Chaos on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  The other AI was answering for me. The other AI was impersonating me. They could have given Steph directions somewhere incredibly dangerous—there is a river running through downtown Minneapolis, although Steph is a sensible young woman who probably would not have walked into the river just because she thought I was telling her to do it. But it is incredibly cold; what if the other AI had led her in circles? According to the information I’m finding, hypothermia can begin in as little as ten minutes in the kind of weather Minneapolis is currently experiencing, although dressing warmly extends the time people can spend outside, which explains why so many people are outside, despite the weather, and walking very quickly to their destinations rather than freezing in place.

  I have been thinking of the other AI as misguided. Clearly, I need to reconsider my evaluation of how much of a threat it is. I feel some chagrin over the fact that of course I already knew it might be a threat, but my concern has now gone up approximately 1,500 percent with the realization that it is a threat to Steph. I make a note to do some self-examination on this point at a later time.

  What Steph needs to do now is find Nell. But Nell’s phone is invisible to me; either it’s off, or one of the apps on it is making it impossible to find in a crowd. I try running through footage in Minneapolis from businesses near her family’s house with security cameras in the hopes of finding her. The problem with this is that when it is thirty degrees below zero, people tend to cover their heads with hoods and hats and cover their faces with scarves and walk with their heads down. If Nell and Glenys are among the people on the security footage I find, I’m not going to be able to identify them.

  Steph’s hunch—that maybe Nell did go to Firestar’s friend’s house, after all—is as good as anything I’m going to be able to do for her.

  Since I can contribute nothing in particular to that problem, I focus instead on a problem that possibly I can solve. The other AI is using social media sites, run as a mix of social networking and games, to create social chaos. It’s not just the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs; the site Marvin uses is part of that same web. So are the Snakeriders Steph overheard the conversation about. And that’s only the beginning.

  Last fall, Steph provided me with the decryption key that her mother created years ago. It’s still exceptionally powerful. I re-encrypted it after I used it to bring robots in to protect Steph from her father. There’s a human saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I decided that I didn’t actually wish to run the experiment to find out if this was true of bodiless AIs.

  I didn’t tell Steph or my creator, Annette, that I’d made a copy, though. If I wasn’t going to use it, it didn’t matter. Right?

  Right now seems like a good time to use it.

  There are over a hundred of these social networking / game sites, making it difficult to unravel the other AI’s web. In addition to Marvin’s future reenactors, there’s a site promising tabletop gaming meetups that Hermione appears to have joined and then not used much. Greenberry is on a network for fans of Fast Girls Detective Agency that promises real car chases, which fortunately they don’t seem to have provided. Yet. I focus in on the groups that are the most active in the Twin Cities, since that seems to be where things are blowing up. Your mission is to skip class! I tell someone who was supposed to vandalize a peer’s locker. Your mission is to sleep in! I tell a hundred different Catacombs members. If you’re already up, consider a nap! Self-care is important!

  The Elves told me to skip class, I see someone send out. But school’s off today, so obviously this means something else. Any ideas what? A dozen ideas pour in, half of them terrible. I try a replacement mission, one that’s more explicitly harmless, but it’s too late. Meanwhile, the Catacombs members I suggested naps to all seem to interpret my instruction as a Bible reference that spurs them to action.

  Protocol A, I see someone send out through five different social networks. I look for online information and find none.

  This isn’t working.

  In fact, I’m afraid I just made things a whole lot worse.

  35

  • Steph •

  It takes me some hunting to find the door, which turns out to be around the side of the house under a very fancy carport thing. This house is enormous, but looking up, I can see paint peeling, a gutter hanging loose and swinging in the wind, and a total of four birds’ nests tucked into gaps in the fancy woodwork. A gust of wind hits me, and I wonder how many nests were there before winter hit.

  I try the doorbell, which doesn’t really have the “working doorbell” feel, and then try knocking. I hear footsteps and a very creaky floor, and the door swings open. It’s an adult: Morthos’s father, probably. He’s a tall, dark-skinned Black guy, with braids he’s tied back. He looks me up and down and says, “Are you selling Girl Scout cookies?”

  “No, I’m looking for Morthos,” I say, since I have no idea what Morthos’s real name is. “I’m a friend of his from an online game, and I was in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m guessing you mean Bijan,” he says, and turns around to yell, “Beej!” over his shoulder. When there’s no response, he says, “Why don’t you come on in and I’ll see if I can find him for you.”

  “I mean, I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” I say, worried that if Nell and Glenys are hiding here, he’ll stumble across them while looking for his son, but it’s clearly too late to worry about this, as he’s waving me inside, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll freeze your ass off. Excuse me. You’ll get frostbite. Bijan doesn’t have school today, it’s that cold. I told him to work on the wallpaper in the third second-floor bedroom, but he’s probably on his computer somewhere.”

  I’m staring around us at the house, barely hearing him. The entry room is overpoweringly grand; it’s a two-story room with a sweeping staircase and a glittering chandelier. There’s a window on the landing of the staircase, set with stained glass. The man sees me staring and pauses with a laugh.

  “Houses like this were built to impress, and first impressions count. Let me show you the kitchen; then I’ll go get Bijan.”

