LittleBrownBat: Marvin, were you trying to scaremonger about water?
Marvin: It’s not scaremongering. THE DANGER IS REAL.
LittleBrownBat: So hey, Firestar, did you go to the GSA meeting?
Firestar: WELL. THAT IS ACTUALLY A STORY.
Marvin: (pulls up a chair)
Hermione: (pulls up a chair next to Marvin)
Boom Storm: Tell us a story, Firestar!!!!!
Firestar: I DID go to the GSA meeting and it SUCKED. It turns out that almost all the GSA people at my school are the same judgmental jerks who kicked me out of the spring play last year.
Greenberry: Wait, are they allowed to do that?
Firestar: TECHNICALLY they probably are not. Anyway I spent about five minutes checking out the GSA and then I went to the juggling club meeting instead. And the GOOD news is, apparently everyone in juggling club is ALSO GAY plus they aren’t assholes! So I’m joining that instead.
LittleBrownBat: Are you any good at juggling?
Firestar: No. They said they’ll teach me.
Hermione: Didn’t you say once that dexterity was your dump stat?
Firestar: Hermione! Please don’t rain on my parade!
Hermione: Sorry, sorry
I’m sure you’ll be an awesome juggler.
Greenberry: What’s a dump stat?
Hermione: It’s a role-playing games thing. If you’re making a character, you assign all your high scores to the stuff you care about. Your worst score is your dump stat.
Icosahedron: And dexterity is your ability to do things like juggle, or walk without tripping over stuff.
Firestar: Even if I never learn to juggle, people there actually talked to me and everyone seemed nice.
LittleBrownBat: That’s awesome. Sorry about the GSA, though.
Hermione: Gay people shouldn’t be allowed to be jerks to other gay people.
Firestar: Possibly if they’d known last year they wouldn’t have kicked me out of the play, but I bet they still would have.
Marvin: You should start a rival GSA. Like if they’re the Gay Straight Alliance, you could start a Gender Sexuality Alliance and you could say on your signs WE AREN’T THE MEAN PEOPLE.
Hermione: MORE GAYNESS, LESS MEANNESS.
Firestar: Maybe I’ll see if the jugglers want to join that one.
{Georgia is here}
Georgia: am i doing this right
how does this work
can anyone see this
Marvin: You’re new! We haven’t had anyone new in ages!
Georgia: yeah help?
Hermione: I haven’t seen you around before. Did you just register?
Georgia: yeah
Hermione: Well, welcome. You’re in a text-chat room.
Firestar: We should do TEN THINGS lists again!
It’s been AGES since we did those!
So that Georgia will know who we are! HI GEORGIA! I AM FIRESTAR! MY PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM, I LIVE IN WINTHROP MASS, MY PARENTS ARE OBSESSED WITH SENDING MY SISTER TO THE OLYMPICS EVEN THOUGH SHE’S EIGHT YEARS OLD, I LIKE CAKE, I AM LEARNING TO JUGGLE. That’s half of ten things. Your turn!
Georgia: never mind
{Georgia has left}
Firestar: Was it something I said?
CheshireCat: I think Georgia will return eventually. If I may make a suggestion: next time, use lowercase letters when you say hello.
12
Steph
I can hardly wait for health class to start, and I’m also a little worried that Rachel will give us both away, as she keeps looking at me wide-eyed and then giggling. I think Bryony’s in on it, too, given the looks she’s shooting my direction, but she’s doing a better job of keeping a straight face.
Ms. Tetmeyer the EA is standing up at the front of the room when class starts, and for a minute, I think, dismayed, that they’re going to have her teach the class instead of the robot, but she just warns us to be quiet and attentive, reminds us there will be a test, and presses the green button on the front of the robot marked Begin.
“Good morning, class,” the robot says. “I received a lot of questions from the question box, so I will start today by answering them.”
