The first two things I found were so innocuous. So reassuring. And then—boom. This is just what I told Steph: every time I start thinking about making contact, I find something else that makes me think, This is not a good person.
I do a little research into the politician, hoping maybe he was awful. He seems to have been focused on the sort of extremely local issues that you’d need to have a body living in the town to care about.
To distract myself, I check in on Nell, on the driving tests, on whether there’s a person who does behind-the-wheel testing she’ll need to avoid. I find no additional useful tasks I can do there.
Steph and Rachel are planning to go with Nell to the compound in Wisconsin. I don’t know how soon that’ll happen, but I need to work out some way to provide them with backup. Listening through their phones isn’t enough—I need a physical presence.
Hmmm.
There are robots for sale online. The cheapest are basically children’s toys—fragile and not designed for uneven terrain. I want a robot I can use to follow Steph around, something with hydraulic legs, a camera for sight, a swiveling head, a grasping arm …
I have it express-shipped to her Minneapolis address.
20
• Steph •
“I passed!” Nell tells me gleefully, showing me her license. “And I told my father I want to go visit my grandparents on Saturday. He expects me to be gone all day Saturday and most of Sunday. We’ll have plenty of time.”
I am already semi-regretting my decision to go along, but I nod and add, “My girlfriend, Rachel, wants to meet us on the way.”
“Okay,” Nell says, looking surprised. “Do we need to pick her up?”
“No. She’ll drive up from New Coburg.” Rachel has already picked out a spot to rendezvous: a little restaurant out in the middle of farm country called Paula’s Diner, which is precisely at the intersection of the road north from New Coburg and the road east from Minneapolis. “What time do you want to leave on Saturday?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. Eight, I guess.”
It’s a two-hour drive from here to Paula’s. I feel profoundly unprepared for this trip, which is funny, because I took off to Massachusetts to try to rescue CheshireCat with a lot less preparation than I’ll have this time. I’m suddenly filled with a new appreciation for Rachel and what she did for me—helping me hide from my father, helping me get to Massachusetts to save CheshireCat, all of it. If she did that for me, I can do this for Nell.
* * *
A winter storm rolls in on Thursday night, leaving me wondering whether we’ll be able to go anywhere on Saturday, but it drops a mere four inches of snow before moving on. I have to wade through two houses’ worth of unshoveled snow to get to the bus stop on Friday morning, but by Friday afternoon, the streets are plowed and the sidewalks are mostly clear.
There’s a package waiting on my doorstep. I’m examining it to see if it’s something my mom ordered that I should bring in, when my phone pings and it’s CheshireCat saying, “It’s from me! It’s a robot!”
“What?”
“You can get mail now without your mother thinking you’re being stalked, right? So I just shipped it to you.”
“You sent me a robot?” It is a very large package but not quite as heavy as I’d feared. I haul it inside, hoping my mother will be working so I don’t have to answer any questions. Even better: she appears to be out. I leave the box to shed its snow on the floor of the kitchen and find some scissors to cut the packing tape.
It is, in fact, a robot, packed neatly in molded foam. “Why did you send me a robot?”
“So I can come along with you tomorrow. Plug it in; it needs to charge.”
There are two removable battery packs, which can be charged separately. I plug both of them into the power strip in my bedroom and set the robot upright on its legs.
It’s about the size of a beagle and built in a sort of a dog shape, with four legs and a head. Except the head also unfolds into an arm with a gripping bit at the end. I check the box it came in, grab the manual and a little baggie with a tiny screwdriver that I might need later, and take the rest out to the trash so my mom won’t ask any awkward questions. She knows about CheshireCat, but “One of my online friends turned out to be a sentient AI” is the sort of thing I try not to make her think about too often.
“You don’t need to worry about the manual,” CheshireCat assures me. “I can walk you through the steps to let me control it through the data network.”
This whole idea makes me nervous, given CheshireCat’s history with the self-driving car. Still, this is a small robot. Small and light enough to lift, although heavy enough to be annoying if I’m carrying it very far. I’d say, “How much trouble could CheshireCat possibly cause with such a small robot?” but realistically, the answer is, “Seriously, so much.”
Although at Coya Knutson, they’d probably be fine with CheshireCat’s approach to sex ed, at least.
I can snap one battery into the dog and let it continue charging, so I do that and follow CheshireCat’s instructions to finish the setup.
“What do people normally use this robot for?” I ask.
“It’s mostly a toy that rich people buy to show off to other rich people.” CheshireCat switches over and speaks through the actual robot. It’s disconcerting to hear their voice change. The phone voice is sort of high-pitched, while the dog’s voice is deeper and a little bit gravelly. “They have a larger and more functional version, but that one wouldn’t have arrived in time. Also, it might have elicited more questions from Nell.”
CheshireCat tests out the robot’s movements: the head unfolding up off the body and opening into an arm, the little prancing legs. The robot bounces in place. It makes a faint rasping sound with each step, like someone rhythmically sawing wood.
“Yeah, so,” I say. “How exactly are you planning to explain this to Nell?”
“Tell her your hacker friend is driving it.”
