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

Greenberry: Isn’t it literally water? Di hydrogen = H2, mon oxide = O???

Marvin: JFC, Greenberry, if you knew you were supposed to play along!

Firestar: Ohhhhhh ha omg.

Greenberry: Sorry.

{LittleBrownBat is here}

Marvin: LBB! Tell Greenberry that she is the most funsuckingest funsucker that ever sucked away all the fun.

LittleBrownBat: I think I must have missed something.

Hermione: Dihydrogen monoxide.

LittleBrownBat: Marvin, were you trying to scaremonger about water?

Marvin: It’s not scaremongering. THE DANGER IS REAL.

LittleBrownBat: So hey, Firestar, did you go to the GSA meeting?

Firestar: WELL. THAT IS ACTUALLY A STORY.

Marvin: (pulls up a chair)

Hermione: (pulls up a chair next to Marvin)

Boom Storm: Tell us a story, Firestar!!!!!

Firestar: I DID go to the GSA meeting and it SUCKED. It turns out that almost all the GSA people at my school are the same judgmental jerks who kicked me out of the spring play last year.

Greenberry: Wait, are they allowed to do that?

Firestar: TECHNICALLY they probably are not. Anyway I spent about five minutes checking out the GSA and then I went to the juggling club meeting instead. And the GOOD news is, apparently everyone in juggling club is ALSO GAY plus they aren’t assholes! So I’m joining that instead.

LittleBrownBat: Are you any good at juggling?

Firestar: No. They said they’ll teach me.

Hermione: Didn’t you say once that dexterity was your dump stat?

Firestar: Hermione! Please don’t rain on my parade!

Hermione: Sorry, sorry

I’m sure you’ll be an awesome juggler.

Greenberry: What’s a dump stat?

Hermione: It’s a role-playing games thing. If you’re making a character, you assign all your high scores to the stuff you care about. Your worst score is your dump stat.

Icosahedron: And dexterity is your ability to do things like juggle, or walk without tripping over stuff.

Firestar: Even if I never learn to juggle, people there actually talked to me and everyone seemed nice.

LittleBrownBat: That’s awesome. Sorry about the GSA, though.

Hermione: Gay people shouldn’t be allowed to be jerks to other gay people.

Firestar: Possibly if they’d known last year they wouldn’t have kicked me out of the play, but I bet they still would have.

Marvin: You should start a rival GSA. Like if they’re the Gay Straight Alliance, you could start a Gender Sexuality Alliance and you could say on your signs WE AREN’T THE MEAN PEOPLE.

Hermione: MORE GAYNESS, LESS MEANNESS.

Firestar: Maybe I’ll see if the jugglers want to join that one.

{Georgia is here}

Georgia: am i doing this right

how does this work

can anyone see this

Marvin: You’re new! We haven’t had anyone new in ages!

Georgia: yeah help?

Hermione: I haven’t seen you around before. Did you just register?

Georgia: yeah

Hermione: Well, welcome. You’re in a text-chat room.

Firestar: We should do TEN THINGS lists again!

It’s been AGES since we did those!

So that Georgia will know who we are! HI GEORGIA! I AM FIRESTAR! MY PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM, I LIVE IN WINTHROP MASS, MY PARENTS ARE OBSESSED WITH SENDING MY SISTER TO THE OLYMPICS EVEN THOUGH SHE’S EIGHT YEARS OLD, I LIKE CAKE, I AM LEARNING TO JUGGLE. That’s half of ten things. Your turn!

Georgia: never mind

{Georgia has left}

Firestar: Was it something I said?

CheshireCat: I think Georgia will return eventually. If I may make a suggestion: next time, use lowercase letters when you say hello.

12

Steph

I can hardly wait for health class to start, and I’m also a little worried that Rachel will give us both away, as she keeps looking at me wide-eyed and then giggling. I think Bryony’s in on it, too, given the looks she’s shooting my direction, but she’s doing a better job of keeping a straight face.

Ms. Tetmeyer the EA is standing up at the front of the room when class starts, and for a minute, I think, dismayed, that they’re going to have her teach the class instead of the robot, but she just warns us to be quiet and attentive, reminds us there will be a test, and presses the green button on the front of the robot marked Begin.

“Good morning, class,” the robot says. “I received a lot of questions from the question box, so I will start today by answering them.”

The synthesized voice is the same as yesterday, but I can tell already that the speech rhythms are different. It’s CheshireCat speaking. I’d sort of expected CheshireCat’s voice to sound a little more natural—they seem human enough in the Clowder—but speaking out loud is a completely different skill set, and apparently it’s not one they’ve mastered.

The ads for instructional robots make them look like they’re AIs, capable of answering whatever question you fling at them, but they aren’t, not really. They have a bank full of scripted answers, and although they use a voice you can tell is synthetic, it’s not like they’re going to say anything that’s not planned for, so most of it has been tweaked to sound as human as possible.

CheshireCat has not been adjusted by sound engineers.

The robot has been tweaked to include thoughtful pauses and even words like hmm. CheshireCat isn’t bothering with any of that. The intonation is okay—things like going up at the end, for questions?—but the pauses are too short to sound right. No human talks like this because we have to stop occasionally to think about what we’re saying.

“Question one. Will anything bad happen to me if I masturbate? The simple answer is, no, of course not. However, there’s some best-practices advice I would like to pass along…”

Ms. Tetmeyer’s head snaps up in the back of the class as the robot instructs us to vary technique lest we develop “death grip syndrome” and then moves on to condom use. I’m afraid Ms. Tetmeyer is going to stop it right there, but she stays in her chair, hands folded, eyes wide. She looks like she’s biting her lip. My classmates are giggling, and the robot pauses, the head turning back and forth to scan the room. CheshireCat is looking at me. I wonder if they recognize me? Probably not, and I can’t think of a good reason to raise my hand and introduce myself.

When the robot starts talking about the advantages of heavy petting over