Once I’m inside, I’m really not sure what to make of it.
There are whole categories of human experience that I just don’t share. For example: food. It’s not that I find food weird—if you are a human, then consuming food is entirely sensible! In fact, it’s required. Please eat your food, human friends. But I don’t eat, and food isn’t especially interesting to me. What is interesting is how humans talk about it and how they categorize all the different things that they could eat. Crickets, rabbits, cows, pigs, lobsters, muskrats, and snails—these are all animals that are eaten as foods and considered perfectly normal in some places, while being “gross” or “unclean” or “weird” or “just not food” in others.
Religion is kind of like food. I don’t know where the lines are between “normal,” “a little weird,” and “very weird,” and I’m not sure which of my friends might be able to help me, other than not Steph, not for this.
What I do learn, browsing quietly around the Catacombs:
A lot of the people posting here talk about someone they call the Elder. There are a lot of churches that have elders, but the people here mean someone very specific.
The Elder has predicted an imminent doomsday, which everyone needs to prepare for in some detail. There are types of preparation that are perfectly sensible, like stockpiling food, water, and toilet paper. The large quantities of guns are more worrying.
The doomsday the Elder is predicting involves a massive crash in the banking networks that renders money unavailable and credit cards unusable. It includes transit networks that manage bus and train traffic and also self-driving cars, steering the cars to form massive occult symbols instead of taking people where they’re going, and communications networks transmitting the sound of synthesized laughter instead of the signals they’re supposed to transmit. In other words, quite a bit of the havoc is the sort of doomsday that might come about if an unscrupulous person had access to Steph’s mother’s incredibly powerful decrypting code, which would let them break into huge numbers of computer systems and send them instructions the computers would think were coming from an authorized user.
Now I’m really worried. First, that the other AI is involved here. And second, that the other AI is working with someone from Homeric Software, the tiny company that was run by Steph’s mother, Steph’s father, Xochitl, and Rajiv.
9• Nell •
This afternoon, my peculiar high school says my assignment is to ride the city bus. Specifically, I need to choose a destination, ride the bus there, and bring back some souvenir to prove I went. Steph has the same assignment, which makes this slightly less terrifying.
My mother used to warn me about how dangerous public schools were. When she was in high school, kids got beat up all the time. A girl got punched in the face on the first day of her ninth-grade science class. There were kids smoking grass in the bathrooms and maybe also shooting up heroin. And that was just in her school; city schools, well, those lockdown drills you heard about weren’t just for show.
Mom would poop out an entire litter of hairless baby hamsters if she knew my father had enrolled me at a school that was making me ride a city bus.
But this is good, actually, because I get to pick a destination. And I’ve gotten a quest from the Catacombs.
I’ve heard other people talk about quests, but I never got one before. Quests are optional (the missions aren’t supposed to be). When you do a quest, you can go up a whole lot of levels a lot faster—sometimes you’re even granted the opportunity to ask the Elder a question. And my quest starts with getting myself to something called the Midtown Exchange. I click Accept, my heart beating a little faster as the cheerful teacher spreads out a paper map of the city so we can pick a destination.
“Where’s the Midtown Exchange?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual.
The teacher points it out on the map. “Is that where you want to go?” I nod. She looks at Steph. “Is that okay with you? We’d like you to stick together.”
Steph shrugs. “Sure.”
We each install an app on our phone that does bus routes and are handed our bus passes and a lanyard to carry them in and then sent out to the bus stop in front of our school.
“Have you ever ridden a bus before?” Steph asks.
“No,” I say. “Have you?”
“No,” she says, and laughs nervously. She puts her bus pass in her pocket, not in the lanyard, and after a minute, I do the same.
Steph acts much more worldly than I feel; she’s lived in nearly a hundred small towns, instead of just one. So it’s easy to forget that she’s never lived in a big city before, and being reminded of this makes my palms sweat, because I was thinking I’d just let her tell me how to do this.
There’s an elderly Black man with a walker at the same stop as us. The bus trundles up, opens its doors, and starts lowering itself to the curb with a loud hiss. Steph tries to lean in to ask the driver, “Is this the right bus to get to the Midtown Exchange?” but she’s drowned out.
“You’ve got the right bus,” the elderly man says. When the bus is fully lowered, it flips out a ramp with a loud beep and he boards,