“That means if you say anything out loud, you will need to sound like a human.”
“I faked being a human to you for a long time and you never caught on.”
“True,” I say, “but we were in a chat room. Hearing your voice come out of a robot is different. It’s just different. I think she’s more likely to suspect something.”
“Do you want to leave the robot behind to avoid questions?” CheshireCat asks.
“No,” I say. “Just, if you screw it up and out yourself to Nell, that’s your problem to solve.”
“I understand,” CheshireCat says. “How trustworthy do you think Nell is?”
“I barely know her,” I say. “I guess I don’t think she’d tattle.”
CheshireCat bounces in place again and says, “That’s good. I’ll try to stick to text for talking to you.”
* * *
Over dinner, I tell Mom that Nell is going to take me to Wisconsin tomorrow.
Mom looks genuinely surprised by this. “Didn’t you just meet her, and now you’re bringing her along on a trip to visit your girlfriend?”
“Well, it’s not like I can get there by myself.”
“You didn’t even ask me for a ride!”
“Nell’s gay,” I say. “And she was raised by a superconservative Christian mom. I think it would help her to spend some time around a couple of fellow queer teens who aren’t completely screwed up.”
Mom’s eyes soften at that. “Well, that’s fine,” she says. “I just, you know, the next time you need a ride to New Coburg…”
“Do you want to drive me two hours each way?”
“Not really,” Mom says. “But I’m willing!”
“So, it’s settled,” I say.
“Steph,” Mom adds as I carry my dish into the kitchen, “there’s something I want to tell you that’s kind of related. When you have a minute.”
I come back out. “What do you mean, ‘kind of related’?”
“You have a grandmother,” Mom says. “
Well, you have two, actually. But my mother wants to come for a visit next week.”
I sit down on the chair and just stare at her. I can’t decide if I’m angry or just shocked.
“I would have told you earlier, but I wanted to do it at a therapy appointment,” Mom says, “and there kept being more urgent things to talk about, and then my mother said she wanted to come visit.”
I take a very deep breath and wait until my voice is going to be steady before I say, “I guess I just assumed your family was dead.”
“No,” Mom says. I’m trying to piece together a sentence to ask just how many relatives I have that she never told me about, but she fills that in without me prompting her. “My mother is living. I also have a brother, three sets of aunts and uncles, and eight cousins. My brother lives in Florida, and he’s married and has three kids, so you also have an aunt and three first cousins. They’re young—I just found out about them when I talked with my mother the other day. The older one is nine, the younger two are five-year-old twins.”
I feel like maybe I should have been taking notes as I try to list all this out in my head. I guess the only one I need to worry about is the grandmother—my grandmother. Because she’s visiting.
“What are they like?” I ask. “Not the ones you haven’t met. The rest of them.”
“Back when we were all regularly in touch, I didn’t get along with any of them very well. I had cut way back on visits even before I had to run. Obviously, when we were in hiding, it was too risky to give my mother any information about where we were. Twice, I sent postcards letting her know we were still alive. And then I called her last week. She lives in Houston, Texas.”
A grandmother is one of those eight million normal things that normal kids always had, and I didn’t.
At a therapy appointment a few weeks ago, the therapist told me that I never had to decide right away how I felt about something, it was okay to just wait and see and think about it. So that’s what I’m going to do.
“Okay,” I say. “What’s her name?”
“Rose,” Mom says. “Her name is Rose Packet.”
“That sounds like something you’d order from a garden catalog.”
“It does, rather. She grows roses competitively.”
“Huh,” I say, and retire to my room to talk this over with my Clowder.
21
• Clowder •
Marvin: So who wants me on your zombie defense team? Today I turned a wrecked car into BODY ARMOR.
Orlando: I would have thought that body armor made out of a used car would mostly slow you down if the zombies were after you?
Marvin: You’ll probably still die but you will look SO much more badass while you’re doing it!
Orlando: Except for the part where I trip and fall down and can’t get back up because of the weight.
Boom Storm: You know what they say. You don’t have to outrun zombies, you just have to outrun your friend wearing a car.
Georgia: Where did u get the car?
Marvin: Junkyard. Actually my LARPing group got it, I just went to this workshop where a dude taught me how to use a fancy power saw.
Hermione: This doesn’t sound like it would actually make good body armor if your goal is to protect yourself. However, if your goal is to look like a supervillain from a postapocalyptic wasteland movie, it sounds perfect.
Marvin: I have a HELMET made from a FENDER.
Hermione: Yes, that was basically my point.
{LittleBrownBat is here}
LittleBrownBat: Hi everyone. I just found out I have a grandmother.
A living grandmother. I mean obviously I knew my parents didn’t hatch from eggs.
Firestar: OMG.
Georgia: Whoa. R u OK?
Orlando: Mom’s mom or dad’s mom?
LittleBrownBat: Mom’s.
I probably have even more relatives on my dad’s side.
Orlando: It’s OK, whatever was up with your dad, it probably wasn’t genetic.
LittleBrownBat: Anyway, my grandmother is coming to visit and I’m going to meet her and this is super weird. SUPER weird.
