Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  Rachel sniffs. “They’re going to regret not calling a crisis management firm,” she mutters.

  We shut off the lights, and I lie awake in the dark. The bedroom is warm and comfortable, and I saw Greenberry lock the door herself so I know we’ve got a locked door between us and my father, and this house even has a security system, and Rachel goes right to sleep, I think, but somehow I’m awake.

  Greenberry’s comment about slumber parties has me thinking about friendships—all the people I met over the years who seemed cool, who seemed like they could be real friends, maybe, but who I didn’t bother trying to get close to because I knew I’d just lose them. It’s not quite true that I was never invited to parties. I mean, I wasn’t invited to parties in the town where all the cool girls wore plaid, but I remember being included in group invites, handed notes, invited over, and just … never asking my mom for permission. It wasn’t worth it.

  Will Mom make me give up CatNet when all this is over?

  Will I let her?

  I’m thinking about Julie again, and suddenly I know where it was I went on my eighth birthday. My mother’s computer is still in the laptop bag, and I get up as quietly as I can, open it, and turn it on.

  PASSWORD: it asks.

  NOT_UTAH, I type.

  And that’s all it takes. I’m in.

  Also, the battery’s dying because apparently I didn’t properly shut it down, it was just “asleep” this whole time, so I get out the charging cord, plug it in next to my laptop and Rachel’s phone, and go back to bed.

  * * *

  We wake up to the sound of Greenberry’s parents fighting.

  “Are you driving Kari to the therapist this afternoon?”

  “No, you are driving Kari to the therapist this afternoon. I have a meeting.”

  “Thanks for telling me.” That’s in a super sarcastic tone. “Anything else I can take care of for you while we’re out?”

  “Did you pick up the thank-you gift for Louise?”

  “We already paid her—not sure why she needs a gift.”

  On and on like that, for forty-five minutes. At 7:15 on the dot, they both leave, still arguing. At 7:16, Greenberry is downstairs, dressed in her school uniform, a little flushed. “Do you need anything before I go?” she asks.

  There’s not a lot of time for breakfast, but she’s put together a care package of snacks for us and travel mugs of coffee. “We won’t be able to give the mugs back!” Rachel points out.

  “Oh, no worries,” Greenberry says. “My father had a bunch of these made as gifts to give clients of his firm, and he made too many and we’ve got fifteen in a cabinet, which is good because my mother loses travel mugs constantly. Anyway, they won’t be missed.”

  She gives us both awkward hugs and then lets us out the side door again. “Let me know what happens,” she says.

  “I will,” I promise.

  * * *

  It’s a beautiful day—sunny, pleasant, and the leaves are changing, so the scenery’s really nice. Best of all, we are almost there. I mean, it’s a seven-hour drive and 450 miles, but given how far we’ve come, it really feels close now.

  “I got into my mom’s laptop,” I say.

  “You figured out the password?” Rachel asks. “So where did you go for your eighth birthday?”

  “Not Utah. Not, underscore, Utah. Like, Utah was where I’d been begging to go—I wanted to go back to Utah to see Julie, and instead she took me to some stupid amusement park, and I was furious the whole day that it wasn’t Utah.”

  Rachel glances over at me from the road. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, yeah. That makes sense.”

  When we stop, she turns on her hot spot so I can connect from my mom’s laptop now that it’s charged. My mom has a bunch of unread email messages from Xochitl. One of them mentions texting me, so probably the message claiming to be Xochitl was actually her and not my father.

  Xochitl also mentions hearing from “someone claiming to be R” and adds “watch your step,” which is not reassuring.

  “Wasn’t there a guy named Rajiv?” Rachel asks when I read this to her.

  “He’s dead! I think. The article I read said he committed suicide while waiting for trial.”

  “Well, that would explain why she says claiming … but R is a pretty common initial.”

