Chaos on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

Nell calls her friend Glenys, but according to what she’s written down, that’s actually her middle name. Her first name is Sonia, and her last name is Olson. The note lists the names of all of Glenys’s siblings, along with her mother’s cell phone number and the license plate numbers of their cars. I type everything into a note and pass it to CheshireCat. If they can’t find Glenys, I don’t know who can.

8•  CheshireCat  •

Sonia Glenys Olson seems to have disappeared.

I start by finding her parents. Olson is a very common last name, but Lake Sadie is small, and the license plate numbers help. I zero in on their home. They live on something that’s not quite a farm but not quite a suburban house with a big yard, either, and I can see it via satellite images, but there’s not much near their house I can peer through, and her parents don’t own any little eavesdropping robots other than their phones.

Conversion therapy is illegal, but therapeutic Christian boarding schools are not, and there are some that are rumored to do conversion therapy in all but name. Most are in Missouri, which has lax regulations. If either of Glenys’s parents took her to Missouri recently, they’d probably have left some signs of the trip, and I don’t find anything. But if they’d paid for their gas with cash, would I even know? Illinois has tollways with cameras that track the cars passing through, but they’d have gotten to Missouri through Iowa, past endless farms. The farms have cameras, but they’re trained on their feedlots, not the highway going by.

I go back a step to see where Glenys went to school, and I realize after some fruitless searching that of course, like Nell, she was homeschooled. At least I can find some evidence that she exists—more than I’d have found of Steph if I’d looked a year ago. There’s a newspaper photo of her 4-H club, and Glenys is in the middle with her purple-ribbon-winning Silkie chicken.

A bit more digging and I find the online high school her mother uses for Glenys’s math instruction. This could maybe help me pinpoint a date she disappeared, if she stopped turning in assignments. I find that her last assignment was turned in December 15, and I’m briefly excited until I remember how common it is for high schoolers to take the last two weeks of December off. She does not appear to have gone back, but that doesn’t narrow it down all that much.

I start poking through her parents’ email in more detail, looking for them talking about Glenys. Glenys’s mother is on a lot of automated mailing lists: there’s one that’s a Bible study, where they pick apart a single sentence from the Bible every day. There’s another one that gives her housework tasks. There’s a mailing list she actually sends messages to that talks about canning and gardening and also guns and ammunition. There are people on the list who talk about their children, but Glenys’s mother mostly doesn’t.

I slow down and go through the email more carefully. Humans sometimes talk about things in very circuitous ways, like they’ll say “my darling children” when they actually mean their cats. I once looked to see what humans were referring to when they talked about monsters, and the most common was their former romantic partner, but it could also refer to a young child, a pet bird, a difficult-to-fix leak in their house, a relative of their current romantic partner, and a car, and that was just an extremely cursory look from a set of emails sent in a single four-second period one Tuesday when I was wondering whether I should be worried about the fact that on one of the Clowders on CatNet, all the mothers were referring to their three-year-old children as “the monster.”

Glenys’s parents didn’t refer to “the monster,” but they did refer to “the monkey” in some email messages. After sorting those out, I was fairly certain that was one of the younger siblings. Unless they owned an actual monkey, and maybe I should be slower to rule that out? Wouldn’t you occasionally take pictures of your monkey, if you had one? I found no monkey pictures.

Maybe Glenys’s email would have clues. Glenys’s email is surprisingly difficult to identify because she has numerous siblings, they’re all homeschooled, and they all use email for their online classes. But there’s one of the three that matches the math class she’s taking, and her last use of it was on December 29. Nothing after that. She surely has a different email account—something her parents don’t know about—but I can’t find it, and I think she’s probably taking steps to cover her tracks from her parents.

I try shaking the other end of the problem and look at “residential treatment programs” for girls in Missouri. I find eight places that, on careful examination of their email, are clearly doing something closely resembling conversion therapy—the sort of pseudoscientific pseudotherapy where they attempt to “cure” homosexuality. (Which is illegal because it hurts people and doesn’t work. Everyone’s known that for years, even if the law is recent.) Four of these programs had a new girl come in between December 29 and today. It takes me some careful examination of records, photos, and video to conclude that none of those four is Glenys.

It’s very frustrating, knowing that this person exists, and is missing, and finding every examined alley bare of clues. I’m not sure what to try next.

To let off some steam, I return to the eight residential programs doing conversion therapy, deactivate their antivirus software, and download the five most destructive computer viruses I know of onto all their computers that are connected to the internet. Maybe this will help a few people like Glenys, even if I can’t help Glenys right now.

I take a look at the social media site Nell and Glenys used, the Catacombs. Nell’s comment that the Mischief Elves interface reminds