Story Excerpt: Amelia Walker and TikTok

Amelia Walker thought there someone besides TikTok and herself in the garden. Not, of course, Aunt Nora, who was in the house waiting for an early visitor to arrive, and not the groundskeeper. Someone or something else must be concealed among the thickets of magnificently flowering native Jontarou shrubs about Amelia.

No explanation came to mind for TikTok’s feline unease, or why her own nerves were similarly on edge without any clear trigger.

Amelia plucked a blade of grass, slipped the end between her lips and chewed it gently, her face puzzled and concerned. She wasn’t ordinarily afflicted with nervousness. I’m fifteen, she thought, and a genius. This was her usual go-to consolation when encountering the unfamiliar, but that didn’t make it any less true. She was also the youngest member of one of Orado’s most prominent families and a wetware security engineer at a Genuflect, a post-series A startup in the Great Northwest. Like most people on Earth, her physical, mental, and emotional health was excellent. Aunt Haley’s frequent cracks about the inherent instability of her intellect could be ignored, for Nora’s own stability seemed questionable to Amelia.

Yet, the current situation remained thoroughly unpleasant.

It wasn’t just here, although it had become more pronounced when she arrived. Amelia suspected something shortly after they landed in Jontarou, maybe an hour into their night at Port Nichay’s rented guest house. She’d hit the sack immediately with TikTok, only to be jolted awake not long after. TikTok stood at the window, forepaws on the sill, her silhouette etched against the starry night, gaze locked onto the garden below.

Amelia, only curious at that point, climbed out of bed and joined TikTok at the window. There was nothing in particular to be seen, and if the scents and minor night sounds which came from the garden weren’t exactly what they were used to, Jontarou was after all on the other side of the planet. What else would one expect here?

But TikTok’s muscular back felt tense and rigid when Amelia laid her arm across it, and except for an absent-minded dig with her forehead against Amelia’s shoulder, TikTok refused to let her attention be distracted from whatever had absorbed it. Now and then, a low, ominous rumble came from her furry throat, a half-angry, half-questioning sound. Amelia began to feel a little uncomfortable. She managed finally to coax the great crest cat away from the window, but neither of them slept well the rest of the night.

“You look so fatigued, dear, like you’re under severe mental strain. Which, of course, you might be,” Nora added musingly. She styled her gold-blond hair piled high on her head. “Now wasn’t I right in insisting to Jessamine that you needed a vacation away from that terribly monotonous work?” She smiled gently.

“Oh, absolutely,” Amelia agreed. “Visiting here is like doing absolutely nothing at all. I love the empty void.” Amelia disliked matching her aunt’s passive-aggressiveness, but the elder often inspired such impulses. However, Amelia had promised her mother to avoid actual battles on the Jontarou trip, if possible.

“Oh, do take your cat with you,” Nora said, when Amelia mentioned taking a walk.

“Oh, TikTok?” Nora visibly blanched at the mild profanity, much to Amelia’s delight. That a mind virus app from seventy years ago caused such emotional distress to this day was fascinated Amelia. Some folks impacted by the slow, then rapid onslaught still dealt with shellshock, but Nora wasn’t one of them.

After breakfast, she went out into the back garden with TikTok, who immediately walked into a thicket, camouflaged herself and vanished from sight. It seemed to add up to something. But what?

Amelia strolled about the garden a while, maintaining a pretense of nonchalant interest in Jontarou’s flowers and colorful bug life. Meanwhile, she thought about the next enhancement she would add to her beloved pet.

Amelia loved working at Genuflect. As a highly competent software engineer, moving into wetware was challenging but exciting, melding organic technology into the bodies of plants and animals. Advancements in modifying the DNA of living organisms had picked up dramatically in the first half of the century thanks to advancements in biology, informatics, and generative artificial intelligence. Now, near the end of the twenty-first century, wires gave way to synapses, silicon to carbon, and neural networks to, well, the original neural network.

