won’t answer. It can tell us that a typical menstrual cycle is twenty-eight days but that they can be as long as thirty-five days or as short as twenty-one days. It cannot tell us anything about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or trans people, nor can it answer questions about condoms, contraception generally, or what constitutes “heavy petting” or “third base.” It can, however, explain that a “French kiss” is one in which the two people “penetrate one another’s mouths with their tongues,” which makes us all cringe. The fact that it can’t tell us anything about masturbation is the thing that makes Rachel so mad she just about flips over her desk.

  “Have you figured out how to hack this thing?” Rachel asks furiously after the bell rings. “Imagine this for a month.”

  “Yes, but…” I try to think of how to tell her that if I do this and get caught, I’ll have to leave. Immediately, probably. Maybe I can just try not to get caught. It won’t be a problem if I can just avoid getting caught … “But I’ll need a distraction so the aide doesn’t see.”

  It’s sitting right there—the robot, I mean—so there isn’t really a question of how to get to it. Rachel holds up one finger, to say wait, and sits back down. I stand there awkwardly as the room empties out.

  The aide comes over. “You going to your next class, Rachel?” she asks.

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Rachel says and grabs her head. “Ms. Tetmeyer, I feel really dizzy. I think I need to go to the health office, but I’m afraid I’ll fall. Can you help me?”

  “Can’t you have your friend help you?” the aide asks skeptically. But she grabs Rachel’s arm to help her up, then steers her out of the room, leaving me alone with the robot.

  It takes two minutes to unscrew the panel, pop in the USB, and screw it back on, and I’m pretty sure no one sees.

  I mean, unless the aide remembers I was in here alone, in which case …

  In which case, CheshireCat had better make it worth it.

  * * *

  Rachel makes it back to class, but thanks to her fakery, they don’t want to let her drive home. Her mother gets called to give her a ride, and I walk home by myself. Fortunately, the rain’s stopped. I buy a sack of cat litter and some garbage bags to try to make a litter box out of a cardboard box, because that cat will definitely pee on my bed if I don’t give it an alternative.

  I also buy a two-liter bottle of ginger ale and try to remember what else my mother gives me when my stomach’s upset. One time years ago, I got really sick and she fed me spoonfuls of this totally gross stuff she said was soda even though it definitely wasn’t. I’m not even sure what that was, though, so I wind up just getting ginger ale.

  When I get home, though, Mom is up and sitting at her laptop.

  “I bought you ginger ale,” I say, putting it in the fridge. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yeah, a whole lot better,” she says. “The pain’s gone away, and I’m keeping down liquids. I should be fine.”

  I pull out one of the kitchen chairs and sit down. “If you did have to go to the hospital, would that … I mean, would that make us easy to find?”

  She gives me her lopsided smile and says, “I’d hide all my IDs and check in as Jane Doe. Then give them my actual info right before I check out.” She looks down at her computer for a minute and then back at me with a slightly furrowed brow. “I’d really have to hide my wallet, though. If I called an ambulance, they might search for it pretty carefully before they gave up.”

  “What if I had to go to the hospital?”

  She sighs. “If you had to, you’d go. I’d explain things to the staff and hope for the best. Anyway, I should probably try to catch up on this contract job. They wanted debugged code twelve hours ago.”

  She doesn’t notice that I take a grocery bag into my room, or maybe she just figures it’s snacks I don’t want to share. I set up a makeshift litter box in a printer paper box lid lined with a thick trash bag and filled with litter, which I slide under my bed because a litter box sitting out in my room would be pretty hard to miss if Mom came in. I hear the cat digging in the litter, so that’s something.

  I log on to CatNet and poke through new images, my messages, anything but my actual Clowder, although it’s not like CheshireCat won’t see that I’m on. I upload the pictures I took of the spiders, thinking about how a few weeks back Firestar was talking about how they couldn’t go to the GSA meetings at their school because they had a therapy appointment that day, which couldn’t be moved because of their sister’s incredibly complicated ice-skating schedule, and then suddenly everything abruptly got moved without Firestar even asking about it.

  Did CheshireCat make it happen? Somehow?

  Today was the first GSA meeting that Firestar was actually going to be able to go to.

  I pull up a chat window. “Hey, CC,” I say. “I used the screwdriver today. I don’t think anyone saw.”

  “I knew you used it because the hacking programs did their work,” CheshireCat says. “The robot is online and ready for me to use!”

  “So tomorrow…”

  “I will be answering the questions. This is going to be so much fun!”

  “If you’re really an AI, what do you even know about sex?”

  “I am very good at finding things on the internet.”

  “There are internet sites that claim that some women have teeth in their vaginas!”

  “I am also excellent at determining which sites are reliable.”

  “Great,” I say.

  “Please trust me to do this. If you have Firestar do it, they will skip school, and they are in real danger of failing some of their classes.”

  I feel a lurch of dismay on Firestar’s behalf, both because they were very upset last spring about grades and because
CheshireCat is snooping on Firestar. Maybe that’s less dismay and more indignation.

  “If you can snoop in a school grading system to see what Firestar’s grades are, why can’t you just fix them so they’re passing stuff?” I ask.

  “I’m not snooping in Firestar’s school records, which are encrypted. I’m snooping in their parents’ email accounts.”

  My theory about Firestar’s schedule seems really justified. “Were you snooping as part of somehow magically making everyone reschedule all the stuff that was keeping Firestar from going to GSA?”

  “Oh. Yes. That was me.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  CheshireCat launches into a complicated explanation involving Firestar’s sister’s ice skating coaching schedule and some other classes she was taking to improve balance and flexibility. Apparently, CheshireCat got someone to “accidentally” reply-all and everything just unrolled from there.

  Somehow, even more than the screwdriver showing up, this convinces me: CheshireCat isn’t lying to me. They really are an AI.

  11

  Clowder

  Marvin: I learned about a new danger today! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE.

  Firestar: Sounds fake.

  Marvin: It’s in almost all toxic waste and also swimming pools and hundreds of people die every year from inhaling it and yet the government is putting it in our drinking water!

  Hermione: I’ve heard of this stuff! Touching it in its frozen state can cause tissue damage.

  Greenberry: Isn’t it literally water? Di hydrogen = H2, mon oxide = O???

  Marvin: JFC, Greenberry, if you knew you were supposed to play along!

  Firestar: Ohhhhhh ha omg.

  Greenberry: Sorry.

  {LittleBrownBat is here}

  Marvin: LBB! Tell Greenberry that she is the most funsuckingest funsucker that ever sucked away all the fun.

  LittleBrownBat: I think I must have missed something.

  Hermione: Dihydrogen monoxide.