The synthesized voice is the same as yesterday, but I can tell already that the speech rhythms are different. It’s CheshireCat speaking. I’d sort of expected CheshireCat’s voice to sound a little more natural—they seem human enough in the Clowder—but speaking out loud is a completely different skill set, and apparently it’s not one they’ve mastered.
The ads for instructional robots make them look like they’re AIs, capable of answering whatever question you fling at them, but they aren’t, not really. They have a bank full of scripted answers, and although they use a voice you can tell is synthetic, it’s not like they’re going to say anything that’s not planned for, so most of it has been tweaked to sound as human as possible.
CheshireCat has not been adjusted by sound engineers.
The robot has been tweaked to include thoughtful pauses and even words like hmm. CheshireCat isn’t bothering with any of that. The intonation is okay—things like going up at the end, for questions?—but the pauses are too short to sound right. No human talks like this because we have to stop occasionally to think about what we’re saying.
“Question one. Will anything bad happen to me if I masturbate? The simple answer is, no, of course not. However, there’s some best-practices advice I would like to pass along…”
Ms. Tetmeyer’s head snaps up in the back of the class as the robot instructs us to vary technique lest we develop “death grip syndrome” and then moves on to condom use. I’m afraid Ms. Tetmeyer is going to stop it right there, but she stays in her chair, hands folded, eyes wide. She looks like she’s biting her lip. My classmates are giggling, and the robot pauses, the head turning back and forth to scan the room. CheshireCat is looking at me. I wonder if they recognize me? Probably not, and I can’t think of a good reason to raise my hand and introduce myself.
When the robot starts talking about the advantages of heavy petting over sexual intercourse (much lower risk of disease, no risk of pregnancy) a blond girl near the front whirls around to stare at Ms. Tetmeyer. “This can’t be right. This can’t be what it’s supposed to teach us. Do something.”
In a cheerful, measured sort of voice, Ms. Tetmeyer says, “I am not allowed to touch the robot or instruct the class in any way, and I’m not allowed to leave you unsupervised. There is literally nothing I can do other than sit here and make sure that none of you touch the robot.”
“Call the office! Tell them what’s going on!”
“I am also not allowed to use a phone when I’m supposed to be supervising students, unless there’s an emergency.”
“This is an emergency!”
“I don’t see anyone bleeding on the floor!”
“I’ll use my phone, then!”
“Well, in theory, I’m supposed to confiscate it if you do,” Ms. Tetmeyer says, “but I guess I can pretend not to notice.”
The robot is telling us about something called “pie-making parties” that someone asked for a definition of, and finishes off by noting that these don’t exist outside of panicked emails exchanged by bored PTA moms, then moves on to a sexual move called the “land shark” that exists only in the imagination of people who have penises but have never had a sexual partner.
The blond girl gets out her cell phone and ostentatiously dials it, but no one in the office picks up. She gets up and starts looking over the robot, at which point Ms. Tetmeyer says, “Ah ah ah! You aren’t allowed to touch it! You are not allowed to touch it!”
“You can’t seriously expect me to just sit here—”
“You might break it! Do you know how much the school spent on that thing? I’m only allowed to touch it to press the Begin button, and you’re not allowed to touch it at all.”
“Well, somebody touched it! Or it wouldn’t be doing this.”
The robot’s head swivels so its
eyes are pointed at the blond girl. “You are being disruptive. Please take your seat like a good classroom citizen, and I will explain ‘saddlebacking,’ which might be of interest to you.”
Is that something that the girl has looked up on the internet? From her absolutely aghast expression, I think the answer here is maybe. She plunks back down in her chair and shrieks, “Make it stop!”
“Just plug your ears, Emily,” Ms. Tetmeyer advises.
Emily clamps her hands over her ears and hums something as the robot explains that “saddlebacking” is a practice intended to maintain an entirely technical sort of virginity, and then continues going through the questions. Bryony and Rachel must have either submitted an entire hour’s worth themselves or put a couple of other kids up to submitting questions, because there are lots, some clearly things people wanted to know (how effective are condoms, anyway?) and some that were probably submitted to troll the robot. (Is gerbiling real? No, CheshireCat says. That’s a homophobic urban legend.)
