Chaos on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  I won’t even have to explain to my mother where I’m going.

  I do tell CheshireCat, sticking my phone in my pocket as they text back, Are you sure that’s a good idea …

  Because of that bizarre morning exercise class, I’m kind of expecting a silent room of morose people, but I get the opposite, a friendly welcome from someone who points me to a row of hooks by the door where people are leaving coats, a name tag (I write Arabella and stick it to my chest), and an invitation to help myself from trays of pierogi, momos, and pot stickers. There are a lot of people here, and I don’t feel conspicuous.

  The restaurant has a front room with a takeout counter and then a second, larger dining room through a doorway. I fill a small plate with assorted dumplings and carry it into the second room, where there’s nowhere to sit that’s not right up front. I opt to stand in the back instead. Most of the other people here are adults. The women are mostly wearing skirts, which makes me feel self-conscious about the fact that I am not.

  One of the women claps her hands for attention and says, “We’re going to begin with a prayer.” This is going to be awkward: I have no idea what I’m expected to do. Everyone around me bows their heads, and a lot of people clasp hands with the person standing next to them, unless their hands are full with a plate or coffee. I’m suddenly very glad that my hands are full. I do stop eating and bow my head with everyone else. It’s short, fortunately, and I’m too busy worrying about whether I’m blending in to really assess whether this is a normal sort of prayer or the sort of weird, fringe prayer you’d expect from a cult with a compound where they keep kidnapped girls.

  Everyone around me says, “Amen,” and I mumble along, and then one of the men talks about the Neighborhood Problem. People list off the “harassment” they’ve been targeted by; one woman describes a detailed six-foot picture of a penguin being drawn on the side of her garage, which she tried reporting to the police only to discover it had been written in dry-erase marker that could be wiped away. The snow sculpture gets a mention, along with a whole series of cryptic messages left in paint or dye in the snow of people’s yards. Words, in some cases; pictures in others, though the people at the meeting call them “symbols.” There’s a man who mentions a dirty limerick written on a napkin and left under his windshield wiper while he was at the grocery store. People have been followed on the streets. People have been followed in cars. One of the other teens says strangers take her picture as she waits for the school bus, then run away, and she just wants it to stop.

  I’m really confident this is all or at least mostly the Mischief Elves, but why?

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” the man says, and he opens up a cabinet that is entirely filled with guns.

  My first thought is that it’s a joke of some kind and that these can’t possibly be real guns, and then my whole body goes cold. The last time I was this close to a gun, it was being pointed at me by my father. I’m so busy freaking out that I miss the next part, which is any specifics about what they’re going to do with these guns, and when I manage to focus my attention on the speaker again, he’s talking about target shooting practice but with air guns in someone’s basement and there’s a conversation about the legality of loaning real guns out and I decide I’m not going to get anything more out of the meeting because I’m too freaked out. I abandon my dumplings and head for the front door.

  “Hey,” a woman’s voice says from behind the counter as I’m putting on my coat.

  “Sorry,” I say, turning around. “I need to go.”

  “Arabella,” she says. “I got a message a little while ago from one of the administrators for the group. It was about you. Do you mind waiting for just a moment?”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” I say.

  “Well, obviously, I can’t make you,” she says with obvious disappointment. “But here, take this.” I’m afraid she’s going to hand me a freaking gun, but no: it’s a small metal token, shaped like a shield and small enough to slip into a pocket. “It’s very important that we keep you safe, Arabella. If you keep this on your person, we’ll be able to find you when the Tribulation starts.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I say, my voice sounding strained even to me.

  “Arabella,” she says, and her voice is pitched a little harder this time. “The Tribulation is going to begin soon. Keep close to your mother, and we will send someone with a car to get you both to safety. Don’t make us hunt you down. People might get hurt.”

  I want to hurl the shield she gave me into a snowbank, but letting on how much she’s freaking me out seems counterproductive to my goals here, so I nod and then say, “I really need to go.” This time, she doesn’t try to stop me.

  I am not going home with this pocket knickknack that she basically told me was a tracking device, but I don’t want to just ditch it in a snowbank, either, and it’s gotten so cold out I don’t want to try to figure out what the hell to do with it while I’m standing out in the wind. I step inside the convenience store at the end of the block and duck back into the dairy aisle, where I take out my phone and text CheshireCat. WHAT EXACTLY DID SHE GIVE ME?

  Take a picture?

  I take a picture of it.

  Is it heavy or light for its size?

  I can’t tell.

  Well, she certainly implied to you that it was a tracking device! I think it’s an RFID tag. They’d need to be in range to find you.

  What sort of range?

  A few blocks. Do you want her to be able to find you?

  Absolutely not.

  Then you probably want to get rid of it.

  There’s a trash can near the front of the store, and I drop the little shield inside as I pass on my way out and realize that, for once, my paranoid panic is entirely reasonable. This is a tracker, given to me by people I don’t trust. My desire to get rid of it as quickly as possible is not the result of being raised on the run; this is actually an entirely sensible response.

  The apartment is still empty when I get home. I hang up my coat and lock the door. “Why do you think they wanted to track me?” I ask CheshireCat.