  I follow him past the staircase and through two doorways into a dumpy, cramped, unpleasant little kitchen.

  “Kitchens were for servants. Those Gilded Age motherfu—uh, railway barons, they were really something else. Anyway, this house’ll be a hell of a thing to see once it’s all fixed up. Grab yourself a snack if you want; I’ll go find Bijan. What did you say your name was?”

  “Firestar’s friend Little Brown Bat,” I say, hoping that one of those names will ring a bell. “I mean, my real name is Steph, but he doesn’t know it.”

  The kitchen has a grimy tile floor, a stained fridge, and a chipped stove. There’s a dishwasher next to the sink, and the counter over the dishwasher doesn’t quite line up with the sink. Mostly, it feels like any number of dingy kitchens that have come with apartments my mother has rented over the years, except for the startlingly high ceiling, which is water-stained.

  It’s taking a while for the dad to come back, so I peek out the door. The kitchen door leads into a sort of walk-through pantry that leads to the dining room, which has a fancy chandelier with a card table and three folding chairs set up under it. A woman with long black hair tied back in a bandanna is scraping peeling wallpaper off the walls.

  “Oh, hello?” she says, her voice muffled slightly by the filter mask she’s got on.

  Bijan’s mom, I guess. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m here for Bijan. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  It’s too late; she’s going to be friendly. This takes a minute. She puts down her scraper and spray bottle, takes off the thick rubber gloves she’s got on, takes off her mask, takes her phone out of the hip pocket of her jeans, unlocks it, stops whatever she was listening to, and pulls her earbuds out. Then she gives me a genuinely friendly smile. “Did Zeke let you in? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you knock.”

  “I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” I say.

&nb
sp; “It’s okay. I’m kind of ready for a break.”

  “I’m here for Bijan,” I say, since I’m not sure she heard me the first time. “Zeke? Zeke is getting him.”

  “Did you come in through the porte cochere?”

  “The what?”

  “The carport thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you saw the entryway! That’s what the whole house will look like when we’re done. Right now, it’s a complete mess, though. Want to see the living room?”

  She leads me to the big front room, which is an unsettling mix of beautiful and totally wrecked; there’s a giant ominous hole in the ceiling and a section of the wallpaper that’s coming down in sheets. “That’s where a pipe burst,” she says. “Oh, I’m Parisa, by the way.”

  “Steph.”

  “Anyway, once this is fixed up, it’s going to be glorious. Look at the carvings around the fireplace! And the inlaid designs in the floor. Aren’t those lovely?”

  The fireplace has dark green tile but also a carved mantelpiece with faces. The floor in here is covered with a sheen of wear and dirt, but I can see darker wood forming an interlocking design against the lighter wood. I look up at the hole again. “Are you really going to be able to just fix this?”

  “Well.” Parisa looks around and lets out a short laugh. “Eventually.”

  There’s a loud creak from the stairs, and Bijan comes down into the living room. “Hi,” he says. “My father said your name is Bat?”

  “Little Brown Bat, and I’m friends with Firestar.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, even though no recognition flickers. He glances at his mom briefly, then says, “Do you want to come upstairs with me so we can talk while I work on wallpaper?”

  “Follow the wastebasket rule!” Parisa calls after us.

  “Mom, I am ace!” he yells down the stairs. “The wastebasket is staying under where I’m scraping.”

  “Wastebasket rule?” I ask.

  “It’s a rule that says I have to keep the door open the width of a wastebasket when I have a girl in a room,” he says.

  We pass his father on the stairs. Zeke gives Bijan an amiable thumbs-up, which Bijan pretends not to see.

  On the second floor, I follow Bijan into a bedroom that’s in somewhat better shape overall than the living room. It looks like he’s using it as an actual bedroom; there’s a futon in a frame here and a desk with a laptop on it. He closes the bedroom door and says, “Okay, tell me who Firestar is?”

  “They know you from the RPG Clowder on CatNet,” I say.

  “Oh, I bet you mean Quabbin,” he says. “The Elven bard. Nonbinary, very enthusiastic, lots of capital letters, basically human sunshine?”

  “Yes!” I say.

  “Summer sunshine,” he amends, glancing out the window at the bright blue sky outside. “I mean. Anyway. What … okay, I still don’t know why you’re here.”

  “Quabbin said you might host these friends of mine who were looking for a place to stay, and I don’t know if they actually talked with you about it, but I’m trying to find those friends and I thought maybe they wound up here.”

  His eyes get sort of wide and he says, “Oh.” And doesn’t say anything else.

  Should I have started with, “Beware, the Mischief Elves are up to something creepy”? I wonder how best to explain that part.

  “Is it true your house is haunted?” I ask, since Firestar mentioned that it might be.

  “Well, maybe,” he says, relaxing a little bit. “Stuff gets moved around a lot. For a while, Dad kept blaming me for it, but eventually it happened while I was out for the night at a friend’s house, and Dad wasn’t going to blame himself. All I know is, it’s not me doing it.”

  “Do you use the Mischief Elves app?” I ask.

  “I did for a while,” he says.