  I poke around through my mother’s files and find one marked READ ME STEPH. That seems promising, but it’s this weird, disjointed list that she clearly intended to turn into a letter but never actually did. MASSIVE INTEGER FACTORIZATION ALGORITHM is one bullet point and YOUR FATHER HAD ME WATERBOARDED is another bullet point, and there’s a whole set of file names and a couple of hints for passwords that are—thank goodness—much more obvious to me than where we went for my eighth birthday. (I’m pretty sure that by my favorite book, she means Stellaluna; I test this out and the file decrypts. I look at it. It’s a bunch of code. I have no idea what this is even for.)

  I try googling MASSIVE INTEGER FACTORIZATION ALGORITHM and get a Wikipedia page about math. After poking around and discovering only more math, I try reading the Wikipedia page and discover that this is maybe something about cryptography, although I’m not sure. I try pulling up the Clowder but keep getting random groups that aren’t what I want, and anyway, almost none of my friends are online, probably because Marvin, Hermione, and Firestar are all on their way to Cambridge.

  Ico’s on, though. I send him a private message to ask him if he has any thoughts about what a massive integer factorization algorithm might be.

  “Well, it could be a reference to the holy grail of computer hacking,” he says. “An awful lot of online encryption—not all of it, but lots of it—is done with very large numbers that are the product of two primes, and if you could efficiently factor them, that would make it super easy to break into, say, almost all the banks.”

  “What could you do with this? Steal money? Launch nukes?”

  “Probably you couldn’t actually launch nukes. You could definitely steal a lot of money, though.”

  “What if you wanted to make yourself dictator of the world?” I ask, thinking about what my mother said about my father.

  “Hmm,” Ico says. “That’s a harder question. I mean, you could steal a bunch of government secrets along with the money. If you were smart, you could certainly get yourself a whole lot of power. For a while, anyway. There are types of security everyone could switch to once they knew someone had figured out the prime factorization thing.”

  In my gut, I think this is what my father is after. It makes more sense than him still being after my mother, all these years later.

  I consider uploading my mother’s file for Ico to look at, but then he adds, “Now, if what you wanted was to bring down civilization as we know it like a house of cards in a magnitude 5.8 earthquake—that you could probably do.” I decide I don’t want to just hand it off to Ico. I mean, I like Ico, but that doesn’t mean I entirely trust his impulse control.

  “Wow,” I send, and I log out. And then log off. And then turn off my mother’s laptop. My father definitely doesn’t know where I went for my eighth birthday. If he catches up with us, I at least want him to have to work to get in to that file.

  * * *

  New York goes on and on and on. I’d always pictured New York as a city, but the state is full of woods and farms, and weirdly, it actually looks a lot like Wisconsin: corn and dairy farms.

  “Which one of us is going to drive in the city?” I ask. There’s no going around this time; we’re heading into Cambridge.

  “Me,” Rachel says. “Because if we get into an accident, we’ll be in way more trouble if you’re the one driving.”

  We pull over at the WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS rest area tourist info thing and trade seats. More of my friends are online; I start pulling people into a large group message, since the regular Clowder still doesn’t want to work.

  “How much farther is it?” Rachel asks.

  “Two hours.”

&n
bsp; “TWO HOURS. Okay. We should figure out where we’re all going to meet. And by we, I mean you should figure it out.”

  I’m almost done pulling people in when it occurs to me to check my own phone for texts.

  I have one. Again, it’s from a strange number.

  It’s Mom. Keep moving. He’s after you. Don’t let him find you. Don’t text back, this is a borrowed phone.

  I feel a flush of deep relief, despite how ominous the message is. Mom’s okay.

  27

  Clowder

  LBB & Georgia: Okay, is this working?

  Firestar: HOLY SHIT WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON WITH THE SITE TODAY

  Hermione: I’m going to guess that it doesn’t work well without any of the admins around?

  LBB & Georgia: I found a feature to let me set up a multiuser chat, so whew. I can only add people who are currently logged on right now though.

  {Marvin has been added to the chat}

  Marvin: GROWN-UPS ARE NAFF

  Firestar: You got grown-ups? I got an RPG group and it was awesome.

  Hermione: You’re leaving us for gaming?

  Firestar: NEVER.

