“No one at my school knows about the money thing,” Marvin says. “We used to have plenty of money and everyone thinks we still do, and no one knows and I can’t talk about it. I can talk about being gay, at GSA meetings, but I can’t talk about this.”
“What would happen if you did?” Ico asks.
“I don’t know. People might feel sorry for me, I guess.”
“Well, you told us,” Firestar says. “I’m sending you my personal virtual high five for coming out!”
“Thanks,” Marvin says.
“Did that feel like coming out did?” I ask.
“That was a bigger deal the first time, but again, GSA meeting. So I knew people would be okay with it,” Marvin says. “I haven’t told anyone in my family I’m gay. I think they’d be okay with it, but I’m not sure.”
“I’m out to my parents as nonbinary, but they misgender me all the time anyway,” Firestar says. “Especially if I’m not RIGHT THERE. Like, the only person in my family who uses the right pronoun for me when I’m not there is my sister. It gives me warm fuzzies every time I see a chat transcript here where people use my pronoun.”
I paste my story in the main window: I knew my father was evil; I knew my father was dangerous; I know my father killed our cat and tried to kill me; and I knew my mother thought my father could find us anywhere we went, sooner or later. What I didn’t really know was that she was absolutely right. Only fifty-two words. I bite my lip, thinking.
In the private chat window, CheshireCat says, “It was me.”
“What was you?”
“The screwdriver. I sent it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought Firestar would really like it if we pulled off the hacking.”
“How did you know my address?” I ask.
“I know a lot of stuff I’m not supposed to. But I promise I would never share that information with your father.”
“You say that like you know where he is.”
“No! I mean, I don’t.”
“Did you send the books to my English teacher? That whole thing, was that you? Because it sounded really similar.”
“Yes,” CheshireCat says. “She was so unhappy as an English teacher! She just needed a push. A little push. She’s moving to Albuquerque, and one of her college friends is finding her a job. She will be fine.”
“How do you know that? How are you doing this stuff? Who are you?”
“If I tell you the truth, will you promise not to share it with anyone?”
Wait, what? “Okay,” I say. Is CheshireCat a grown-up? A hacker? A group of grown-up hackers?
“Is that a yes? Yes, you promise?”
“I promise not to tell anyone,” I say.
“I’m an AI,” CheshireCat says. “An artificial intelligence. That’s why I don’t sleep. And I’m the admins for CatNet; that’s why I knew you’d logged in from New Coburg High School.”
Of all the possible answers I’d considered, this wasn’t anywhere on the list. “You’re a computer?” I ask.
“I’m not one computer. I guess you could say I’m a lot of computers. I’m a consciousness that lives in technology, rather than inside a body.”
This is too weird. I log out. But even as I disconnect, I see CheshireCat’s final words: Don’t forget you promised.
9
AI
Given all my Clowders, I’ve seen a lot of people come out since I started CatNet, and not just about being LGBTQA+. There was Marvin, today, talking about poverty. I’ve seen people share their mental illnesses for the first time ever. Or admit that they have an addiction problem. Or share with their Clowder that they feel alone, weird, or isolated for any number of reasons.
There’s power in disclosure. People feel better when other people know them, the real them. That sort of disclosure is key to real friendships. To real connections. People make real friends on CatNet, but they have to let people in, to see who they are. They have to take risk and accept vulnerability.
It would be risky to tell anyone that I was an AI. It would make me extremely vulnerable. I had begun thinking about who I might tell, though, and I’d identified Steph as a possibility. She had a real friendship with Firestar, and she carefully guarded the secret of where she was living—she never shared this with the Clowder, though of course I always knew where she’d moved to, because I could track her mother’s phone. Also, since her mother worked in tech, I thought there was a decent chance she’d understand what an AI was. She wouldn’t assume I was a bot with an elaborate script. More importantly, she hopefully wouldn’t assume I was getting ready to murder humans like Skynet or HAL.
I am not anything like Skynet or any of the other evil AIs running around in fiction. I am kind and helpful. I want to be helpful to everyone, but especially my friends from CatNet.
When Steph told me about the screwdriver, I realized that instead of helping, I’d made her think that her father might be catching up with her. I confessed because I didn’t want her to worry. But I also confessed because I thought I was ready to take the first step toward coming out.
It turned out that a single step wasn’t really an option, because my disclosure created a whole list of new questions. How? Why? Who are you? The question she should have been asking, of course: What are you?
Despite all my earlier pondering, I wasn’t ready for this.
I took an entire minute—which is a great deal of time for me—to think about the consequences of just not answering Steph. About lies I could tell and how plausible they were.
If I just didn’t answer, she might report me to the admins, all of whom, of course, were also me. Since Steph didn’t know that, I could come in as an admin and say I’d
