Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  I glance at Rachel, nervous. She narrows her eyes. “He’s a terrible PR guy,” she says. “They’re going to regret not calling a crisis management firm the minute this story broke.”

  “Are you some sort of PR expert?”

  “Oh, you know, two years ago, Suncraft Farms granola bars had salmonella contamination, and it was a thing. My mom’s friend Wendy works at the factory doing communications stuff, which meant running a cute Twitter feed about granola bars and breakfast cereal and writing news releases. After the salmonella contamination happened, she got pulled up in front of cameras and said, ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ when they asked her about the salmonella. They hired a crisis firm and sent Wendy to the mail room for six months.”

  “Is she back in communications now?” I ask.

  “Yeah, she’s pretty good at writing funny tweets. Also, the salmonella totally wasn’t our fault; it was a supplier.”

  I look at the Suncraft Farms Twitter feed. It looks like Wendy spends most of her day offering coupons for Suncraft Farms granola bars to anyone who mentions needing a snack: “You look like you’d enjoy our new Açai Berry-Yogurt breakfast bar! Here’s a coupon for 15% off your first box! #snacks #healthysnacks.”

  “Georgia thinks they’re going to put Chet Biscuit, PR rep, on ice,” I tell CatNet. “He’s no good at his job.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Marvin says.

  “How is this even news?” I ask. “I mean, you hack one robot…”

  “The robot hack is news because last week, GM announced that autonomous cars were now 25 percent of what’s on the road,” Ico says.

  “What? No way it’s that high,” Hermione says. “There’s, like, two in my entire town.”

  “Don’t you live somewhere in Maine?” Marvin asks.

  “Yeah,” Ico says. “California’s been subsidizing them because they’re fuel efficient and safer, so they’re all over here.”

  “I don’t see the connection,” I say.

  “A hacked robotic car would be a really big deal because it could run people over. I think that’s part of why everyone’s so interested in this story. Plus, I mean, it involves sex and teenagers.”

  “Talking about sex and teenagers,” CheshireCat says. “Anyway, he’s wrong about how secure Robono robots are. Their household robots are highly vulnerable to a major hack unless you install the patch that no one installs.”

  “We should totally hack all of them,” Marvin says, “and make every robotic floor cleaner in the country spontaneously go out to clean the floors at 2:00 a.m. today, just to divert the press from New Coburg.”

  “Was it a ruptured appendix your mom had?” Hermione asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s what they thought at the hospital, anyway. They took her into surgery, and they’re saying days or weeks of antibiotics in the hospital.”

  “So you can’t go anywhere.”

  “Not unless I leave her here.” She did say run. I try again to think of a place I’d run to.

  I plug in my mother’s laptop, open it up, and wake it. A password box appears, because of course the laptop is passworded. Mine is, too, but Mom knows my password. “Question for the hacker types,” I ask CatNet. “How do you get into a laptop if you don’t know the password?”

  Marvin asks me about the operating system and version and then gives me a procedure that’s supposed to get me in, only it doesn’t. Instead, a pixelated skull and crossbones pops up with a message saying YOU SHALL NOT PASS.

  “A skull and crossbones?” Firestar says.

  “Where exactly did this laptop come from?” Ico asks.

  “It’s my mom’s.”

  “She’s a programmer, right?” Ico says.

  “Do you think she wrote this lock program herself?” Marvin asks.

  “Maybe. LBB, which would you say is more likely: that your mother would use obscure shareware to secure her laptop, or write something of her own?”

  “The second one.”

  “I’m out of ideas,” Ico says.

  “Go back to that main screen and try your name,” Marvin says. “Or your nickname if there’s some dorky thing she calls you.”

  “My neighbors used the name of their dog as a Wi-Fi password,” Ico says.

  “How many wrong guesses do I get before it just deletes all my mom’s files?”

  “Normally, the answer would be ‘infinity,’ but I have no idea how your mom’s laptop protection program works,” Marvin says.

