Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer (detective books to read TXT) 📕

help you. The world is big. Most of it is not covered by cameras. Even in an area with cameras, I can only see the items in full view—I can’t go around peering into drawers or shuffling through piles. The difference between the object you lost and millions of nearly identical objects is unlikely to be discernible to a surveillance camera, anyway. So that driving log that went missing—I couldn’t help.

On the other hand, if you’re sitting at a driver’s license testing station hoping for a no-show, that is trivially easy to provide. I could provide a whole day full of no-shows just by messing with the calendar reminders on people’s phones, although of course for ethical reasons I want to know exactly who I’m inconveniencing and whether this would be a real problem for them. A few minutes of research and I’ve strategically disabled morning alarms or backup reminders for a number of people who shouldn’t be on the road unsupervised yet, anyway, and I’m confident that Nell will get her test, as long as she’s in the waiting room at some point that day.

This starts me thinking again about the other AI.

Does it have friends? Or if not friends, per se, does it have people it finds extra interesting, that it does favors for? If I’m right that it’s manipulating people, are there people who are beneficiaries or just people who are tools?

The internet is very large and has some unpredictable currents—you might take two nearly identical pictures of your cat, and yet in one of them, your cat’s eyes are just a tiny bit wider, his mouth giving just slightly more impression of a yell, and people who would never have given the first picture of your cat a second glance will find the other hilarious, and suddenly Yelly Cat is a meme and you have a famous cat and there are cartoon drawings of your cat being sold on T-shirts—no one knows why some pictures, jokes, clever quips, slogans, amusing minor news stories just get everyone’s collective attention.

But if you pay enough attention to the internet, you know where some of the currents are. If I want to bring attention to something, I know where to put it for the right person’s eyes to fall on it, whether that’s a journalist who will follow up with an actual story, or someone who’s famous on the internet and just has a lot of people paying attention to what they say.

So now I’m wondering: Can I find the signs of someone else doing this?

I’ve helped people find jobs and scholarships. I’ve helped a lot of homeless domestic animals (not just cats) find humans who will love them and care for them. Looking for signs that someone else has been doing something similar, I find those indications almost immediately.

There’s a summer trail-building program for young people that got both an influx of cash, allowing it to expand by a factor of eleven, and an equally dramatic rise in applications. Looking at the applicants, a lot of them seem to have stumbled across the information about the program with just enough time to apply. This looks startlingly like something I would do. I look for a unifying theme among the applicants and don’t find one, other than general outdoorsiness.

There’s a letter-writing campaign to support someone’s unusual front yard—a bee-friendly prairie in place of boring grass, which violated zoning ordinances until enough of their neighbors objected to the city’s demand that they cut it. This is good; bees are important.

And there’s a coordinated harassment campaign against a low-level politician who served on his town council until things got so nasty that he announced he wasn’t going to run again and then withdrew from the internet almost entirely. I can find no indication of what this person did to attract my counterpart’s ire.

The first two things I found were so innocuous. So reassuring. And then—boom. This is just what I told Steph: every time I start thinking about making contact, I find something else that makes me think, This is not a good person.

I do a little research into the politician, hoping maybe he was awful. He seems to have been focused on the sort of extremely local issues that you’d need to have a body living in the town to care about.

To distract myself, I check in on Nell, on the driving tests, on whether there’s a person who does behind-the-wheel testing she’ll need to avoid. I find no additional useful tasks I can do there.

Steph and Rachel are planning to go with Nell to the compound in Wisconsin. I don’t know how soon that’ll happen, but I need to work out some way to provide them with backup. Listening through their phones isn’t enough—I need a physical presence.

Hmmm.

There are robots for sale online. The cheapest are basically children’s toys—fragile and not designed for uneven terrain. I want a robot I can use to follow Steph around, something with hydraulic legs, a camera for sight, a swiveling head, a grasping arm …

I have it express-shipped to her Minneapolis address.

20•  Steph  •

“I passed!” Nell tells me gleefully, showing me her license. “And I told my father I want to go visit my grandparents on Saturday. He expects me to be gone all day Saturday and most of Sunday. We’ll have plenty of time.”

I am already semi-regretting my decision to go along, but I nod and add, “My girlfriend, Rachel, wants to meet us on the way.”

“Okay,” Nell says, looking surprised. “Do we need to pick her up?”

“No. She’ll drive up from New Coburg.” Rachel has already picked out a spot to rendezvous: a little restaurant out in the middle of farm country called Paula’s Diner, which is precisely at the intersection of the road north from New Coburg and the road east from Minneapolis. “What time do you want to leave on Saturday?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. Eight, I guess.”

It’s a two-hour drive from here to Paula’s. I feel profoundly unprepared for this