“Oh my God.” The burrito I’ve been chomping on threatens to make a reappearance.
“What’s wrong?” River asks. “You’ve gone gray.”
I point to my laptop screen. “Come look.”
35
CATFISH
It takes two hours for Wren to stop being sick, and get them through a warm shower, and get the pair of us, plus the evidence, over to church.
The chat messages got worse. Much worse. Obsession worse. Sadistic worse. Unhinged worse. Some of the things Chase told the chatbot he was going to do to Wren turned my stomach too. Many of them were poetically described, especially the one where he planned to put a chainsaw between Wren’s legs to slice them in half while they were still alive.
And he repeatedly deadnamed Wren, as if knowing what it was, and being able to call Wren it, meant there was something special between the two of them.
I’ve never called a meeting. Never had the need. Was happy to go along with everyone else’s agenda.
But now, I’m going to ask the club to take a vote.
I want to kill a federal agent. Something that would lead to the death penalty if I was caught.
When Wren and I enter the room, everyone is already there.
Grudge tips his head to my side of the table. “Brought in a chair for Wren.”
Wren’s hand is cold and damp in mine. I know they can’t be feeling good about what we’ve uncovered. And I’m worried about them. They’ve been quiet since the shower, and I worry that debilitating anxiety we’ve worked so hard to get rid of is back.
Because this is no longer about a random string of events. It’s deeply personal.
“You called this meeting,” Wraith says. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve got?”
I place my hand on Wren’s back. “You want me to do this, or do you have it?”
I can only imagine the layers of complicated feelings Wren is grappling with right now, and I wish I could carry the weight for them.
Wren blows out a breath. “I got it. Federal Agent Dorian Chase has been stalking me for years.”
“Jesus,” Atom says. “What did you find?”
Wren opens their laptop and turns it so my brothers can see some of the evidence. “I guess I came into his orbit somehow about three years ago. You could say Chase is a frustrated white hat hacker. Someone who can do a version of what I do, but for purely legal means. But his work with the FBI takes him to the dark web, and I guess he found me there. He’s good. Very good. To have found my real identity, given all my safeguards, suggests he has a real talent.”
Grudge temples his fingers. “You think this was an attempt to bring you in so he could charge you?”
“It might have started that way,” I say. “Who knows. But it’s gone way beyond that.”
Wren pushes their laptop to Grudge. “There are hundreds of sessions like this. He’s trained an AI model to talk like me. He’s fed any transcripts from old logs and defunct forums and scraps of code commits that bear my syntax quirks. My jokes. Even myspelling errors, like how I always mix up theeandiin weird. He’s effectively grafted my voice to a chatbot so he can pretend he’s talking to me. It…”
Wren’s voice fades, so I step in. “He’s been getting off on sexually torturing a version of Wren he built in code and chatbots for three years.”
Grudge grabs the laptop and reads it. His face morphs through disgust, then anger before he shoves the laptop towards Wraith. “The guy can’t decide if he loves you or wants to rape you. Sick fuck.”
I remember what that part says.
Dorian:You asked for that.
Wren:You said you’d never hurt me.
Dorian:You hurt me when you don’t love me
