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

Both the Catacombs social media site and the Mischief Elves use encryption I can’t easily hack, but the easiest way into a secure system has always been social engineering—tricking a gullible human into giving you the information you need to get in. I start assembling what I’ll need for a convincing spearphishing attempt—“Dear (name), We’ve had a security breach and are asking everyone to change their password. Please click here to log in to your account at the Catacombs”—but I’m making my list using the registration information in people’s email, and it turns out a bunch of people have emailed their passwords to themselves so they wouldn’t forget them.

There are four Catacombs users that mailed passwords to themselves who have exactly the sort of accounts I’m looking for: long-term users who were active for a while but haven’t been online recently.

While I’m at it, I take a look for Mischief Elves users like this as well, so I can examine the two sites side by side. It wasn’t the Catacombs that initially made Steph suspicious—it was the Invisible Castle app. I should take a look at that, too.

The Invisible Castle has an elaborate aesthetic design, built from photographs taken by users and submitted as part of assignments. I recognize corners of the world here and there, including a glorious image of a purple door that I’m fairly certain is from a house in Minneapolis and a glimpse of a castle that I think is currently being run as a bed-and-breakfast in Ireland. I’m so taken by this use of user data that I’m tempted to start redesigning aspects of CatNet, but that seems like a distraction I probably shouldn’t devote processing power to right this moment.

The Catacombs does have a similar organization to the Invisible Castle, but with less adornment. I start going through as methodically as I think I can get away with without attracting unwanted attention. Here’s what I want to know: If Glenys was taken somewhere run by her church, can I locate it and work backward the way I did with the boarding schools? Maybe successfully this time?

They have groups called Tribulation Teams that are geographically based and have in-person meetings. And they’re all over, which is less helpful than I’d like: there are dozens of houses scattered just across Minneapolis and Saint Paul, used to host things like that exercise class Steph went to with Nell. I set those aside for now and focus on references to central locations that aren’t in cities.

Yes: there are various large compounds, and I find references to a summer encampment event held at something called the Fatherhold in Wisconsin. But there’s no address—in fact, people seem pretty convinced the Fatherhold isn’t found on maps—and no directions. There are pictures taken at the event, though. I download the photos and compare them to satellite imagery.

It’s the shoreline of the lake that tips me off. The Fatherhold is outside a very small town nearly due east from Minneapolis. The Catacombs users are correct that it isn’t exactly on the map—the road in isn’t marked as a road, but you can see it clearly on the satellite image.

If Glenys’s family took her here, they almost certainly passed through Wausau, Wisconsin, on the way there. I run through every cloud-storage bit of video I have access to, and I find it: Glenys’s family’s car. I don’t know for sure that Glenys made the trip, or that they left her there, or even that they went all the way to the Fatherhold, but I do know that one of the cars her family owns passed through Wausau, Wisconsin, on January 2.

I don’t think I can contact Nell directly—I should go through Steph—but I do take a look at what Nell is up to. She took a walk in the morning and took some pictures, including a picture of a box of hammers that she deleted a few minutes later, and a picture of a box filled with packages of stump remover.

Stump remover.

I just saw something about stump remover. It wasn’t on the Catacombs, though; it was in one of my Clowders. I shift my focus: it was Firestar talking about how the post-cake project was going to be homemade sparklers. Marvin asked how you make homemade sparklers, and Firestar described a recipe that included stump remover.

“Where did you get the stump remover?” I ask Firestar.

“Someone at school handed it out, along with the instructions. The same person who had the helium for the glitter party.”

I don’t want to snoop on Nell, not any more than I already have, so I snoop on a couple of strangers instead, some in Minneapolis and some in Boston, near where Firestar lives, and a few other places, and this is what I find:

The Catacombs are sending people out to buy—or steal—stump remover and leave it in caches. Those caches are then picked up by someone from the Mischief Elves, who then distributes the potassium nitrate to teenagers with instructions for making them into fireworks. Other members of the Catacombs are being sent to buy or steal plant fertilizers, bottles of kerosene, mercerized cotton, sacks of sugar … a long list of items that are harmless enough in isolation but can be cooked or assembled into explosives.

They’re also sending people out to buy or steal hammers, axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars. Those are also being picked up and stored in people’s basements and garages.

A little more checking leaves me fairly sure Nell stole a hammer on her walk today.

This seems bad. I send Firestar a private message expressing my worries—including the fact that I believe the supplies are being provided by a group that definitely does not care about Firestar’s safety and well-being. Firestar seems unimpressed by my safety concerns, but their attention is caught by the possibility that the stump remover was supplied by fundamentalist extremists—so I think I’ve convinced them not to try out the sparklers recipe in their basement while their parents