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

to plead guilty and do forty hours of community service. So maybe it will make sense to have you spend some time with your grandmother.”

“They’re going to make you say you actually did something wrong by taking me?”

“That may be the easiest way to make this go away.”

“That’s not fair.”

She shrugs. “I don’t really care if it’s fair as long as in the end Michael’s in prison and I’m not, and you and I are both safe.”

That seems like a potential lead-in.

“So,” I say. “Remember Rajiv?”

“What do you mean, ‘remember Rajiv’? Obviously, I remember Rajiv.”

“What I’m wondering is, how good of a programmer is he? Like, could he create something like CheshireCat?”

“No,” my mother says. “He absolutely could not do that, or anything close.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling a mix of relief and worry that we’ve been chasing someone down the wrong path.

“What he could possibly do,” my mother says, “is find a way into the systems where CheshireCat is stored, copy their source code, and adapt it.”

“Oh,” I say. Oh. I think about CheshireCat’s cheerful theory that maybe their identical–code twin would be interested in dog videos instead of cat pictures, but the idea that the other AI might be a copy of CheshireCat adapted by Rajiv is the most unnerving thought so far.

“Anything else about him you’d like to know?”

“Would he join a cult?” I ask. “Is that something you can imagine him doing?”

She leans back in her chair and looks at me with narrow eyes. “I met Xochitl, Rajiv, and Michael through a club where people discussed atheism and agnosticism.”

“So, no?”

“I didn’t say no,” Mom says. “He wouldn’t join a cult sincerely, any more than I would. But I briefly considered joining a cult when we were on the run, so it’s possible he did, too.” I must have looked startled at that. “This was back when you were in first grade. You kept getting angry and lashing out at your classmates, mostly with your fists. Every time you got in trouble, I pulled you out and we moved, because I was afraid of what it would lead to if you saw the school psychologist. But I was also pretty sure the instability was making things worse for you. And I couldn’t see a way out.” Mom scratches her head and sighs deeply. “We had a stay in Iowa that lasted about a month, and there was a religious group not too far from that town that had a communal farm. Not Amish or anything like that—this group was new to the area, but they were living mostly off the grid. I thought that it was possible we could join the cult and vanish.”

“Did you seriously consider this?” I ask. Mom nods. “But you didn’t do it.”

“No. I didn’t do it. Also because of you, in the end. I thought about it and realized that I could fake whatever beliefs would keep us safe, but you wouldn’t be faking. If you were raised that way, you’d actually believe, and I couldn’t do it. It’s one thing if you decide on your own that you want to have a religion as part of your life, or experience something you need a belief in a god to understand. It would be different to bring you up believing something I knew was a lie.”

I try to untangle this. “So, you think Rajiv might have joined a cult to keep himself safe.”

“There are a lot of things he might have done, if he’s even alive. Is there a particular reason why you think he’s in a cult?”

“You talked about how he wants a utopia, but believes the fastest way to get there is to burn everything else down and rebuild. Nell’s cult believes in something called the Tribulation, where they have to prove the earth is worthy to get Jesus back.”

“Christians with that sort of apocalyptic orientation think that everything that happens is predestined,” my mother says. “They think there’s going to be a war, and they’ll lose. Trust me, I grew up in Texas, I heard about this plenty.”

“Nell’s church is different,” I say. “That’s why I think Rajiv might be involved. It just sounds like how you described him.”

“Even if you’re right,” Mom says, “the idea that change requires destruction is not exactly unique to Rajiv.”

I pull out my phone and pull up the photo I took at the Midtown Exchange. “Does this look like Rajiv to you?”

Mom stares at the picture for a long minute. “Yes.”

I don’t want to tell her about rescuing Glenys, so I just say, “This same person is involved in Nell’s church, somehow. I’ve…” I go for an expedient lie. “Nell had a picture.”

“And why all the questions about an AI?”

“There are these social networks,” I say. “They’re doing some things you’d really need an AI to make happen, or else just an implausible amount of human effort. Rajiv—well, someone, I don’t know it’s Rajiv—someone is using these networks to pit people against each other.”

“Go on,” Mom says.

“Nell uses this site called the Catacombs. It’s a bunch of Christians who spend a lot of time thinking about the end of the world and listening to prophecies, kind of, from someone they call the Elder. We also have this classmate who got us both to register for a site called the Mischief Elves. Both of these sites give assignments. The Catacombs supply a lot of material to the Mischief Elves, but don’t know it. The Mischief Elves do a lot of mischief that makes the people in the Catacombs feel like everyone’s out to get them, and I don’t think the Mischief Elves know that, either. Today, I went to a meeting of Catacombs people, and they were going to lend out actual guns to everyone.”

My mother looks jolted. “You were at a meeting with guns?”

“I left right away! But then this lady stopped me and gave me this speech about how she wanted to keep the two of us safe. Like, you and me. And