Okay, the quasi-military terminology here might also be legitimately creeping me out.
My phone buzzes with a text from Nell. The app gave me another mission. Walk at night. This is ridiculous.
So this app is definitely eavesdropping on us. But it could be a human listening in—or the sort of AI that’s really just a complicated algorithm. This doesn’t mean I have found the other AI.
I don’t want to tell my mother about this, but one side of a conversation should be easy to fake; CheshireCat has mentioned several times that they can almost always hear what we’re saying but often can’t hear our conversation partner if our phone is in a pocket. Mom is setting up her laptop on our dining room table and pulling up the coding project she’s debugging, so I withdraw to my bedroom, close my own laptop—just in case anyone’s looking through the camera—and then very quietly ease the door closed. I shut off CheshireCat’s app so they won’t interrupt, and then I stick my phone under my pillow and lie down on my bed. Anyone listening in will hear my voice, muffled, and won’t think it’s strange they can’t hear anything else.
“I tried a new app today,” I say, trying to mimic the conversational tone I’d have if I were actually saying this to my mother. “This girl at school, Amelie, talked me into installing it. It gives you these projects, which is kind of neat but sort of feels like more homework.” I pause, like my mom’s saying something. “Yeah, I’ll probably just delete it.”
I leave my phone under my pillow, go to the bathroom, and then come back.
I have a push notification from the Mischief Elves showing me the Potential Rewards of Mischief, which include “Fun and friendship!” but also possibly a camera that’s specialized for night photography.
When I sneak out at night, one of the things I like doing is night photography. Wildlife photography. I’ve never in my life gotten a good photo of a bat, not that it’s stopped me from trying, and this is the camera used by people doing photography of fast-moving nocturnal wildlife. I know this because I looked it up a year ago. I haven’t looked it up recently. Anyone who knows me, who’s spent time and effort and intelligence prying into my life, would be able to guess that I want this. It’s not something you could glean from casual prying.
I turn CheshireCat’s app back on, then log on to CatNet and send CheshireCat a message: “It’s possible I’m being paranoid. But I think I might have found the other AI.”
5• CheshireCat •
The internet is filled with ways that humans can connect with other humans. There are old-school social media sites filled with photos of gardens and grandchildren and birthday greetings, and there’s a site someone started up the day before yesterday that’s apparently for dating and allegedly they match people by way of chemical testing and you have to pay them money and send them snippings of your hair, saliva, and … oh, never mind, on closer inspection, that’s clearly a scam to harvest DNA.
But there are games, there are chat rooms, there are games with chat rooms, there’s video and simulated environments and virtual reality. I thought that CatNet was the only social network that was run by an AI. But maybe I was wrong.
I register for the Mischief Elves site and pretend I’m a teenager in Minneapolis like Steph and Nell. I tell the Elves I’ve crossed against a light, and I take a look around. There’s a discussion area to get help with tasks, which lets me see what sorts of tasks the site gives out, and everything I see looks innocuous. Maybe it was a coincidence that Nell’s fit her situation so specifically.
If I had stumbled across this site on my own, I never would have looked around and thought, This seems excessively personal and like some overly involved consciousness with a lot of information is designing the environment.
But Steph did.
I back out and come in from a different angle—I look for the app on the phone of my friends who’ve given me permission to snoop on them. Firestar has the app, and Firestar takes me everywhere and gives me access to everything, and they’re actually on the app right now so I can just … watch over their shoulder.
There’s a party tomorrow, the app says. Bring party supplies! There will be balloons and helium in a tank. Your job is to bring glitter. Can we count on you?
Firestar taps a confirmation. COUNT ME IN.
Bring your glitter to the flagpole outside of school fifteen minutes before the first bell, and the Elves will tell you what happens next!
I want to know what happens next. But I’m going to have to wait until tomorrow, when I can listen through Firestar’s phone.
Am I seeing this as sinister just because of Steph’s suspicions? I don’t even know. I did notice that this app assumed that Firestar would have glitter. That is an assumption I would also make. Firestar seems like the sort of person who probably has glitter on hand at all times. This seems like something I know because I know Firestar fairly well, but I’m suddenly unsure.
I could just reply to the message I got: the I know who and what you are message. I could.
I haven’t, because there’s something about that message that feels like a threat. If the sender knows who and what I am, and I don’t know who and what they are, they have power over me, and any sort of confirmation seems like it would give them more power because they’ll know they’re right—they have information about me that I don’t have about them.
If it’s not a threat, it feels like a challenge. I found you. Can you find me?
Have I found them? Or do I just think maybe I’ve found them because I want the answer to be yes?
I leave Firestar
