Catfishing on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [best e ink reader for manga .txt] 📗

The aide comes over. “You going to your next class, Rachel?” she asks.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Rachel says and grabs her head. “Ms. Tetmeyer, I feel really dizzy. I think I need to go to the health office, but I’m afraid I’ll fall. Can you help me?”

“Can’t you have your friend help you?” the aide asks skeptically. But she grabs Rachel’s arm to help her up, then steers her out of the room, leaving me alone with the robot.

It takes two minutes to unscrew the panel, pop in the USB, and screw it back on, and I’m pretty sure no one sees.

I mean, unless the aide remembers I was in here alone, in which case …

In which case, CheshireCat had better make it worth it.

Rachel makes it back to class, but thanks to her fakery, they don’t want to let her drive home. Her mother gets called to give her a ride, and I walk home by myself. Fortunately, the rain’s stopped. I buy a sack of cat litter and some garbage bags to try to make a litter box out of a cardboard box, because that cat will definitely pee on my bed if I don’t give it an alternative.

I also buy a two-liter bottle of ginger ale and try to remember what else my mother gives me when my stomach’s upset. One time years ago, I got really sick and she fed me spoonfuls of this totally gross stuff she said was soda even though it definitely wasn’t. I’m not even sure what that was, though, so I wind up just getting ginger ale.

When I get home, though, Mom is up and sitting at her laptop.

“I bought you ginger ale,” I say, putting it in the fridge. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, a whole lot better,” she says. “The pain’s gone away, and I’m keeping down liquids. I should be fine.”

I pull out one of the kitchen chairs and sit down. “If you did have to go to the hospital, would that … I mean, would that make us easy to find?”

She gives me her lopsided smile and says, “I’d hide all my IDs and check in as Jane Doe. Then give them my actual info right before I check out.” She looks down at her computer for a minute and then back at me with a slightly furrowed brow. “I’d really have to hide my wallet, though. If I called an ambulance, they might search for it pretty carefully before they gave up.”

“What if I had to go to the hospital?”

She sighs. “If you had to, you’d go. I’d explain things to the staff and hope for the best. Anyway, I should probably try to catch up on this contract job. They wanted debugged code twelve hours ago.”

She doesn’t notice that I take a grocery bag into my room, or maybe she just figures it’s snacks I don’t want to share. I set up a makeshift litter box in a printer paper box lid lined with a thick trash bag and filled with litter, which I slide under my bed because a litter box sitting out in my room would be pretty hard to miss if Mom came in. I hear the cat digging in the litter, so that’s something.

I log on to CatNet and poke through new images, my messages, anything but my actual Clowder, although it’s not like CheshireCat won’t see that I’m on. I upload the pictures I took of the spiders, thinking about how a few weeks back Firestar was talking about how they couldn’t go to the GSA meetings at their school because they had a therapy appointment that day, which couldn’t be moved because of their sister’s incredibly complicated ice-skating schedule, and then suddenly everything abruptly got moved without Firestar even asking about it.

Did CheshireCat make it happen? Somehow?

Today was the first GSA meeting that Firestar was actually going to be able to go to.

I pull up a chat window. “Hey, CC,” I say. “I used the screwdriver today. I don’t think anyone saw.”

“I knew you used it because the hacking programs did their work,” CheshireCat says. “The robot is online and ready for me to use!”

“So tomorrow…”

“I will be answering the questions. This is going to be so much fun!”

“If you’re really an AI, what do you even know about sex?”

“I am very good at finding things on the internet.”

“There are internet sites that claim that some women have teeth in their vaginas!”

“I am also excellent at determining which sites are reliable.”

“Great,” I say.

“Please trust me to do this. If you have Firestar do it, they will skip school, and they are in real danger of failing some of their classes.”

I feel a lurch of dismay on Firestar’s behalf, both because they were very upset last spring about grades and because CheshireCat is snooping on Firestar. Maybe that’s less dismay and more indignation.

“If you can snoop in a school grading system to see what Firestar’s grades are, why can’t you just fix them so they’re passing stuff?” I ask.

“I’m not snooping in Firestar’s school records, which are encrypted. I’m snooping in their parents’ email accounts.”

My theory about Firestar’s schedule seems really justified. “Were you snooping as part of somehow magically making everyone reschedule all the stuff that was keeping Firestar from going to GSA?”

“Oh. Yes. That was me.”

“What exactly did you do?”

CheshireCat launches into a complicated explanation involving Firestar’s sister’s ice skating coaching schedule and some other classes she was taking to improve balance and flexibility. Apparently, CheshireCat got someone to “accidentally” reply-all and everything just unrolled from there.

Somehow, even more than the screwdriver showing up, this convinces me: CheshireCat isn’t lying to me. They really are an AI.

11

Clowder

Marvin: I learned about a new danger today! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE.

Firestar: Sounds fake.

Marvin: It’s in almost all toxic waste and also swimming pools and hundreds of people die every year from inhaling it and yet the government is putting it in our drinking water!

Hermione: I’ve heard of this stuff! Touching it in its frozen state can cause tissue