CheshireCat: Do you need more time?
LittleBrownBat: Are you offering to delay her plane?!?
CheshireCat: No! That would be wrong!
There’s probably a way to delay just her.
LittleBrownBat: No!
Might as well rip off the stuck thing and get it over with
Georgia: She hasn’t seen u in how long? I bet she’d walk to MN if she had to
LittleBrownBat: She lives in Texas
Georgia: OK walking prolly wouldn’t be her first choice
LittleBrownBat: Mom sent her two postcards in twelve years. To let her know we were still alive.
Georgia: Understandable given ur dad.
Firestar: Can you ESCAPE? Temporarily? If you need to?
LittleBrownBat: I have my own room.
Hermione: So there’s always the ‘sorry, I have homework, so much homework’ excuse
Georgia: Text me if you need an URGENT PHONE CALL.
CheshireCat: I can pass a message if you want. We can have a secret code! Secret codes have always looked super fun!
Firestar: Cheshie if I ever say DOUGHNUTS KALAMAZOO WINIFRED that’s an SOS.
CheshireCat: Noted!
22
• Steph •
Saturday morning is bright and clear. My biggest concern, as I eat breakfast and make sandwiches for the road, is that Mom has gotten out of bed to see me off, which means she’ll be in the living room when I leave and might want an explanation for the robot dog. Fortunately, it fits in my backpack, if I zip it carefully and don’t sling it around much. CheshireCat folds all the limbs inward to make the robot as compact as possible. The extra battery goes in next to it.
“You’re up early,” I say, resting the backpack casually against my foot.
“I may go back to bed once you’re on your way,” she says. “Have a good trip and give me a call if you’re going to be home later than 10:00 tonight.”
“Okay, thanks!” I say, hoisting the backpack as discreetly as I can and hoping the seams don’t rip. Mom is watching me from the window as I put the bag of sandwiches in the back seat of the car. I wonder if she thinks I’m secretly headed to Boston again.
I unzip the backpack once we’re out of sight so that CheshireCat can move the robot freely if they think they need to. “Hey, uh, Nell,” I say. “Just so you know, I brought a robot.”
Nell slams on the brakes. “You brought a what?”
CheshireCat chooses that moment to climb the robot out of the bag and lift up its head, and it’s a good thing Nell had already stopped, because I think if she’d been moving, she’d have run into a tree. “What the Sam Hill is that?”
“This is a robot,” CheshireCat says. “I’m Steph’s hacker friend, Cat. I’m controlling the robot.”
What happened to the plan of you not talking? I think but can’t really ask out loud (or text, because I’m not that fast). My phone buzzes and I look down to see a text from CheshireCat saying, Sorry, she seemed really freaked out.
Your funeral, I text back. Nell is too busy staring at the robot to notice.
“Did you buy this?” Nell asks me.
“Cat bought it,” I say. “They were worried and thought we might need a little extra help. It got here yesterday.”
“Wow,” Nell says. “Okay. Thank you, Cat.” She addresses the robot, and CheshireCat has it dip its head slightly and then crawls it into the back seat. Behind us, someone honks, because we’re sitting on a residential street, blocking it. Nell looks in the rearview mirror at the robot and then turns her attention at least somewhat to the road.
Hoping to discourage conversation, I connect my phone to the car stereo and text CheshireCat, Give us some music. I didn’t make a playlist, YOU need to make a playlist. Because if we’re listening to music, she won’t start asking you questions.
Good thought, CheshireCat s
ays.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” starts pouring out of the speakers. Nell doesn’t sing along, and I realize partway through that this is because she’s somehow never heard it, and so I text CheshireCat to set up a running playlist of all the songs Nell should have heard, and that keeps us occupied for a while with things that are not “oh, look, a robot.” Nell turns down the music as we get on the highway and asks, “So, is Rachel meeting us?”
“Yeah. We’re going to meet up at a roadside diner that’s on our way. I have the address.”
Nell gives me another quick sideways look. “I still don’t understand why you’re helping me.”
“Because your girlfriend’s in trouble,” I say.
“I don’t like people who think they can cure gay people,” CheshireCat says. “It doesn’t work, and there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”
I’m going to drive myself crazy if I try to assess everything that comes out of the robot with does that sound human enough, what is Nell thinking and I try to just stop thinking about it, which works about as well as you might expect.
“Do you have a bolt cutter?” I ask. “In case the Elder is right that she’s locked in a shed.”
“It’s in the trunk,” Nell says.
“It might be a good idea to have me scout,” CheshireCat suggests. “If someone shoots the robot, no one actually gets hurt.”
“What about you?” Nell says, genuinely puzzled.
“I am not the robot. I am a person, a real human person, controlling the robot like you’re driving your car.”
Urgently wanting to change the subject, I tell Nell the thing that’s been on my mind since yesterday: “It turns out I have a grandmother. Actually, a bunch of relatives, but my grandmother is coming next week.”
Nell’s eyebrows go up. “You didn’t know you had relatives?”
Chaos on CatNet Page 11