But the future was definitely organic, Amelia believed. No artificial colors or flavors. Many in the great global powers like India, Argentina, and even the United States were essentially cyborgs without the clunky cyberpunk attachments. Any adult over twenty could install connections to the Internet, software agents, and various mind apps, all without the physical computer.

These were what Amelia called phase one implementations—conscious applications that were connected to the mind, but separate from conscious and subconscious thought. Take the most popular use case: asking for the weather. Even someone as technophobic as Aunt Nora could know the weather when she woke up each morning by thinking about asking the meteorological app for the day’s forecast. A phase two implementation would be Nora’s weather app notifying her of the weather each morning. Phase three would involve her thinking about the weather and getting results without thinking about an app at all. Phase four would have Nora know the weather automatically, like knowing addition, just another fact in the brain.

Most regulations today kept such integrations apps to phase one for humans and animals, but Amelia had a few phase two installations, and TikTok had plenty more.

None were weather related.

Amelia experienced the most curious little chills of alarm from time to time, but discovered no signs of a lurking intruder, or of TikTok either. Then, for half an hour or more, she’d just sat cross-legged in the grass, waiting quietly for TikTok to show up of her own accord, while coding a task for work with Aviator, one of her more sophisticated Phase one apps.

Amelia scratched her kneecap, scowling at Port Nichay’s park trees beyond the garden wall. Feeling nervous without a reason felt absurd, yet an irrational urge kept mounting, suggesting she needed to do something specific, though what that was remained unclear.

In fact, TikTok wanted her to do some specific thing completely idiotic.

Abruptly, Amelia closed her eyes, thought “TikTok?” sharply, and waited.

One of her favorite mind apps she installed on TikTok was SightShare. She could, through a kind of symbolic mind-picture method, like a short waking dream, see and hear what TikTok saw and heard. She could also call out to her, though TikTok could not communicate back, though a meow wouldn’t be too much use.

Well, it might be a more of a roar, as crest cats were a substrate of domesticated mountain lions.

The warm glow of sunlight shining through her closed eyelids faded out quickly and was replaced by some inner darkness. In the darkness there she could see TikTok was sitting a little way off beside an open door in an old stone wall, green eyes fixed on Amelia. Amelia got the impression that TikTok was inviting her to go through the door. But then quickly TikTok looked to a movement of a bird in the bushes. The throughput was choppy and slow, like something was sharing the near-field communication bandwidth, but it was the only app she was using with her pet.

She closed the app and at once found herself sitting, eyes still closed and the sunlight bathing her lids, in the grass of the guest house garden.

She opened her eyes, looked around. Her heart was thumping rapidly. The experience couldn’t have lasted more than four or five seconds, but how disconnected, it was like she was both watching through TikTok and watching her watch TikTok. Usually, it was like watching a recording.

It served her right, Amelia thought, for being so lazy. What she should have done at once was to make a methodical search for her. TikTok was bound to be somewhere nearby. Locate her behind her camouflage, and hang on to her until whatever was up with the garden was explained! Talented as TikTok was at blotting herself out, it usually was possible to spot her if one directed one’s attention to shadow patterns. Amelia began a surreptitious study of the flowering bushes about her.

Three minutes later, off to her right, where the ground was banked beneath a six-foot step in the garden’s terraces, TikTok’s outline suddenly caught her eye. Flat on her belly, head lifted above her paws, quite motionless, she seemed like a transparent wraith stretched out along the terrace, barely discernible even when stared at directly. It was a convincing illusion; but what seemed to be rocks, plant leaves, and sun-splotched earth seen through the wraith-outline was simply the camouflage pattern TikTok had printed for the moment on her hide. She could have changed it completely in an instant to conform to a different background.

Amelia pointed an accusing finger.

“See you!” she announced, feeling a surge of relief which seemed as unaccountable as the rest of it.

