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

beginning to wonder what sort of message I can leave, and then a woman picks up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, um, is this Ben’s mom? Can I speak to Ben? Please.”

I sound all wrong, and there’s a pause, and then the woman says, “Who is this?”

Oh god oh god, I didn’t prepare for this one. “Stephanie, but everyone calls me Bat.” There. Now he’ll know who’s calling. Hopefully. “From his English class.”

“Okay.” Ico’s mother sounds really dubious. “Ben!” she calls. “Ben, you have a phone call!”

“Who is it?” he shouts back, sounding angry.

“A girl named Stephanie. I mean Bat. She says people call her Bat. From your English class?”

There’s a long pause, and I think he’s not going to make the connection. Then, in the background, I hear galloping footsteps, like someone is running down a flight of stairs. “Hello?” Ico says into the phone.

“You’re welcome,” I hear his mother say in the background. I’m pretty sure she’s rolling her eyes.

“Ico?” I say. “This is Little Brown Bat.”

“Yeah, yeah, I figured that. How did you get my mother’s number?”

“I got it from CheshireCat, who is the world’s greatest hacker and has been keeping it a secret, and listen, okay? That guy, my dad, turns out he’s super scary. Also, he has an IP logger that logged every visit to that website, so he knows where all of us live, at least approximately, and he lives in Silicon Valley … Mil—um—Mil something—”

“Milpitas?”

“Yes, Milpitas. It’s really, really close to you.”

“But, like, all he has is my IP address? That’s not going to get him my house. Especially since I was using my neighbor’s Wi-Fi—”

“So that social engineering thing you explained to us? He’s really good at it. Really good. If he called your neighbor’s ISP, do you think he’d get their address?”

“They’re not supposed to give that out…” He trails off, and I’m pretty sure he’s thinking about how he’d try to get an address out of an ISP. “Huh.”

“Ico, please trust me that he’s dangerous. Be careful.”

“Okay.” There’s a pause. “Yeah. I will. Thank you for telling me. I’ll be careful.”

“I can tell you more in the Clowder if you can get online…”

“My parents are mostly not letting me out of their sight right now because they found a laptop they didn’t know about. Although they did not find the rest of the laptops they don’t know about. It’s hard to get online right now, though.”

“I’m glad your mom let me talk to you.”

“Well, number one, you’re a girl and you’re calling me up. She’d love it if I got a girlfriend. Or any other sort of friend, actually. Number two, you said you were in my English class, which I’m currently failing, and she’s hoping this means I’m actually going to take an interest in the next thing that’s due. So you hit several of her weak spots.”

“Oh. I assumed you had friends because of the laptop selling thing.”

“That’s less a friendship thing and more like I’m their dealer.” There’s a pause, and he says, “That was a joke. People can never tell when I’m making a joke.”

“L-O-L,” I say like I’m in the Clowder. “There, now you know I’m laughing.”

“Fantabulosa,” he says. “Was that everything?”

“Yeah, your life is possibly in danger, lock your doors, and be careful—that was most of it.”

“Also, CheshireCat is a world-class hacker.” He sounds admiring. “I will definitely want to talk to them for some tips. Okay. I’m walking back to where my mom is now so I’m going to say some stuff about English class … yeah, Bat, thank you very much for calling me, and I will try not to let our group down. I’ll call you back if I have any questions. Can you give me your number?”

I give him my phone number.

“Cool. Excellent. I’m hanging up now. Good-bye.”

I go back inside. Rachel is sitting at the kitchen table with her own mac and cheese. “Do you want me to reheat yours?” she asks. “You didn’t eat very much.”

“I wasn’t hungry. Because my father’s not an arsonist; he’s a kidnapper. He probably cut off my mother’s finger, and he knows where we are because everyone visited his website. He’s looking up flights to where people live, including us but also Firestar and Hermione and Marvin. And even if I run—somewhere—my mother’s stuck in the hospital here.”

“Under a fake name, though, right?”

“Yes. Under a fake name. So … hopefully he won’t find her, as long as he doesn’t find me.”

Rachel takes my bowl and sticks it in the microwave with a big slice of extra butter. It comes out a bit more edible.

“My parents have a friend with a cabin,” she says. “It’s up in La Pointe, Wisconsin. Actually, I think it might be a yurt or something. But maybe they’d let us go up there? If we need to?”

“Is there internet in the yurt?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel says.

The thought of not even knowing what’s going on makes me feel even worse. “He’s after all of us. I can’t just take off and leave everyone else to fend for themselves.”

“He’s only after the rest of us to get to you,” Rachel says.

“I don’t think that’ll help, though.”

“I still want to know how CheshireCat knew all this stuff.”

I open up my laptop and send CheshireCat a message. “Rachel saw some stuff over my shoulder. Can I tell her the truth?”

Another pause—a long pause, considering—and CheshireCat says, “As the human saying goes: in for the penny, in for the pound.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that everyone’s going to figure it out sooner or later, so you might as well tell Rachel now.”

I close the laptop. Rachel is finishing her own mac and cheese, her eyes on me. It would be totally quiet if it weren’t for the birds shrieking in the next room.

“CheshireCat is actually an AI,” I say.

“A what?”

“An artificial intelligence. They’re a computer program, basically.”

She wrinkles her brow. “Like Siri?”

“Well, Siri isn’t actually a person. Siri’s faking being a person. Siri’s basically like the sex ed robot; it’s got