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

“I’m calling because I’m concerned about her safety,” I said, dividing my attention between the phone call and the car chase, which, given the cognitive load involved in verbal conversation, was not as easy as I’d led Steph to believe.

Rachel’s conflicting location information was apparently because to defeat the Heli-Mom tracking app her parents had installed on her phone, she’d installed a separate app to feed it misleading data. As long as I just disregarded all the info from either app, I could see where she was. But what I really needed was to pinpoint Michael’s car. Fortunately, he was driving a car with a data connection.

Most of the cars on the road have data connections these days. At the top end are the cars that drive themselves. But there are also the cars that call you an ambulance if your airbags deploy and cars with anti-theft features that let the automaker find the car if it’s not where you parked it. This car had the basic level of data: if you lost your key or locked yourself out, roadside assistance could unlock it for you or turn it on.

That meant I could track the car. If I had a way in, I could even just shut it off entirely.

Unfortunately—for me—automakers are quite a bit more concerned about hacking than most companies building internet connections into their devices. No one worries about refrigerator hackers, but one of the first questions asked about driverless cars was, “What if somebody hacked your car and drove it into a wall while you were in it?”

If someone had asked, “What if somebody hacked your refrigerator and turned it off for just a few hours a night so your mayonnaise spoiled and gave you food poisoning,” people might have been more nervous about refrigerator security, but maybe not. Internet-enabled refrigerators are just replacing other refrigerators. Driverless cars are replacing human drivers, and humans are under the thoroughly mistaken impression that they’re good at driving cars.

In any case, this car was well protected from hacking. I couldn’t turn off Michael’s car.

But I could track him. So I tracked him.

“Dana Smith is the victim of stalking,” I said to the nurse. “And her stalker is in New Coburg and trying to find her. He is extremely dangerous and probably armed. You should be very, very careful.”

“Who is this?” the nurse asked, and I was afraid this meant she didn’t believe me. And then I remembered one important detail.

“Did you notice that she’s missing a finger on one hand? The stalker is the person responsible for that.”

“Could you hold on for just a minute?” the nurse said. “Please don’t hang up, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Hold music required much less concentration than conversation, so I moved my spare attention to the problem of stopping Michael.

In a city, I could have whipped up a traffic jam in minutes just by altering the directions people were getting from their GPS apps. I might have even been able to drop railroad crossing arms to block his way. There was nothing in New Coburg to work with, and the nearest city was Eau Claire, an hour away. Maybe the Clowder would have ideas about how to stop him?

Hermione had already told everyone the same things she told me and wanted to know how he got there so fast, when I’d promised I was keeping an eye on things. “I told you,” Marvin said. “Burner phone.”

“Yes,” Hermione said. “But if he flew, there’s got to be a record of his travel.”

“That’s only true if he flew commercial,” Marvin said.

“As opposed to what, a private plane?” Hermione said. “How rich do you think this guy is?”

“He works in Silicon Valley,” Ico said. “My parents aren’t all that rich and they don’t have private planes, but they know someone who’s that rich.”

“Have you ever flown on a private plane?” Firestar asked.

“It’s kind of a big ask, and my parents would rather hit people up for venture capital,” Ico said. “But he might know someone who owes him a favor. There’s a private airport really close to New Coburg.”

“What about the car?” Hermione asked.

“I bet he stole it,” Marvin said.

“So could we call the cops and say the car is stolen?” Firestar asked. “Would that work?”

“Only if it’s been reported stolen,” I said. Which it hadn’t. I’d already checked. “They’re on their way to Marshfield. Is there anything in Marshfield that could be turned into an obstruction?”

“A building could be turned into an obstruction if you blew it up,” Marvin said.

“We have a hacker,” I said. “Not explosives.”

Everyone was looking at the map of the road between New Coburg and Marshfield. I’d already looked at that map, but maybe they’d think of something I hadn’t.

“There’s a big dairy farm on the way,” Hermione said. “Could you get all the cows out onto the road?”

“You can’t really hack cows,” Marvin said. “Even if you opened the doors, they’d probably just hang out in their barn.”

“There’s a trucking company,” Greenberry said. That would be terrific if I could hack the trucks, but truck companies are extra careful about vehicle internet security because there are people who try to hack self-driving trucks in order to steal all the items being shipped. Possibly there was a way to convince the humans to drive their trucks across the road between Rachel’s car and Michael’s car, but I couldn’t think of one, and then they were all past the trucking company, so it was too late.

The hold music shut off. “Hi, hello,” the nurse said, coming back on the line. “I was hoping you could talk to my supervisor?”

Another woman’s voice came on. “What else can you tell me about Dana Smith?” she asked. “Or the individual who’s after her?”

I gave her Michael’s name, the license plate number of the car he was driving, and told her that he could be extremely charming but should be treated with extreme caution. Then the nurse wanted to know my name. I didn’t