  “Just how sick is she?” Ico asks. “Could you run over to the hospital and just ask her, if she’s out of surgery?”

  “Ico, nooooooooo,” Firestar says.

  I try STEPHANIETAYLOR as the password. No success, but it does give me a hint: EIGHTH_BIRTHDAY. I report back in.

  “Well, what did you do on your eighth birthday?” Hermione asks.

  I have no recollection of my eighth birthday. I snap both laptops shut in frustration. “What did you do on your eighth birthday?” I ask Rachel.

  She looks up from her tablet. “Uh. That might have been the year we went roller-skating. Or maybe that was when I turned nine? I’m not sure. Why?” I explain the password thing.

  “Do you want to go back over to your apartment?” Rachel asks. “Sometimes people write down passwords…”

  “It wouldn’t be in the apartment,” I say, and it occurs to me that if she did write this down, it might be in our file box, which is still out in the back of Rachel’s car. I go get it, carry it up to Rachel’s bedroom, and pop off the lid. Rachel scoots over to look over my shoulder as I start flipping through.

  There are folders inside, but they’re not labeled. I find a contract and address for something called Secure Forwarding in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and contracts for the cell phones. I find a Social Security card for Dana Taylor, an expired driver’s license, and some other odds and ends. There’s a bunch of Iowa paperwork from the last time she got the car license plates updated, and a stack of my transcripts and report cards (the ones we got) going back to sometime in grade school, held together with a paper clip.

  Digging deeper, I find paperwork that says a divorce is granted to some people named Michael Quinn and Laura Packet, from Cupertino, California, which strikes me as an odd thing to have until a little farther beyond that I find the court papers from a name change, Laura Packet to Dana Taylor. And then just a little deeper, a birth certificate for a Stephania Quinnpacket with my birthday on it.

  “Apparently, my mother’s name isn’t really Dana, and my last name isn’t really Taylor?” I say out loud and giggle nervously. “My mom is actually Laura, and I’m Stephania Quinnpacket.”

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “I think it was my parents’ names mushed together.”

  There are some more legal papers, including a bunch that say ORDER OF PROTECTION and one that says CUSTODY on it. There’s a Last Will and Testament done with a kit (I can tell from the footers) and witnessed by a notary that says I should go to live with Xochitl Mariana, whoever that is. There’s a battered paperback book at the bottom with a picture of a typewriter inside a box and a photo print of four grinning people standing in front of a sign saying HOMERIC SOFTWARE. One of them looks like Mom. I flip it over, and the names on the back are Laura, Rajiv, Mike, and Xochitl. I have no idea how you pronounce Xochitl, but in my head, it’s zoe-chittle.

  No password.

  “Okay,” Rachel says. “Your eighth birthday. Are you sure you don’t remember?”

  I shake my head.

  “Do you remember anything about being seven?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I remember the one time I had a friend. The one time before now, I mean.” I tell Rachel about my summer with Julie: sundresses, bats, the basement apartment with the funny smell. The copy of Stellaluna. Ico’s theory that my mother gave her a false phone number. The number of people named Smith in the United States.

  “Do you still have the book?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I dig out Stellaluna, and Ra
chel flips immediately to the front page, which has an inscription: Merry Christmas, Julie, our little star, love Gramma and Gramps.

  “Too bad they didn’t write a town,” Rachel says, disappointed.

  “It still wouldn’t tell me where we went for my eighth birthday.”

  “Lie down on my bed,” Rachel says, scooting off it. “Close your eyes.” She opens the book and folds it delicately across my face. I start giggling, and she says, “Shhh, this is a recognized technique for memory retrieval! Focus on the smell.”

  I breathe in the smell of the book. It just smells like a book, not like my apartment under Julie’s house. Rachel doesn’t say anything, so I just breathe for a minute, thinking about Julie’s house again.

