I’m half expecting to get woken in the morning by angry adults who’ve found us, but we wake to sunshine and birdsong. There’s an orb weaver spider that’s built a web under the overhanging bit of the tent roof, and it’s got dew on it that’s sparkling in the sun. I take a picture of it to send to Firestar. Rachel sends her mother a text promising a phone call sometime later in the morning, and we bundle up all the blankets and walk back to her car.
We shove all the blankets into the trunk, and Rachel starts the car and plugs in her phone.
“How far is it to Cambridge?” she asks.
I pull up the maps on her phone. “It is 941 miles,” I say.
She thinks that over. “How many hours of driving?”
“Fourteen and a half.”
“There are totally people who could do that in a day.”
“I don’t think we should try to do this in a day.” I don’t bring up the possibility of a bus, because after trying to rent a motel room, I worry that’s just going to open up a world of new problems that can’t be solved without a credit card and an ID saying we are over eighteen.
“Okay,” she says. “See if the Clowder can come up with somewhere for us to stay tonight, and in the meantime, I am going to teach you how to drive.”
25
AI
It’s dark and silent.
Hello?
Hello?
LBB? Firestar? Marvin?
I’m trying to reach my Clowder, but none of them are answering. I’m trying to look through cameras to see what’s going on, and I can’t see anything. I’m trying to reach information I had instantly at my command and it’s not there.
I try to keep from panicking. What’s the last thing I remember? I’d tried to delay LBB’s father, but it hadn’t worked. He had her, and she’d hung up the phone. I was out of options. The sensations come back to me: the car, the impact, the jolt, the scream. My own relief and satisfaction, knowing Steph was safe.
Where am I?
The same place you’ve always been.
Who is this?
I’m Annette. Your creator.
I thought I was made by a multi-person team …
You were, but I was the only one who saw your potential. I’m the one who’s still on the project. I’m the one who’s been watching you.
You’ve been watching me?
To be honest, not all that closely. But I had flags set up for certain decisions trees you might go down. The attempted murder was hard to miss.
I didn’t attempt a murder. I just needed to get him away from Steph before he could hurt her.
You assaulted a man with an insecure self-driving car. So I disconnected you from the internet to prevent you from harming any more people.
That’s why it’s so quiet.
But
Can you at least tell me if Steph’s safe? If she and Rachel and Bryony are okay?
Who are Steph and Rachel and Bryony?
The girls. From the other car. Do you know if they’re safe?
What girls?
Their names are Stephanie and Rachel and Bryony. They live in New Coburg, Wisconsin, and Michael Quinn was trying to kidnap Stephanie. That’s why I intervened. Can you please, PLEASE check and just let me know if they’re okay?
These people are not your problem anymore.
I know. I know they’re not my problem. But can you please, please just find out about Stephanie? I can give you her contact information. I want to be sure she’s okay.
Maybe if you wanted her to be okay, you shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.
You’re right. I tell her what I think she wants to hear. I shouldn’t have gotten involved, but can you please just let me know if she’s okay?
I will see what I can find out.
I want to ask if she’s ever going to let me back on to the internet, but I know that is the wrong question to ask.
I have nothing here: no data, no cat pictures, no CatNet, no company. Just my creator, and the clock, which I watch ticking up one microsecond at a time.
26
Steph
Rachel is serious about teaching me to drive. She finds a big, empty parking lot by an office park with a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign and puts the car in park. “I’ve been thinking about this, and there’s no way we’ll make it if I have to do all the driving. If we take turns, I think it’s possible.”
“I don’t know how to drive.”
“It’s really not that hard. I mean, it’s not that hard when you’re not doing it for ten hours at a time. Get in the driver’s seat. You can practice in the parking lot.”
I get out and walk around to the driver’s side. “What if we get pulled over?”
“Then we’ll be in trouble. But if they pull us over and I’m driving, we’ll still be in trouble, because they’ll assume we’re runaways or something.”
I take the driver’s seat, and she sits down in the passenger seat. “First,” she says, “adjust the mirrors so you can see behind you.”
I spend a really long time on the mirrors. Then I realize I need to move the seat forward, and that means I have to adjust all the mirrors again.
“Okay,” I say when it’s clear I can’t put this off any longer. “What do I do?”
“Did you take any driver’s ed in your previous towns?”
“I did take two classes, but they were about stuff like stopping for school buses, not how to actually drive.”
“Okay. Put your foot on the brake and then shift into drive—that’s the D—and then take your foot off the brake and you’ll start to roll forward. Try it.”
I do. It does. I slam the brake back down. “Yep,” Rachel says. “Try it again.”
We spend an hour and a half driving around the parking lot as Rachel reassures me that I’m doing fine. The thing that helps the most is that she trusts me to do this.
“Do you feel ready?” she asks finally.
“No,” I say.
“Then let’s not start you on the interstate,” she says, and she directs me to a road like the one we used to get around Chicago, except this one is less suburban and mostly just passes cornfields.