Someone’s put in the question, “Why do some people want you to say ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’?” and CheshireCat goes into an explanation of nonbinary gender identities: “Some people don’t feel like they’re either a girl or a boy. They might feel like they’re in between the two things and not really on either side. Some people feel like a girl some days and a boy other days. And some people feel about the question ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ like you might feel if someone asked you ‘Are you French or Ukrainian?’ and insisted that you had to either speak French to them or Ukrainian. That last part is a metaphor for insisting that you need to use either ‘he’ or ‘she.’ Imagine if, when you said to people, ‘I am neither French nor Ukrainian! I am American! I’m not even European!’ they acted like this was ridiculous and started loudly speaking to you in French because according to them, you looked French. Would you like that? I think you wouldn’t like that.”
When people ask what Firestar’s gender identity is, they usually say their gender is sharks.
“What’s your gender?” someone calls out. The robot’s head swivels at the sound of the voice, and even though the question didn’t come through the question box, CheshireCat says, “I myself am agender. I have no gender and consider myself neither male nor female.”
Emily tries her phone again, and this time someone in the office picks up because she says, “The robot is not working properly, and Ms. Tetmeyer won’t fix it.”
“I’m not allowed,” Ms. Tetmeyer calls again from the back of the room.
“It explained oral sex to us!” Emily shrieks. “With advice on technique!”
I hear a door slam from somewhere down the hallway, and about two minutes later, the school secretary and the principal come barreling through the door. The robot swivels its head and says, “For more accurate sex-positive information, visit Scarleteen—” and then the principal smacks a red Stop button on the back.
I met the principal, kind of, when she substitute-taught my English class, but now her face is so red I wonder if she’s about to have some sort of medical emergency. She sweeps the whole room with an absolutely murderous glare and then fixes her eyes on me and says, “New girl. What’s your name? Come with me.”
* * *
The school maintenance guy loads the robot onto a tilting red hand truck and brings it back to the office. The principal furiously sends me to sit in one of the chairs lined up against the wall, and then she summons in a whole raft of adults. There’s a blond woman named Ms. Kirschbaum who apparently teaches math and supports all the school computers. There’s Ms. Tetmeyer, who’s there as a witness, I guess. There’s an older man who has the “athletic coach” uniform, complete with a whistle around his neck, but he sidles out five minutes later, mumbling something about a previously scheduled meeting.
It occurred to me at some point when it was too late to do anything about it that I wasn’t wearing gloves or anything when I plugged in the USB drive, so if it does occur to them to dust for fingerprints, they may find incriminating evidence. It’s a relief to watch Ms. Kirschbaum take apart the robot without any particular care and yank out the USB drive with her own bare hand. Pretty sure any fingerprints on there now are going to be hers.
The principal snatches the USB drive out of Ms. Kirschbaum’s hand and turns toward the secretary’s computer. “Wait, stop!” Ms. Kirschbaum yells. “Don’t just plug it into a school computer; it’s probably got hacking software on it!” They dig an old laptop out of a closet and take a look at the drive, but either the script was self-deleting or CheshireCat covered my tracks, because the USB drive is blank, or at least they don’t see anything on it, which sets off a furious argument about whether this makes it more my fault somehow, or if maybe it was actually an outside hacker and not me at all. There’s an angry conversation about patches for the robot’s control software that might or might not ever have been installed.
The principal takes a break from yelling at her staff to come yell at me. Well, not yell. Exactly. She takes me into her office and closes the door and gives me a poisonous glare and says, “Miss Taylor, what exactly did you do?” in what was probably supposed to be a calm, controlled voice, one that would make me think I was in deep trouble and had better cooperate if I knew what was good for me.
But not for nothing have I listened to Marvin and Ico discuss—endlessly—the best ways to respond if you’re in trouble with some authority figure but they don’t actually have any hard proof that you did the thing they think you did.
