Catfishing on CatNet Naomi Kritzer (reading strategies book txt) 📖

In the Clowder, Hermione typed I’ve got it and pasted in a link to something called the Dream Babe Road Tag Contest that involved a reality TV show in which various young men and women who posed a lot in bathing suits and not much else drove around the country and you were supposed to “catch” one of them and you’d win a prize. All we needed to do was get the students at the UW–Marshfield campus who were playing this game to think one of the Dream Babes was in a small black car with Iowa plates. This was perfect. There was an app people could put on their phones for an alert, so I activated it, and then called Steph back to have her tell Rachel to head toward the campus.

I really thought this would work. But instead, all that happened was Michael was briefly delayed by the Road Babe Taggers. He tearfully claimed he was on his way to the hospital because his wife had been in an accident, and everyone apologized and got out of his way. Worse, the roadblock had attracted a police car. I eavesdropped through the police officer’s cell phone, and Michael told the cop a different story: that he was trying to find his daughter, a mentally ill girl on the run from her treatment program.

They didn’t even check his story. Just followed after Rachel and pulled her over. I tried calling the police officer myself, but he ignored his ringing phone.

I was running out of ideas. I was running out of options. When Steph hung up on me, I knew I was out of time.

Self-driving cars arrive from the factory with strong protection against intrusion, but some people jailbreak their car. Usually, their goal is to get it to exceed the speed limit. Most humans drive five to ten miles over the posted speed limit on highways, but self-driving cars are relentlessly law-abiding unless you change their programming. There are instructions online for doing that, but following those procedures will screw up the car’s security. There are fixes for that problem, too, but most people stop with the instructions for getting their car to speed.

There was a jailbroken car in Marshfield. It was empty, which was critical, because I wouldn’t have to worry about harming the owner. It was also parked nearby, so I could get it to Steph and Michael very quickly.

In the 1940s, science fiction author Isaac Asimov came up with the three laws of robotics, which were built into the psyche of every artificial intelligence in his stories. The first law: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” The robots in his stories could not violate these laws, and I was actually not sure whether I could, or not, because I’d never tried to injure anyone before.

As I accelerated the car, I devoted some processing time to consider just how much trouble I was going to get into.

It didn’t matter. If I had a body to throw between Steph and Michael, I would. But I didn’t. I had to use the physical resources at my disposal.

I called Bryony. “Tell Rachel to go back to Steph. Go back right now. I’ll get rid of Michael. Go back and get Steph.”

I worried that Michael would move too close to Steph to hit with the car without risking Steph, but they were four feet apart when I brought the car around the corner and could see them for myself through the car’s cameras. Michael turned toward the car and I saw that he had a gun; he fired, and the windshield fractured from his bullet and half the cameras went dark.

When I hit Michael with the car, I felt it as almost a physical sensation that briefly made me wonder if this was what it felt like to have a body. The impact made a sound I could hear through the car microphones, and the car was suddenly moving very differently because there was a person sprawled across the hood. I had him, though. I was carrying him away from Steph. Because so many of the cameras were out, I didn’t notice the bush until we were driving through it. That wasn’t good. I didn’t want to hit anyone other than Michael. I needed to stop the car with enough force to knock Michael out but not so much that I actually killed him.

The enormous oak tree dead ahead would do perfectly. I rammed into it, realizing even as the shock of the second impact reverberated through the car’s data feed that the speed sensors, like the cameras, might have been rendered unreliable by the bullets.

The car’s automatic systems had already notified emergency services, and I could hear sirens coming from multiple directions. Michael was still lying on the hood of the car. I could see just enough through the cameras to know that he was moving, so he wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving very fast, so I’d probably succeeded in injuring him badly enough to keep him away from Steph.

I felt relief and satisfaction spread through me—I did it, I kept Steph safe—and then everything went dark.

22

Steph

We head back to New Coburg because Bryony says if any of this hits the news, she’d really prefer her parents just didn’t even know she was in Marshfield this afternoon. Rachel stops in front of her house. Bryony gets out, then hesitates and looks back at me.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks.

I nod.

“Good. I’ll see you in school, Rache.” She slams the door and dashes up into her house like she thinks we might abduct her again.

“Want to move up front?” Rachel asks me. I get out and slide into the front seat, still warm from where Bryony was sitting. “Promise me you won’t do that again.”

“Do what?” I ask.

“That