4 NEXT LEVEL
Charlie showed him the text.
Peter’s eyes went wide. “Do you know what this means?”
“Yeah, some freaky AI chatbot is cyberstalking me. Or you’re pranking me.”
“I wouldn’t mention your mom like that.”
For once, no irony was in Peter’s voice. He was devilish, Charlie thought, but he wasn’t cruel.
“So then what the fuck?”
Peter read it again:
It’s your Daddy, God.
Mommy says hi.
I have a job for you.
The word job was a link.
“It’s like the one I got. But different.”
“You got one, too?”
“Yeah.” Peter fished out his phone.
They were standing by the lockers outside the room of the counselor, Mrs. Fleck, with its gaudy posters about feelings and perseverance. Mrs. Fleck was the rumored owner of many cats.
Peter opened his texts.
You got ballz.
Fuck me? No—Fuck YOU!
Do you BElieve in me? I BElieve in you.
Now … SHOW ME.
The SHOW was a link, too.
“Did you click on it?” Peter asked.
“No. Did you?”
“Not yet. I wanted to do it together.”
“Fine, let’s use your phone,” Charlie said. “I’m not looking to download some rootkit.”
“I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows. “We insulted it. And now it wants us to click a link? No thanks.”
“Look, I found the site, right?”
“Right.”
“I told you about it.”
“True.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t tell you everything I read.”
“Oh, shit.”
Peter gave that easy smile. “It’s all good, I promise.” His excitement was contagious and hard to resist. “This chatbot, it’s more than that.”
“More than a chatbot?”
“The people who talk about it, they’re the best in the world. The most exclusive coders. Think of the chatbot as a kind of gatekeeper.”
“Gatekeeper to what?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. They made him. And he stands watch. And it’s hard enough just getting to the website to talk to him. But if he likes you…”
“Then…”
“Then you get invited.”
“Invited to what?”
“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out.”
“And you think this is our invitation?”
“No. I think this is our test to see if we should be invited. ‘I have a job for you.’ ‘I believe in you.’ ‘Show me.’ So let’s show them.”
“So we click the link, and then…”
“We see what it wants. If it’s out of bounds, we don’t do it.”
“And if it does give us malware?”
“Look, if these people wanted to hack us, we’re already hacked. Besides, like you said, we can use my phone.”
Charlie was running out of excuses, or more to the point, he was running out of easy problems for Peter to bat down. If Charlie wanted to, he could think of a million good reasons not to click the link. The truth was, he didn’t want to think of them.
But one thing did bother him.
“What about the reference to my mom? ‘Mommy says hi.’ That’s just sick. And how did they even know?”
“It’s all over your social media. It would take about two seconds for a bot to figure that out about you. And honestly I think it’s just riffing, not being cruel. Look, think about it like an AI. God equals father, then it links father to mother. It’s just connecting dots. No malice, just typical natural language processing. You know, bullshit.”
Charlie sighed. “At least test the link first.”
“That’s fair.”
Peter checked the pop-up over the link. Instead of a Web address, it showed a random string:
R29kIGlzIGdyZWF0Lg==
“It’s gibberish,” Charlie said. “They’re masking the URL.”
“Maybe, but it’s not gibberish. It’s encoded text. Probably base64.”
“How can you tell?”
“Educated guess. Multiple of four, all the characters are A to Z or zero to nine. And that last part, Lg==. You see that sequence repeated all the time. It’s a period.”
“So what does it say?”
Peter googled base64 decoder, then pasted the string in and hit Decode.
In the text box below, the decoded text appeared:
God is great.
“That’s funny,” Peter said. “So they masked the Web address and hid a pass phrase in the mask. They’ve given us the door and the key. These people aren’t trying to give us a virus. They’re trying to test us. The only question now is, Do we have the guts to go stick it in?”
Charlie sighed because he knew Peter was baiting him, yet Charlie was going to do it anyway. He was curious. He went back to the original text—I have a job for you!—and clicked job.
For a moment, his screen went black.
Then, the archangel Michael appeared, in the form of a text prompt.
“Well, we already know that,” Peter said. “Better lucky than smart. You want the honors?”
“Sure.” Charlie typed:
God is great.
Then, in white font on a black screen, instructions appeared. It told them what to do, but not how.
“Oh,” Peter said.
“Huh. That’s not so bad.”
“No. Kinda fun.”
“And doable.”
“Very doable. Very Vindicatory.”
“True, but … do we really want to drag them into this?”
Peter looked at Charlie, surprised. “Sure. They’d love it. You want to hog this just for us?”
Charlie shook his head defensively. Why did he want to hog it, just for them? Because Peter had become his best friend? Because the Vindicators seemed uncool by comparison? Because being around Peter made him feel mysterious and special and—for those wild distracted moments—free from the pain that sat in his gut like a rock?
Or D, all of the above?
Charlie shrugged. “Of course we’ll invite them. We don’t have to say why we’re doing it.”
“You don’t want to tell them about God?”
“Well, not yet. I mean, we don’t even know if they’ll get invited. The texts only came to us.”
“Sure.” Peter nodded as if that made all the sense in the world. “Sure.”