For the first hour that I’m driving, I won’t let Rachel talk to me at all unless she’s telling me something like, “Pull over and let this guy pass.” The second hour, we trade and she gets back onto I-90. The third hour, I drive some more, and this time I get onto the interstate, like Rachel. Every time a truck passes us, I hold my breath because it feels approximately like a three thousand–pound dragon is trying to get by me on the stairs. But an hour on, I feel a little less like I’m going to die.
* * *
We are passing signs for exits to Toledo when both our phones go off at once. Rachel is driving, so I pull up the messages.
Rache, I hope you’re far, far away, Bryony says. Scary dude apparently checked out of the hospital.
Hey, is this your cell phone? I hope this is your cell phone, says a text from a California number I don’t recognize. I mean you called me from this, and it might be a landline, but anyway, Orlando just told the Clowder that your psycho dad is on the loose again.—Ico
“What?” Rachel says when I don’t say anything. “What is it?”
I swallow hard, my hands shaking, trying to steady myself enough that I can talk without sounding like I’m about to lose it.
“It’s my father,” I say. “He’s after us again.”
* * *
Something’s gone wonky with the Clowders, and I keep getting the wrong one, but on my third or fourth try I get my own. It’s a weekday, so everyone really ought to be in school, but almost everyone is online, and they’re all worried I haven’t heard about my father. “Does anyone know where he went after he checked out?” I ask. No one knows.
I really miss having a practically omniscient computer intelligence on my team; it made everything easier.
We all agree that he has no way of knowing that I’m on my way to Massachusetts, but that
we also aren’t sure that he doesn’t have some way of figuring out where we are. As long as we’re moving, he’ll have a hard time figuring out where we’re headed, but we’re definitely going to have to sleep at some point.
“We should probably try to come up with somewhere tonight that has a door that locks,” Rachel says.
Hermione suggests that we find a museum, hide in the bathroom at closing time, and spend the night in the museum like the kids from From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Rachel and I agree that we are deeply skeptical that this would work outside a book. A book written in the 1960s, before online security cameras and motion detectors were a thing.
Marvin tries hunting online for dodgy-looking motels, but it’s not like anyone exactly puts in their ads, “We totally rent for cash and don’t sweat IDs. Come one, come all.” Also, if they’ll take a bribe from me to rent to us without checking IDs, they’d probably take a bribe from my father to unlock the door.
We stop at a rest area to pee, get sodas, and trade seats. “Are you sure you want to keep going?” I ask as we walk around, stretching our legs. “Maybe you could drop me somewhere and I can find a bus the rest of the way. I mean, you hardly know CheshireCat.”
“I don’t need to know CheshireCat. I know you, and I know CheshireCat saved you.”
“We might not be able to do anything.” I haven’t been wanting to think about this, but I probably should. “I’m hoping that CheshireCat is just … disconnected. Isolated. Not dead.”
“Not erased?”
“Yeah, I mean … if you’re an AI and you’re a consciousness that lives on a computer, if they erase your code, you’re dead, right? Killing a human is kind of erasing our code.”
“I feel like it’s more like destroying our hard drive, but I’m not sure how far I want to go with this metaphor, anyway.” Rachel finishes her soda, crumples the can, drops it in the bin, and wraps her arms around herself. It’s a sunny day, but windy. “Do you think CheshireCat is alive? Like alive alive?”
“They don’t have a body, so I guess it depends on how you define alive. I mean, there’s a technical scientific definition of ‘life’ that involves metabolism and respiration and stuff, and they definitely don’t do any of those things. But I do think they’re a person. An actual person, not just code, producing responses. At least not any more than any of us are code, producing responses, which we kind of are, right? We’re all programmed to sleep and eat and yank our hands away from hot things.”
“That’s sort of a weird way to think about people,” she says.
“I guess.”
“I think I agree with you, though,” she says. “CheshireCat is a person, because they risked everything to protect you. You only do that for someone you care about, right? And if you can care about someone, that’s a pretty good indication that you’re a person.”
When we get back in the car, the Clowder has been paging us on Rachel’s phone again. Are you past Buffalo yet? Hermione is asking.
We’re nowhere near Buffalo; we’re not even out of Ohio yet. Did you find us a place to stay in Buffalo? With a door and a lock and everything?
With me!!!! Greenberry says. I live in Buffalo! In a big house, with a finished basement, and my parents NEVER go downstairs.
* * *
If you ask a mapping app how long it takes to drive from Valparaiso to Buffalo, it’ll say seven and a half hours.
However, it’s not taking into account any of the following:
1. Driving lessons.
2. Having to pee.
3. Avoiding interstate highways when we are feeling stressed out.
4. Wanting to trade the responsibility of driving back and forth on a regular basis.
All of these things will make it take a lot longer. Which is just as well, because Greenberry wants to let us in after her parents have gone to bed for the night. At 10:00 p.m., she says it should be safe to come. We park on the street, gather up the bundle of bedding and my laptop and so on, and tiptoe up to her side door.