“Never confess,” Marvin says whenever this comes up. “They’ll try to convince you that you’ll be in less trouble if you confess, and it is basically never true.”
Lying makes me nervous, but no one here even knows what I look like when I’m nervous. I furrow my brow and say furiously, “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of being responsible for this just because I’m new.” There. That wasn’t even a lie.
“Then who did this?”
“Why are you asking me? I barely even know anyone’s name.”
“I know what my students are and aren’t capable of. Except for you.”
I fold my arms and stare fixedly at the wall.
“Do I need to call your mother? Bring her in here?”
Might as well get it over with. I feel a pang, because I hate New Coburg but I don’t want to leave Rachel. “If you’re going to keep accusing me of messing with your robot, then yeah, I think I do want my mother here.”
Her eyes narrow. She pulls up my record from the computer and takes out her phone. I can’t tell if she’s actually dialing my mother’s number or bluffing, but no one picks up because she puts the phone down. I feel a prickle of worry and try to shake it off. Surely even if she did call, Mom is just busy. Or napping. She was better this morning.
“Principal Collins?” The secretary is knocking on the door. “I think Emily must have also called the police.”
The police officer who comes in is young, like barely older than me. “May I help you, Matt?” the principal asks. “I mean, Officer Olson?”
“I got a call from someone at the school,” he says. “Involving porn and minors? And the robot? Do I need to arrest the robot?”
“There was no porn,” Ms. Tetmeyer calls.
“Were you there?” He turns to her and whips out his phone to record her. “Please describe what happened.”
“The robot said it was going to go through all the questions submitted through the question box page, and then it actually answered all of them instead of saying, ‘You’ll have to ask your parents.’”
“What I was told was that there was graphic descriptions of sexual acts,” Matt says. “And hacking, which is also illegal. Is this the suspect?” He points at me.
“If I’m going to be questioned by the police, I want a lawyer present,” I say.
Matt goes beet red and gets right in my face, bending down since I’m in a chair. “You’ll get a lawyer when I say you get a lawyer, and not one minut
e before, missy. Is that understood?”
Wow. Rachel was not exaggerating about the police here.
“Is it understood?” His spit flies out and hits me in the face. I grab a Kleenex out of the box on the principal’s desk and wipe it off me.
“I am exercising my right to remain silent,” I say. “I’m not answering any questions until I have a lawyer.”
The principal is rubbing her forehead like it hurts. “You’re not under arrest, Stephanie,” she says.
“Then can I go back to class?”
Matt straightens up and says, “Have you talked to Rachel and Bryony yet? Whatever it is, they were probably involved.”
“I was going to do that next. Why don’t you stop back in later and we’ll pass along anything we’ve learned. All right?”
They ease him out the door, and then they do summon Bryony and Rachel. I’m briefly worried they’ll turn me in. Or try to help and accidentally incriminate me. But they disclaim all knowledge and clam up; Ico and Marvin would be proud. Ms. Tetmeyer is eyeing Rachel speculatively and shoots me a look at least once, but doesn’t point out that she left me alone with the robot, briefly, yesterday, when Rachel abruptly got dizzy. Probably because she doesn’t want to get in trouble herself for leaving me alone with it.
In the end, they send us all back to class.
Victory.
I mean, unless I regret staying by this time tomorrow.
* * *
I start hearing rumors about TV reporters an hour and a half later.
Emily, unsatisfied by the complete lack of arrests, has called the local news. They sent over a van from the studio, which is now parked outside the school, along with a reporter and a camera guy, and apparently Emily skipped out of her fifth-period class to get interviewed. They’re hoping to interview other students who were in the class. By art class, at the end of the day, the rumor’s gotten specific: since I’m the student who got dragged off to the office, they want to interview me.
I pull up the hood of my sweater, feeling like I’ve got a target pinned to my back. “I can’t be on TV,” I whisper to Rachel.
Catfishing on CatNet Page 9
