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

Greenberry: Of course I want to stay! It was so neat to meet you in person! You’re ALL going to meet in person, and I’d be jealous, but I got to meet you first!

Hermione: Marvin, I thought you couldn’t drive. How did you get to Boston?

Marvin: I found someone who would drive me to Boston if I gave him $500 in cash.

Money solves so many problems!

Also I did not wind up dead in a ditch somewhere, which is good, because somewhere around Maryland or Delaware I started worrying.

So where are we going? A house, an office, an apartment? If it’s an office, they might not even

be

there in two hours.

LBB & Georgia: It’s a house at 66 Antshire Street, Cambridge.

Firestar: Do you want us to scope it out? Walk by and gawk?

LBB & Georgia: If you really want? But wait for me to get there to knock, okay?

Marvin: FUNSUCKER.

28

Steph

Boston traffic is awful.

The drivers here all seem basically homicidal, and the roads aren’t labeled well. We keep getting stuck in massive traffic backups, which is almost a relief because when we’re stopped on the road I can check the map and make sure we’re still on the right road. Although Rachel’s phone seems to find Boston bewildering and keeps trying to recalculate what we ought to be doing based on the idea that we’re on the city street running under the highway, instead of on the highway itself.

We manage not to die. I’m a little surprised.

When we get off in Cambridge, the directions seem almost straightforward until we get to this intersection with what seems like about seven streets all converging and realize too late Rachel has gone the wrong way. There’s a parking garage, though, and we’re in Cambridge, so Rachel just parks and then we look at her phone and realize it’s a good half-mile walk still to the coffee shop.

“Do you want me to get the car back out?” she asks a little hesitantly.

“No. We can walk the rest of the way.” I pack up both laptops into my backpack and slip it on over my coat.

The houses in Cambridge are very close together, and the sidewalks are narrow and hardly anyone has a yard to speak of. We keep passing groups of college students; they’re loud and cheerful and all seem to be having a good time with their friends.

The Cherry Pi has a neon cherry in its front window. I peer through and see a group of college students at a big table near the front. As I come in, all their heads swing toward me and Rachel, and I recognize Hermione from the selfies she’s posted and realize they’re not college students. They’re my Clowder. They’re here, waiting for me and Rachel.

“Are you Little Brown Bat?” asks an Asian kid with short black hair and a baggy black T-shirt that says SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT: WANTED, DEAD AND ALIVE on the front. “You’re Little Brown Bat and Georgia, right? Are you? I don’t want to hug you until I know for sure.”

“I’m Little Brown Bat,” I say, and Firestar sweeps me into a hug so enthusiastic they almost pull me off my feet. Firestar never posts selfies; they told me once this is because in the Clowder, no one ever has to know if they were identified male or female at birth—they can really just be a them.

“And you’re Georgia?” Firestar says. “I don’t know you as well. Would you like a firm handshake instead of a hug?”

“Handshake sounds great,” Rachel says, sounding relieved.

“I am so delighted to meet you,” Firestar says, pumping Rachel’s hand twice.

Hermione looks like her pictures—short brown hair, freckles, glasses—but I still expected high-school-aged Emma Watson. She slides out from the table and gives me a hug, though it’s a less exuberant hug than I got from Firestar.

Marvin is really tall. He’s even taller when he sits up straight; he’s slouching when I arrive at the table. His hair is short; he has his ears pierced, with a little gold ring in each ear, and a butterfly drawn on his wrist in Sharpie. “Like my art? Courtesy of Firestar,” he says. “I’m up for a hug if you want one.” He gives me a side-hug without actually standing up, which is fine because I’m pretty sure I’d come up to about his armpit.

“So my name’s actually Steph,” I say. “But if you want to keep calling me LBB, you can.”

“I’m Rachel,” Rachel says. “Or Georgia.”

“I’m Nick,” Marvin says.

“Cam,” Firestar says.

“My name is Madison,” Hermione says, “but I am one of eight Madisons in my grade, and I would really prefer it if everyone would keep calling me Hermione.”

“Is that your real-life nickname?” I ask.

“No. It’s too embarrassing to ask everyone to call me that,” she says. “But you already call me Hermione, so it’s different. By the way, did you know that Cherry Pi was a robot café when you sent us here?”

“A what?”

Hermione points toward a glass wall separating the eating area from the bakery itself, and I stand up for a closer look.

Apparently, the Cherry Pi is some project started by a bunch of MIT grads: all the baked goods are made by robots, and you can watch the robots work, so I do that for a few minutes. Some of the baked goods are delivered through a sliding door to the café for sale (the cash register is run by a human) and others are packaged up in boxes with shrink wrap for instant delivery by drone to anywhere in Cambridge. From inside the café, we can see drones taking off with boxes of doughnuts and frosted cakes, and other drones are coming back and being attached to the charging wall by the robot dispatcher.

It’s kind of mesmerizing.

“If you order a sandwich, they have a sandwich-making robot that makes it for you,” Hermione says. “Do either of you want a sandwich? We got sandwiches earlier, and it’s pretty neat to watch.”

I shake myself