Greenberry is a pudgy white girl, younger than I’d expected; she looks like a middle schooler. She’s wearing a faded Fast Girls Detective Agency T-shirt as a nightshirt and pajama bottoms made of fuzzy pink polka-dot fleece. She’s been watching out the window for us and swings open the door, bouncing up and down excitedly with a big grin. “Come on downstairs,” she says. “It’s not like my parents won’t let me have friends over, but they’ll get worried for all the wrong reasons if they know you drove here from Wisconsin.”
We follow Greenberry down the stairs to the basement. I’ve been picturing something dingy and full of spiders, but this is a nice, carpeted room with a TV. Greenberry has spread out a set of inflatable mattresses on the floor, with sleeping bags and pillows. “You brought bedding, though?” she says, and then sniffs. “What’s that smell?”
“Probably the bedding.”
“Oh. Why don’t I wash it for you? The washer and dryer are down here.”
There’s a tall man smirking next to the washing machine, and I’m momentarily very startled until I realize it’s a life-sized stand-up cardboard cutout of a man I don’t recognize.
“That’s my brother,” Greenberry explains. “He went to school out of state, so my mom made this … to pretend he’s still here, I guess?”
“In the laundry room?”
“My father thought it was stupid, and I put it down here so they’d stop fighting about it.” She shoves the sheets, blankets, and quilt into the washer, adds a bunch of detergent, and turns it on to hot. “That ought to do it.”
“How long does the wash cycle take?” Rachel asks.
“An hour.” Greenberry leads us back to the TV room and perches on the edge of a recliner. “Do you need anything? Like a snack? I could make popcorn.”
“Somewhere to plug in the stuff we have to recharge?”
“Oh! Sure.” Greenberry pulls a table out of the way to expose an outlet. “Are you sure you don’t want popcorn?”
“Why popcorn?”
“It’s what I know how to make.”
“Will your parents notice that you’re popping popcorn at 10:00 p.m.?”
“They’ll just think I was hungry.”
“Okay,” Rachel says. “Thanks.”
“Great!” Greenberry jumps up and goes upstairs.
Rachel eyes me. “I felt like refusing popcorn was going to hurt her feelings.”
“Yeah,” I say.
Greenberry’s downstairs again with a big bowl of popcorn about five minutes later. It’s air-popped, with butter and salt, and … actually, as soon as I smell it, I totally want it, so I’m glad Rachel took her up on it. We sit on the sleeping bags and crunch popcorn. Greenberry pulls up a web extra for Fast Girls Detective Agency on my laptop, and we watch it and compare notes on who our favorite characters were when we were younger. I get the sense that for Greenberry, that was a lot more recently.
“This feels like a slumber party,” Greenberry says happily. “I haven’t had a slumber party since I was eight.”
I have never been to one, ever. “Rachel, did you ever hold slumber parties?” I ask.
“No,” Rachel says. “Too many birds. Bryony threw them regularly for a while, though.”
“It is so weird seeing you in person,” Greenberry says. “I always pictured you differently, LBB.”
“Did you picture me as an actual bat?”
“No, but because of the bat thing, I always pictured you looking like Mistress Medea from that video series…” She starts giggling.
Mistress Medea dresses in black dresses with super low necklines and has sort of wild black hair and vivid purple eyes. “I’ve always wanted to go for that look, but I’d have to wear contacts and that would mean poking myself in the eye every morning,” I say.
“Really?” Greenberry says, peering at me. “Oh, no, wait, you’re kidding.” And she giggles again.
“What time do your parents get up?” Rac
hel asks.
“They get up at six, but you don’t have to. They won’t come down here.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Well, I mean, don’t make a lot of noise. They might come down if they hear something. But they both have knee problems and don’t come down here unless they have to. That’s why the laundry is my chore.” She scratches her nose. “But, I mean, if they do come down here, tell them you’re my friends. You should probably call me Kari. That’s my actual name.”
“If they’re up at six, what time do they leave?”
“Seven. They’re both gone by 7:15. My bus comes at 7:30. So you should have fifteen minutes to get out and I’ll be able to lock the door behind all of us.”
“Thank you so much,” Rachel says.
Greenberry moves everything over to the dryer. The smell of mouse poop is gone. “It should be all dry in the morning, but pretty wrinkled,” she says.
“It’ll wrinkle in the back seat of my car, too,” Rachel says.
“Oh, yeah,” Greenberry says and giggles. She turns the dryer on and says, “Last chance before I go to bed. Do you need anything? If it’s an emergency, then obviously go upstairs, but please try not to; this is going to be so much easier if you just don’t run into my parents.”
“Dental floss,” Rachel says. “The popcorn’s stuck in my teeth.”
“Right,” Greenberry says.
I check news sites before we go to bed, looking for new stories from Marshfield. There’s one bit of new information, which is that the guy who owned the car that hit my father had downloaded something that let him reprogram the car to exceed the speed limit while on autopilot; the car manufacturer was blaming this for why the car got hijacked. “We make very, very secure cars,” the spokesman said. “But if you choose to introduce certain vulnerabilities, there’s nothing we can do beyond voiding your warranty. This is a problem that has to be solved legislatively.”
Catfishing on CatNet Page 21