  I want to be consensually polyamorous with you and gaming.

  LBB & Georgia: We are in Massachusetts. Cambridge is about two hours away. I think we should meet at Cherry Pi, which is a place that sells coffee and pie.

  Firestar: Pie is always good.

  Marvin: I am already in Boston.

  I am actually sitting next to Firestar.

  HI FIRESTAR

  Firestar: HI MARVIN

  Marvin: And technically Firestar has just informed me that we are not in Boston but in Cambridge. So we can definitely meet you at the Cherry Pi in two hours. Right now we’re hanging out at Harvard pretending to be the sort of people who hang out at Harvard.

  Hermione: Technically, you are the sort of people who hang out at Harvard! Since that’s literally where you’re hanging out!

  Marvin: Where are you right now, Hermione?

  Hermione: I am on a bus.

  I’ll be in Cambridge in an hour.

  {Greenberry has been added to the chat}

  Greenberry: Oh hi everyone!

  LBB & Georgia: We’re figuring out where to meet in Boston. You don’t have to stay in the chat if you don’t want.

  Greenberry: Of course I want to stay! It was so neat to meet you in person! You’re ALL going to meet in person, and I’d be jealous, but I got to meet you first!

  Hermione: Marvin, I thought you couldn’t drive. How did you get to Boston?

  Marvin: I found someone who would drive me to Boston if I gave him $500 in cash.

  Money solves so many problems!

  Also I did not wind up dead in a ditch somewhere, which is good, because somewhere around Maryland or Delaware I started worrying.

  So where are we going? A house, an office, an apartment? If it’s an office, they might not even be there in two hours.

  LBB & Georgia: It’s a house at 66 Antshire Street, Cambridge.

  Firestar: Do you want us to scope it out? Walk by and gawk?

  LBB & Georgia: If you really want? But wait for me to get there to knock, okay?

  Marvin: FUNSUCKER.

  28

  Steph

  Boston traffic is awful.

  The drivers here all seem basically homicidal, and the roads aren’t labeled well. We keep getting stuck in massive traffic backups, which is almost a relief because when we’re stopped on the road I can check the map and make sure we’re still on the right road. Although Rachel’s phone seems to find Boston bewildering and keeps trying to recalculate what we ought to be doing based on the idea that we’re on the city street running under the highway, instead of on the highway itself.

  We manage not to die. I’m a little surprised.

  When we get off in Cambridge, the directions seem almost straightforward until we get to this intersection with what seems like about seven streets all converging and realize too late Rachel has gone the wrong way. There’s a parking garage, though, and we’re in Cambridge, so Rachel just parks and then we look at her phone and realize it’s a good half-mile walk still to the coffee shop.

  “Do you want me to get the car back out?” she asks a little hesitantly.

  “No. We can walk the rest of the way.” I pack up both laptops into my backpack and slip it on over my coat.

  The houses in Cambridge are very close together, and the sidewalks are narrow and hardly anyone has a yard to speak of. We keep passing groups of college students; they’re loud and cheerful and all seem to be having a good time with their friends.

  The Cherry Pi has a neon cherry in its front window. I peer through and see a group of college students at a big table near the front. As I come in, all their heads swing toward me and Rachel, and I recognize Hermione from the selfies she’s posted and realize they’re not college students. They’re my Clowder. They’re here, waiting for me and Rachel.

  “Are you Little Brown Bat?” asks an Asian kid with short black hair and a baggy black T-shirt that says SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT: WANTED, DEAD AND ALIVE on the front. “You’re Little Brown Bat and Georgia, right? Are you? I don’t want to hug you until I know for sure.”

  “I’m Little Brown Bat,” I say, and Firestar sweeps me into a hug so enthusiastic they almost pull me off my feet. Firestar never posts selfies; they told me once this is because in the Clowder, no one ever has to know if they were identified male or female at birth—they can really just be a them.

  “And you’re Georgia?” Firestar says. “I don’t know you as well. Would you like a firm handshake instead of a hug?”

  “Handshake sounds great,” Rachel says, sounding relieved.

