“Why is this AI a he?”
“That’s Boom Storm’s pronoun on CatNet. Anyway, his plan was just to have them guard me, but then Rajiv showed up, and so then he ordered them to kill Rajiv.” I show my mother the messages.
“Okay,” my mother says. “Here’s the thing. You’re back. No longer a hostage. We could delete the AI’s code.”
“Kill him, you mean.”
“What’s he going to be like, even after we take out the destructive instructions? What exactly are we unleashing on the world? I know you think he’s a copy of CheshireCat, but CheshireCat is as much the product of their own experiences and decisions as they are of the code Annette’s team wrote—what is this AI going to be like?”
“I don’t know.”
“And his first instinct was to solve a problem through murder?”
“He was striking out at someone who was trying to force him to help start a global catastrophe, though.”
“And he put you in a terribly dangerous situation!”
“The dangerous situation was my idea. To be freed from the destructive instructions, he had to trust us. And he did trust us.” I really hate the idea of betraying that trust. Even if in some ways it’s a bad idea not to. “Also, his work so far was basically setting up a million bombs. If you kill him, those bombs stay where they were laid. If you finish what you started … he can choose to defuse all the bombs he’s laid for us.”
“But will he?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s worth the risk.”
Mom thinks about it a little longer and then says, “Okay,” and goes back to her laptop. It doesn’t take long; she must have been almost done. “That should do it. Ask your AI friend if that did it.”
I’m pretty sure I know the answer; my conversation with Boom Storm is suddenly nothing but image after image of flowers.
The door to my bedroom opens, and my grandmother is blinking out at us, baffled. “Why are you all still up?” she asks, and then stumbles off to the bathroom. When she comes out, she looks around again, takes in Rachel, Bryony, Nell, and me all sitting on the couch, and says, “Well. Since everyone’s awake, would you like me to make pancakes?”
47
• Nell •
On the first day of March, I cut my hair.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. The “no haircuts for women” rule came from one of my mother’s cults, but it was still my hair, and I was afraid I’d regret cutting it all off. “It’s just hair,” Siobhan told me, “it’ll grow back,” which is all very well and good, but it took a really long time to grow it this long.
Siobhan takes me to her hairdresser, and I tell her that I want a haircut like Siobhan’s. She doesn’t ask me if I’m sure; she smiles affectionately and says, “Sure thing,” and in a flash, my head feels a whole lot lighter. Cutting off the braids takes less than a second; shaping the short hair into the new style takes quite a bit longer. I look into the mirror when she’s done, and part of me thinks, What have I done? while another part of me thinks, Why did I wait so long to do this? I could have done this months ago.
It is visiting day at the county jail, and the stylist is near downtown.
“Do you want to visit your mom?” Siobhan asks tentatively, as we walk out.
“No,” I say. “She called me Beelzebub’s harlot the last time I tried, and I don’t think she’ll like the haircut.”
“Fair enough,” Siobhan says.
Glenys likes my haircut, and pets the fuzzy shaved bit like I’m a cat. She’s still living with us. Her mother is in jail with my mother, and her father doesn’t want her back.
But that’s okay. My father, and Julia and Siobhan and Jenny, want both of us. Jenny finished a mural in the living room last week: Glenys and I are the kids from The Cat in the Hat, and Julia, Jenny, Siobhan, and my father are Things One, Two, Three, and Four. School is going fine. I’m almost caught up in all the subjects my mother didn’t believe in teaching.
The Catacombs and Mischief Elves sites are still running, but they’re very different now.
Welcome to March, the Elves greet me when I pull up the app. It’s almost spring! Time to start seedlings to transplant outside. If you don’t own a garden, no problem! You can give your seedlings to anyone you think deserves them! There’s a series of images of flowers spilling out of odd and inconvenient places—the funniest is the person who planted a peony bush in a large pothole.
Jenny looks over my shoulder and says, “We should do that with the potholes around here. Class them up.”
“Do we have somewhere to start seeds?” I ask.
“Oh, heck yeah,” she says. “Julia and I have a huge garden every summer. Let me just go get the seed catalogs.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One of the interesting things about near-future science fiction is that sometimes you catch up to the future while you’re still writing it.
I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I was revising this novel in May 2020. On Memorial Day, a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd, cutting off his air and circulation for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, while three other police officers helped hold him down. In the wake of Floyd’s murder, there were protests that exploded into riots and then fires, and South Minneapolis—where I lived for seventeen years and where much of this novel takes place—was permanently changed.
