“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.”
5 THE AFFAIR
Mr. Burklander was forty-seven years old when the kids in his twelfth-grade creative writing class heard the story about his wife dumping all of his clothes onto the front lawn from the second-story window of their house. He had a massive heart attack and blacked out in the grass in his boxers. It was hard, looking him in the eye when he came back, but they all did, because they all loved him.
No one ever heard why his wife tossed him out, exactly, but the way Jennifer Miller wasn’t in Mr. Burklander’s class anymore, there were some rumors. But that’s all they were. Rumors.
Mr. Burklander approached Charlie as the rest of the class cleared out. Charlie was staring down at his desk, lost in thought.
“How’s it going?”
Charlie glanced up, looking surprised. “Fine, I guess.”
“You didn’t turn in your story.”
“I had writer’s block.”
“I don’t accept that, Charlie. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. You just sit down and do it, like a job, whether it feels right or not. I want you to try. I think writing could help you find a way out of this place you’re in. I really believe that.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Charlie slung his backpack and went for the door.
Mr. Burklander’s hand caught him. He pulled Charlie around, a bit brusquely.
“I’m not messing around here. This is your life.” Mr. Burklander’s eyes softened. “I lost my mother when I was in my twenties. I remember. I had this dream, for years after. She was standing under a building that was shaking. I kept pulling on her arm, trying to get her to move, but she wouldn’t. And a piece of the building came down, right on top of her. I’m almost fifty, Charlie, and I still remember how that dream felt, when I woke up. I always woke up right when the building came down. You will get past this, Charlie. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
Charlie tried to shake his arm loose, but then he didn’t.
Only Mr. Burklander was still trying to save Charlie. Burklander was the faculty sponsor for student council. He’d always liked Charlie.
When Charlie’s mom died, his grades went from A’s to C’s. He had been on track for valedictorian. He and Vanhi had a pact to go to Harvard together. Now he just wanted to run in the opposite direction of anyone trying to remind him of who he once was. The school tried to help. He couldn’t blame them for any of this. They tried to hook him up with counselors. They offered him a semester off, then a year off. But he refused their help, in ways big and small. It was insulting. It made him feel weak. If he wanted to throw it all away, they couldn’t stop him. Screw them. Screw it all. He didn’t want to go to Harvard anyway. He just wanted to be left alone. Eventually, the teachers got tired of taking his abuse. Most of them, anyway. He didn’t know whether to love or hate the one who was still trying.