  “I am so delighted to meet you,” Firestar says, pumping Rachel’s hand twice.

  Hermione looks like her pictures—short brown hair, freckles, glasses—but I still expected high-school-aged Emma Watson. She slides out from the table and gives me a hug, though it’s a less exuberant hug than I got from Firestar.

  Marvin is really tall. He’s even taller when he sits up straight; he’s slouching when I arrive at the table. His hair is short; he has his ears pierced, with a little gold ring in each ear, and a butterfly drawn on his wrist in Sharpie. “Like my art? Courtesy of Firestar,” he says. “I’m up for a hug if you want one.” He gives me a side-hug without actually standing up, which is fine because I’m pretty sure I’d come up to about his armpit.

  “So my name’s actually Steph,” I say. “But if you want to keep calling me LBB, you can.”

  “I’m Rachel,” Rachel says. “Or Georgia.”

  “I’m Nick,” Marvin says.

  “Cam,” Firestar says.

  “My name is Madison,” Hermione says, “but I am one of eight Madisons in my grade, and I would really prefer it if everyone would keep calling me Hermione.”

  “Is that your real-life nickname?” I ask.

  “No. It’s too embarrassing to ask everyone to call me that,” she says. “But you already call me Hermione, so it’s different. By the way, did you know that Cherry Pi was a robot café when you sent us here?”

  “A what?”

  Hermione points toward a glass wall separating the eating area from the bakery itself, and I stand up for a closer look.

  Apparently, the Cherry Pi is some project started by a bunch of MIT grads: all the baked goods are made by robots, and you can watch the robots work, so I do that for a few minutes. Some of the baked goods are delivered through a sliding door to the café for sale (the cash register is run by a human) and others are packaged up in boxes with shrink wrap for instant delivery by drone to anywhere in Cambridge. From inside the café, we can see drones taking off with boxes of doughnuts and frosted cakes, and other drones are coming back and being attached to the charging wall by the robot dispatcher.

  It’s kind of mesmerizing.

  “If you order a sandwich, they have a sandwich-making robot that makes it for you,” Hermione says. “Do
either of you want a sandwich? We got sandwiches earlier, and it’s pretty neat to watch.”

  I shake myself and check the time. “No,” I say. “We’ve been snacking on the road and I’m not hungry. We’re all here, right? Everyone who’s coming? Let’s go.”

  * * *

  We make our way up a residential street that’s so narrow I’m surprised cars can even fit. The sidewalks here are made out of red brick. The house, when we reach it, is a blue house with a small front porch and a bay window. We stop, and everyone looks at me.

  I’m going to have to knock. My mouth goes dry, but we’ve come all this way, and I said they had to wait for me, and I’m here with my friends and they have my back as literally as possible. They follow me up the front steps, and watch as I ring the bell. I hear a ding … dong from somewhere deep in the house. We wait. Someone’s coming; fingers part the curtain that hangs over the window in the door, and someone peers out at us.

  For a minute, I am not sure if they’re going to open the door, and I wonder what we even look like. Five teenagers. Do we look like Harvard students? MIT students? Do we look like we’re going to ask for money, or directions, or like we’re going to try to tell her about the Bible or the Book of Mormon? I have just started wondering what we’re going to do if this person doesn’t open the door when I hear the lock turn.

  A woman swings open the door. She’s younger than I’d expected. I mean, obviously older than us, but younger than my mom.

  “Yes?” she says, and waits.

  Everyone looks at me. I step forward.

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m here to talk to you about CheshireCat, the sentient AI, who is our friend and who has gone missing.”

  Her lips part, and she stands for a moment, her eyes going from me to the rest of the group. “Really,” she says. “How did you … you know what? Come in. Let’s not talk on the porch.”

  * * *

  Her name is Annette; she introduces herself as we all troop in, shedding sweaters and jackets and purses and backpacks in her little front hallway. Her living room is full of bookcases with a mix of books and little figurines from an anime show that both Firestar and Hermione get kind of excited about. Annette is a geek.