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 to their texting and homework and go back to talk to Steph.
“I can’t decide,” I tell Steph.
“I can keep investigating,” Steph says.
I hate asking my human friends to do anything that seems at all risky. There are things that seemed like such good ideas that led to so many complications. I resolve to keep a close eye on anything that results from this. “Yes,” I say. “Please do. That would be very helpful.”