“So, he’s right that Rajiv could try to undo what my mother’s done.”
“Well, maybe. She can probably lock him out of the code once she’s done editing it.”
I look over at my mother, who’s watching me over the edge of her laptop.
“I told the AI that if anything happened to you, I was going to reprogram it to do nothing but make paper clips, because that struck me as a fate worse than death for an intelligent AI, and CheshireCat agreed,” Mom says. She pushes her hair out of her face. “It sounds like something almost happened to you. What exactly was its plan?”
“The people guarding me were Nell’s mom and Glenys’s mom,” I say. “The AI probably did not have a lot of people he believed would kill me if ordered to do so, and from the messages I got when I got home, I don’t think he thought they’d recognize me.”
“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