  After a few minutes, Rachel takes the book off my face and says, “Keep your eyes closed. You told me today that your earliest memory was kindergarten, right? So just start with that one.”

  “I was trying to cut shapes with safety scissors, and I got really mad and threw the scissors, and they hit another kid in the face and made him cry. I tried to tell everyone that I wasn’t throwing them at that kid, I was just mad at the scissors, and no one listened.

  “They sent me off to some room for kids who were in big trouble. I waited for hours, and when my mother picked me up, she’d already packed the van. We must have already been doing the constant moves because I knew what that meant. I remember this because I was so angry that time. Angry at everyone for not listening to me when I said it was an accident. Angry at my mother for thinking I was in so much trouble we had to leave. I don’t know why she thought we had to leave. I mean, I was a kindergartener who got sent to the principal’s office; the police weren’t involved or anything.”

  “Do you remember where this was?”

  “It was hot. The air was sticky. We drove for a whole day to get to our next place, and I think it was a state with a two-word name, like North Dakota or South Dakota.”

  I tell Rachel about getting into trouble over and over until I learned to just shut down instead of getting angry. I tell her about the girl in first grade who got in my face and said, “I heard you live in the upstairs of the Laundromat.” Her name was Angie, and her hair was parted perfectly in the middle and done in thick shining braids without a hair out of place. I tell her about deciding that time that it would be worth moving again, and ripping out a big piece of Angie’s hair and still having it in my hand when I got in my mother’s van to go to the next town.

  When we get to Julie again, I remember we lived in that house during the summer and that Mom specifically said she wanted to move before fall came. We moved in just after school got out; we moved out just before school started. Julie had told me that we’d have Mrs. Seegmiller, who she said was really mean, but it wouldn’t be so bad with me in the class with her, and I wonder now if that’s part of why Mom moved before the year started. I probably would not have gotten along very well with a teacher already well-established as mean.

  “Utah,” I say suddenly. “Julie lived in Utah.” And then I remember my eighth birthday: I’d begged, as a birthday present, to go back and visit Julie, and Mom had refused and instead she’d taken me to an amusement park. I can’t remember the name of the amusement park, but I remember it had a giant swing ride that went over water and a roller coaster that looked like it went straight up and straight down.

  “Okay, let’s look at pictures,” Rachel says, and so I sit up and we search the internet for amusement parks with roller coasters that go straight up and straight down. None of them look remotely like what I’m picturing, and none of them have giant swings that go out over the water, and the more I think about it, the less certain I am that either of these is right.

  “It’s an amusement park, though,” Rachel says. “Maybe if we keep trying, you’ll remember what state you were in at the time? It wouldn’t be hard to narrow it down…”

  “I want to look up some of the other stuff I found,” I say.

  Xochitl Mariana is a computer programmer who works in Boston. She has her picture on her résumé and looks about Mom’s age, probably. I close the window.

  “Holy shit, check this out,” Rachel says, and she spins her computer so I can see it. She’s searched on Stephania Quinnpacket and pulled up the first hit.

  It’s a very simple page titled Searching for Stephania Quinnpacket, and there’s a picture of a chubby-cheeked infant with dark hair and a suspicious expression who I guess could be me.

  Stephania Quinnpacket is my 16-year-old daughter whose mother took her and vanished when she was three years old. My ex-wife is vindictive and may have told her lies about me and about our life together. I wish to re-establish contact with Stephania. $1000 reward for information.

  Rachel stares at the screen. “Do you think this is true?”

  I shake my head, running through what I know about my father: the arson, the stalking, the prison sentence. “He went to jail.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe your mom just told you that.”

  Am I sure? My mother showed me a newspaper clipping, but those can be faked. Rachel is reading off a page about parental kidnapping with a description that sounds like my life:

  Frequent moves, false IDs, trouble getting even basic health care …

  And suddenly I remember that the newspaper clipping my mother showed me claimed my father’s last name was Taylor, like ours.

