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

Her voice sheds the last of the sleepiness. “How can I help?”

“Mom is missing. I’m in my apartment, but there are people I don’t trust who know where it is and may be watching. I can climb out the back, but I can’t just run away on foot. It’s too cold. I need someone to meet me.”

“With a car.”

“Yes.”

“Ten minutes. No, fifteen. I’ll need a little time to find a car.”

“I’ll watch for you.”

“You do that, sweetie. I’ll be there.”

I put my cleaned phone in my pocket and add the burner phone just in case. I look longingly at my heavy coat, but I can’t assume they didn’t plant another tracker in there somewhere—I add another wool sweater layer and then put my too-light jacket back on. My laptop goes into my backpack and so does the robot and its spare battery.

I haven’t turned on any of the overhead lights in my apartment—after all the trouble I went to breaking in through the back, being Obviously Here seems counterproductive. So when I hear a car drive up outside and pull in next to the curb, I freeze, not wanting to even provide shadows of movement. The car is just sitting there, engine idling, and I list out all the perfectly normal reasons they might be sitting out there in the middle of the night: They might be buying or selling illegal drugs. They might be lost and consulting a map. They might be catching Pokémon. Many possibilities that have nothing to do with me.

My nose is itching, and I sneeze.

That startles my cat, who leaps up from the spot where she’s been napping and runs over to stand, for a minute, in the window, looking out.

A minute later, I hear the car driving away. Probably just lost and consulting a map, I tell myself, trying to calm down.

I open a can of food for Apricot (thank you, good kitty), then check the time. It’s been almost fifteen minutes. I peer out the back window—and there’s a big gray car idling in the alley. My burner phone pings, and it’s a text. I’m here.—Mimi.

Okay. I go back out through the balcony door, even though with the robot in my backpack there’s no way to latch it from the inside. At least it’s a lot easier to climb down off the balcony than it was to climb up the garage—I just lower myself and drop, it’s not even all that far—and then run over to the car. Mimi is behind the wheel. I slide into the passenger seat.

Someone is coming down the alley toward us, and for a second, I think we’re going to be trapped, but Mimi slams the car into reverse and careens out of the alley, just missing a second car that was getting ready to pull in.

“Let’s lose these folks,” she says, pats me on the knee, and floors the accelerator.

Are we in a car chase? How am I in the second car chase of my life? “Losing those cars would be great,” I say, hoping that CheshireCat discreetly helps us out. Sure enough, the second we cross a train track, the crossing arms drop, even though there’s no train in sight.

Mimi drives a bit farther, then pulls over and looks at me. “Do we need to go rescue your mother right this second?”

“I don’t even know where she is. So we kind of can’t.”

“Just as well, because I need coffee and at least a little solid food in me if I’m going to get my head around whatever’s happening. Michael’s not involved, is he?”

“No. I mean, not directly, anyway.”

“That’s one mercy. Does this town have any twenty-four-hour diners?”

I look this up on my phone and find one on Lake Street that turns out to be in a vintage railcar. My grandmother carefully parks in the small lot behind the diner, and getting out, I remember something. “I thought you didn’t rent a car.”

“I didn’t,” she says.

“But…” I gesture at the car. “But now you have a car.”

“I stole it,” she says.

I stop dead for a second, despite the wind. “You stole a car?”

“Finding an open rental place at this time of night would have taken far too long, and I didn’t want to rely on a taxi when things were obviously already complicated. Don’t worry about it. A car this new definitely has insurance. Let’s get inside. How do you survive weather like this?”

We’re the only people in the diner. We sit down at a booth, and I hoist my backpack onto the seat next to me. “What do you have in there?” Mimi asks.

“My laptop computer and a robot,” I say.

She laughs and then narrows her eyes. “You were serious. You were serious? Why do you have a robot?”

“Just in case I need one,” I say. I mean, that’s literally true. Also, she stole a car and she’s wondering why I have a robot?

This restaurant is like an upscale fancy person’s version of the roadside diners I ate at on Saturday. They have “ancient grains” waffles with organic raspberries and grass-fed whipped cream. Mimi mutters that she really doesn’t want to know what sort of excuse for avocado toast she’s going to get from Minnesotans in January and orders herself pancakes with a side order of (free-range, organically fed, heirloom-breed) bacon and a bottomless cup of coffee. I get the same.

“Don’t try to tell me what’s going on until we’ve both had at least one cup of coffee,” Mimi instructs me, and so I wait quietly. The waitress comes around with mugs, a bowl of brown sugar clumps that are formed into pebbles with tongs to pick them up, and a cream pitcher shaped like a cow. Mimi drinks her coffee black. Once she’s finished a cup and gotten a refill (and a plate of pancakes), she says, “Now. What’s going on?”

I can’t tell her about the AIs, but I can tell her that someone—some unknown, mysterious mastermind—is running a network of social media sites