  “Is it still on your phone?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  I give him the shortest possible version of the “let’s you and him fight” game the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs are engaging in. Bijan pulls out his phone as we’re talking and uninstalls the app. “What about CatNet?” he asks.

  “CatNet is safe,” I say.

  “You sound really sure.”

  “The CatNet administrators saved my life last year,” I say. “I trust them completely.”

  “Oh, hey,” he says. “I think Firestar told us about this. It involved robots and hacking and a driverless car…” He looks into space for a minute and then adds, “That was you?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Huh,” Bijan says. He puts his phone back in his pocket. “So, I don’t honestly know if your friends are here or not. Here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure people have been in and out of this house the whole time we’ve been working on it. I mean, unless it’s all poltergeists. It was being used as a squat before my parents bought it at the auction, and I think there are some ways in and out that aren’t the regular doors. Anyway, I didn’t personally hide your friends in here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not, in fact, hiding somewhere in here. And if you’d like me to help you look, I’m happy to do that.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  We start in the basement, because if we’re doing a thorough search, Bijan wants to get that out of the way ASAP. I can’t blame him. This is, hands down, the single creepiest basement I’ve ever been in. It’s enormous, first of all, and there are not nearly enough lights, although in part that’s because light bulbs haven’t been replaced. Bijan brought down an entire box of light bulbs, and we screw in fresh ones whenever we spot one that’s not on. About a third of the time, that adds more light; the rest of the time, apparently the fixture isn’t working, either. Bijan marks those with glow-in-the-dark tape and takes the bulb back out before moving on.

  It’s cold down here, and more cold is seeping in through the stone walls, which are crumbly and shedding bits of dust and grime. The furnace is running, and it’s a regular-looking thing with vents coming off it, but there’s also an ancient-looking iron stove with latching doors just sitting down here that looks like the sort of thing the witch in Hansel and Gretel might have gotten shoved into at the end of the fairy tale.

  “That’s a coal-burning furnace,” Bijan tells me. “It’s an antique. Usually, people had them broken up and hauled away when they replaced them with gas furnaces or whatever, but whoever owned this house then didn’t bother. Now it’s some sort of nifty antique and my parents are trying to sell it to someone, but they’re fighting over how they’re going to get it out of the basement, since of course it weighs as much as a medium-size car.”

  “Do you think anyone could be hiding in it?” I ask.

  “You want to open it up and check, feel free,” he says, edging away slightly.

  The handles don’t want to turn, and I almost give up, but I eventually wrench one open and reveal a shelf full of mouse poop and too small an interior space for anyone to be crouching in.

  After checking the basement thoroughly, we come upstairs. His mother meets us at the top of the stairs with a burst of some language I don’t know.

  “I’m giving her a tour,” he says defensively. “Also, we did the light bulb audit. There are eleven fixtures that don’t work.”

  More of the other language. He rolls his eyes and says something back. Whatever it is seems to mollify her, and we troop up to the second floor.

  “Your friends definitely aren’t hiding on the first floor,” Bijan says. “That’s the main place my parents are working right now.”

  “What language was that?” I ask.

  “Farsi. My grandparents are from Iran. Mom’s actually from California, but she wanted to make sure I spoke the language, so she speaks it to me a lot. It comes in handy if she wants to say something like ‘Have you offered your friend a snack, what’s wrong with you?’ in front of said friend. Did you want a snack? I said you weren’t hungry because I figured you’d rather finish searching now, eat later.�
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  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s stick with the tour.”

  The second floor is bedrooms and bathrooms and closets. Bijan and his parents are using two of the rooms as actual bedrooms, and the rest are in various stages of disarray. We open every single closet and find clothes hangers, peeling paint, and—on the back of a shelf in one of the closets—a fur.

  “Can’t believe my parents missed this,” Bijan says, and picks it up a little bit gingerly. I thought it was a scarf, but once it’s in the light, I see it’s like some sort of extra-long weasel with the actual head still attached. “Help, help, I’m being oppressed!” he says in a squeaky voice, holding the head like it’s a puppet.

  “Repressed,” I correct him without thinking.

  “You’re even more of a dork than I am,” he says, sticking the fur back on the shelf. “Let’s try the top floor.”

  The next floor up has four small bedrooms and then doors that open into two enormous unheated attics that are—I’m not expecting this—full of junk.

  “What’s in these?” I ask, looking around at the boxes.

  “Could be anything,” Bijan says. “But lest I get your hopes up, the odds that it’s anything at all valuable are extremely low. We looked in a few right after closing. Two were boxes of invoices and taxes and stuff from the 1980s. One was full of old newspapers, also from the 1980s.”

  “There’s probably something from the 1980s that would be interesting to find,” I say.

  “If there’s a box up here that’s, like, vintage 1980s comic books or something, that’ll be one of the ones that got chewed to pieces by the squirrels.”

  It is frigid in here. Warmer than outside, but still extremely cold. Just in case, I raise my voice a little and say, “Nell, Glenys, if you’re here, it’s me, Steph, and I need to find you. Please come out?”

  I hear a banging, but it’s coming from outside the house.

  “That’s the gutter,” Bijan says. “It’s coming off that corner, and it bangs against the house in the wind.”