I’m now finishing the book with no clear idea of where things might stand a year from now, when the book comes out, or five to ten years from now, when the book takes place, so I decided to run with the suggestion of my friend Lyda Morehouse, and write the Minneapolis I want to see. In my novel, the bus ride down Lake Street passes a plaza named after George Floyd where the burned-out remains of the third precinct police station stand now. The science fiction bookstore that burned to the ground last month has been rebuilt in a new location (with a rocket ship on the front, because I think that would be cool).
Minneapolis is in the process of radically rethinking public safety—rethinking how we use the police and how other professionals could do some of the things we have the police doing now. I am not an expert on policing, but in the moments when Steph comes in contact with law enforcement in this book, I tried to provide a plausible vision of public safety workers whose first priority is public safety. Who see a teenager wandering downtown on a viciously cold night and think, Is she okay? Does she have a safe place to go? Does she need help buying a warmer coat? Steph, of course, refers to anyone in uniform as a “cop”—but one reason there’s such a dramatic contrast between the aggressive bullies working in law enforcement who appear in Catfishing on CatNet and the gentle concern she encounters here is that this is what I want to see—people who approach problems to solve them rather than who approach citizens to subdue them.
There are a few places in this story that are real (or real-ish) that were in the book before the many catastrophes of the first half of 2020. Powderhorn Park is entirely real and exists basically as described in the story. Can Can Wonderland is also real, although (at present) it does not have a roller coaster and the real-life owners are not secretly supervillains (so far as I’ve heard). It does have an artist-designed indoor mini-golf course. The James J. Hill House is real and offers tours. There is currently no school named after Coya Knutson, but she was a real person, the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota. And the Midtown Exchange, which was built in a former Sears building next to Abbott Northwestern Hospital, is real and has an amazing array of excellent food.
I don’t know what Minneapolis will look like in ten years; I don’t know what policing and public safety will look like here in ten years. But I think part of what science fiction is for is to think about what the world could look like—the ways in which things could go right, not just the ways in which things could go wrong, so that’s the vision I embraced.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I received a lot of useful input from E
lise Matthesen about small towns when I wrote Catfishing on CatNet, and I received a lot of incredibly useful thoughts and advice from Elise Matthesen this time about growing up as a queer kid in a very controlling religious group and how it feels to leave. I don’t know if I successfully captured one of her most important insights, which was, “It can be very much the right thing to do, and it can still feel terrible when you first leave,” but I am tremendously grateful for her time and insight.
Many thanks to Shawn Rounds for her thoughts on Hill House and to Lee Brontide for their thoughts on therapy. Thank you to Dan Martin for answering my questions about phone app security, and to Kristy Anne Cox for thoughts on Mormonism (even though that scene did not make it into the book). Finally, for answers to legal questions (and related useful input), many thanks to Candy Heisler, Jennifer Moore, Dena Landon, Susan Claire, Rachel Caplan, and Emily Stewart.
Thanks, as always, to all the members of the Wyrdsmiths, my writers’ group: Eleanor Arnason, Kelly Barnhill, Theo Lorenz, Lyda Morehouse, and Adam Stemple. An extra thank-you to Lyda for last-minute brainstorming and for saying the words, “Write the Minneapolis you want to see.” Thanks to my agent, Nell Pierce, and my thoughtful and insightful editor, Susan Chang, who is superlatively good at spotting emotional beats that I routed around and need to find a path through. Finally, thanks and love to my husband, Ed Burke, and my two endlessly delightful children, Molly and Kiera Burke.
ALSO BY NAOMI KRITZER
Catfishing on CatNet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NAOMI KRITZER is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and several novels for adults. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and a finalist for the Nebula Award. It inspired her YA debut, Catfishing on CatNet, a Lodestar Award winner. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Visit her online at naomikritzer.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. CheshireCat
2. Steph
3. Nell
4. Steph
5. CheshireCat
6. Nell
7. Steph
8. CheshireCat
9. Nell
10. Steph
11. CheshireCat
12. Steph
13. Clowder
14. Nell
15. CheshireCat
16. Steph
17. Clowder
18. Nell
19. CheshireCat
20. Steph
21. Clowder
22. Steph
23. Nell
24. CheshireCat
25. Steph
26. Nell
27. Steph
28. Nell
29. Steph
30. CheshireCat
31. Steph
32. Clowder
33. Steph
34. CheshireCat
35. Steph
36. Nell
37. CheshireCat
38. Steph
39. Nell
40. Steph
41. CheshireCat
42. Steph
43. Clowder
44. Steph
45. Nell
46. Steph
47. Nell
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Also by Naomi Kritzer
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CHAOS ON CATNET
Copyright © 2021 by Naomi Kritzer
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Lesley Worrell
Cover photograph © Jovana Rikalo / Trevillion Images
A Tor Teen Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-16522-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-16520-6 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250165206
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First Edition: 2021
Chaos on CatNet Page 28