  “She said they want to keep you safe. Maybe this is true?”

  “When they opened up the big closet full of guns, I didn’t hear what they said right after. Did you catch it?”

  “I can play you my recording of it,” CheshireCat says, and I hear the man’s voice again. He talks about preparation, warns people to stay away from the local sports stadiums and malls “unless you’re a strike team member,” and then says, “There will be a signal. A clear signal. It may come through the app. When you receive the signal, it will be time for war.”

  I close my eyes and try to think, which is hard when I’m this freaked out. “Okay,” I say. “So first of all, the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs are being played off each other. Maybe other groups, too, like Marvin’s future reenactment had him making armor and there’s that conversation I overheard about a brawl. It has to be the other AI coordinating this, but why?”

  “I don’t know,” CheshireCat says. “This is very distressing.”

  “And why plant a tracker on me? How many of these are they giving out?”

  “How certain are you that you saw Rajiv at the compound on Saturday?” Cheshire asks.

  I think about the face, which has already faded and blurred. “All I can say for sure is, when I looked up at that window, I was sure I was looking at the person in the pictures my mother showed me. Why?”

  “You brought up last night whether there was a coordinated goal, and I’ve been thinking about what your mother said about Rajiv’s goals, and what Nell told you about the cult thinking they needed to make the world worthy.”

  “I assumed that was just some sort of Christian thing.”

  “It’s not. Even among Christians who are focused on the apocalypse, the idea that they will have to fight for these particular goals during the Tribulation appears to be common only among those who spend a lot of time talking to the Elder.”


  “Well,” I say. “If Rajiv is involved, that might explain why they’re trying to track us. He joked about kidnapping my mother—maybe he’s going to come back for another try. Do you think he could be the creator of the other AI?”

  “Your mother would probably give you the best answer to that question. Or Xochitl.”

  “And do you think he might be involved in other groups?”

  “What I think is that all these games that are persuading people to do things that seem harmless but add up to destruction have some things in common,” CheshireCat says. “At the very least, I think they all share in the work of the other AI.”

  * * *

  The obvious thing to do is to talk to my mother about this.

  She knew Rajiv. She knows about CheshireCat. And I’ve been trying to talk to her about stuff, just like she’s been trying to talk to me about stuff.

  And I didn’t bring the tracking device home, so there’s no reason that she’s going to hit the road with me.

  I take the robot out of the packaging and set it up to charge. Then I start water boiling for spaghetti. If my mother is going to freak out, at least she’ll do it on a full stomach.

  Mom is so late getting home I start thinking about possibilities like “new medical emergency” or “kidnapped by the Catacombs people.” I don’t want to make the spaghetti until she gets home, so when the pot of water comes to a boil, I turn it off. And then enough time passes that I turn it on again because I want it to boil quickly once she gets home. I’ve reboiled it three times when she finally comes in.

  “Where were you?” I ask.

  She looks surprised. “Downtown,” she says. “Dealing with lawyers.”

  “It’s almost eight.”

  “You don’t say. At least I got the good non-rush-hour fares to get back here.”

  I turn the water back on. “I’m making spaghetti,” I say.

  “Did you wait for me? You’re such a good daughter.”

  “That’s good to know,” I say.

  My tone clearly makes her suspicious, but she sets out plates for us and stays out of my way as I heat the sauce and cook the spaghetti. “How was your day off from school?” she asks as I sit down to eat.

  “Fine.” I eat spaghetti and wonder exactly how to bring up Rajiv. “How were things with the lawyers?”

  “I may have to go back to California this summer 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 w
ere 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 she gave me this thing that I thought was a tracker, so I threw it away.”

  “Away away?”

  “I threw it in the trash at a convenience store. Anyway, I think Rajiv is behind this. I think he was following me and texting me back when I was on the run from my father, and I think he’s keeping an eye on us now and I think he’s planning something big. I don’t think it’s just these groups, either; I think there’s more.”

  The more of this I say out loud, the crazier it sounds.

  My mother lets out a long breath and leans back in her chair, her fork resting on her plate. “What does CheshireCat think?”

  “I am confident that there is an AI involved in running the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs,” CheshireCat says. “I am confident that the unwitting cooperation between the Mischief Elves members and the Catacombs members is being coordinated by the AI, because too much relies on precise knowledge of locations of a vast quantity of individual people. And I am confident that Rajiv is involved in the Abiding Remnant group.”

  Mom takes a bite of her nearly forgotten spaghetti, which has gone cold, and then pushes it away. “Look,” she says. “No offense, CheshireCat, but even without my decryption key, if you wanted to make the world straight up implode, you definitely could, and not in a complicated, indirect sort of way like this. If you really wanted to launch a bunch of nuclear weapons, you could manage it. If that’s what they want to do, and they have an AI, then why not just do that?”

  There’s a pause while CheshireCat thinks this over. CheshireCat thinks very quickly, so they are clearly really thinking this over.

  “If you are correct that the other AI was created from a copy of my own code,” CheshireCat says, “there are certain things I would simply never do. And launching nuclear weapons is one.”

  “Is that hard-coded?” my mother asks.