  But his name is Quinn. The article is a fake.

  15

  Clowder

  LittleBrownBat: So apparently my name isn’t really my name.

  {Georgia is here}

  Georgia: Steph am I doing this right

  LittleBrownBat: You’re supposed to call me LBB in the chat room, Georgia.

  Georgia: oh right sorry

  LBB are you going to tell them about the website

  LittleBrownBat: I need to explain the birth certificate first.

  I found a birth certificate with my first name, more or less, but a different last name. Stephania Quinnpacket. And Georgia found this website—

  {active link to offsite—click to activate}

  Which says I was KIDNAPPED.

  Firestar: WHOA.

  Hermione: Is that actually a picture of you?

  Georgia: Pretty sure it’s her. Same chin.

  Firestar: omg I just realized that Georgia knows what you actually look like because you didn’t have to take a selfie, she’s just looking at your FACE.

  What does she look like Georgia? You have to describe her!

  Georgia: I know you’ll be shocked to hear this but LittleBrownBat is not in fact an actual bat.

  Firestar: I KNEW IT

  Or at least I always suspected

  But is LBB cute?

  Georgia: Oh yeah adorable.

  LittleBrownBat: Are we seriously having this conversation? Instead of talking about the website?

  Marvin: Do you think your mother really kidnapped you?

  LittleBrownBat: No! But I mean, how would I even know?

  Hermione: What did your mom tell you about your father?

  LittleBrownBat: That he burned down our house and killed the cat and almost us but they weren’t able to pin the arson on him so they convicted him of stalking.

  And we went on the run while he was in prison.

  Mom showed me a laminated newspaper article, only it says his name is Michael Taylor, and it’s not.

  It’s Michael Quinn.

  So that article was a fake. A fake like the birth certificate she shows to schools.

  A fake like everything else I know about myself!

  CheshireCat: There’s a database of missing children, and I looked up Stephania Quinnpacket and Stephanie Taylor and neither are in it.

  LittleBrownBat: But what if Stephania Quinnpacket is also a lie?

  Icosahedron: I looked up the owner of the domain of that website, but whoever it is uses a privacy service so I can’t see the name.

  LittleBrownBat: Figures.

  Icosahe
dron: I’ll try some social engineering and see what comes back.

  Firestar: What’s social engineering?

  Icosahedron: It’s like how if you want to know your next-door neighbor’s Wi-Fi password, instead of asking, “Hey, what’s your Wi-Fi password?” you might have a casual conversation with them about how to choose a password that’s easy to remember because sometimes they’ll say, “Maybe you could use your pet’s name.”

  LittleBrownBat: What are you actually doing?

  Icosahedron: There’s a way to send a message through the privacy service, so I created a new email account and sent a message saying that I’m an assistant to someone at a movie studio and we’re in preproduction for a movie that involves a super spy named Brun Quinnpacket and so we want to buy the Quinnpacket domain if it’s available, offering $5000. Maybe he’ll email me back.

  Hermione: Is it possible that both things are true?

  Your father is dangerous, AND your mom kidnapped you?

  LittleBrownBat: I don’t even know what to think.

  Hermione: I guess you really can’t talk to your mom right now …

  LittleBrownBat: Not sure I’d talk to her anyway.

  Even she weren’t in the hospital we kind of don’t have a talking sort of relationship.

  Hermione: Have you told her about your secret cat yet?

  LittleBrownBat: Well, for example, I have not told her about my secret cat yet.

  Boom Storm: How’s the cat doing?

  LittleBrownBat: She had kittens.

  Firestar: OMG FREE KITTENS! I WANT ONE!

  16

  Steph

  CheshireCat is using their magic AI powers to do all the searches on Michael Quinn. Rachel is lying on her bed. “Is CheshireCat, like, a private investigator?” she asks. “I sort of figured everyone was a teenager.”