The great cat twitched one ear in acknowledgment, the head outlines shifting as the camouflaged face turned towards Amelia. Then the inwardly uncamouflaged, very substantial looking mouth opened slowly, showing TikTok’s red tongue and curved white incisors. The mouth stretched in a wide yawn, snapped shut with a click of meshing teeth, became indistinguishable again. Next, a pair of camouflaged lids drew back from TikTok’s round, brilliant-green eyes. The eyes stared across the lawn at Amelia.

“Quit clowning around, TikTok!”

The eyes blinked, and TikTok’s natural dark brown color suddenly flowed over her head, down her neck and across her body into legs and tail. Against the side of the terrace, as if materializing into solidity at that moment, appeared two hundred pounds of supple, rangy, long-tailed cat. On the tip of her tail was a large, stripe of black fur, which might have looked ridiculous on another animal, but didn’t on her. Even as a fat kitten, hanging head down from the side of a wall by the broad sucker pads in her paws, TikTok had possessed enormous dignity.

Amelia studied her, the feeling of relief fading again. TikTok, ordinarily a restful and composed companions, was still tensed up about something. That big, lazy yawn a moment ago, the attitude of stretched-out relaxation…all a sham! Such a tricky cat!

“What is eating you?” she asked.

The green eyes stared at her, solemn, watchful, seeming for that fleeting instant quite alien.

For a moment, Amelia had the uncanny certainty of having had the answer to this situation almost in her grasp. Something about Jontarou didn’t feel right.

She shook her head, and TikTok’s impassive green eyes blinked.

Jontarou? The province lay outside Amelia’s sphere of personal interests, but she’d read up on it on the way here from the Rocky Mountains of Orado. Among all of India, Jontarou was the paradise for zoologists, a gigantic animal preserve, its continents and seas swarming with magnificent game. Under current law, it was being retained deliberately in its discovered state. Port Nichay, the only city, actually the only inhabited point on Jontarou, was beautiful and quiet, a pattern of vast but elegantly slender towers, each separated from the others by rolling parkland and interconnected only by the threads of transparent skyways. Near the horizon, just visible from the garden, rose the tallest towers of all, the green and gold spires of the Shikaris’ Club, a center of world affairs and of social activity. From the car which brought them across Port Nichay the evening before, Amelia had seen occasional strings of guest houses, similar to the one Nora had rented, nestling along the park slopes.

Nothing very sinister about Port Nichay or green Jontarou, surely!

Maybe Nora? That blond, slinky, would-be Machiavelli? What could—?

Amelia’s eyes narrowed reflectively. There’d been a minor occurrence—at least, it had seemed minor—just before the X-ship landed last night. A young woman from one of the farcast services had asked for an interview with the daughter of US Senator Jessamine Walker. This happened occasionally; and Amelia had no objections until the her almost gossipy persistence in inquiring about the “unusual pet” she was bringing to Port Nichay with her began to annoy. TikTok might be somewhat unusual, but that was not a matter of general interest, and Amelia said so. Then Nora moved smoothly into the act and held forth on TikTok’s appearance, habits, and name, of course, in considerable detail.

Amelia had assumed that Nora was simply going out of her way to be irritating, as was her pastime. Looking back on the incident, however, the chatter between her aunt and the journalist—though they preferred the terms farcaster for reporting to distance themselves from the Post-Times scandals of the fifties—had sounded oddly stilted, like something the two might have rehearsed.

Rehearsed for what purpose? TikTok? Jontarou?

Amelia chewed gently on her lower lip. A vacation on Jontarou for the two of them and TikTok had been Nora’s idea, and she had enthused about it so much that Amelia’s mother at last talked her into accepting. Nora, Jessamine explained privately to Amelia, had felt they were intruders in the Walker family, had bitterly resented Jessamine’s political honors and, more recently, Amelia’s own emerging promise of brilliance. This invitation was Nora’s way of indicating a change of heart. Wouldn’t Amelia oblige?

So, Amelia had obliged, though she took very little stock in Nora’s change of heart. She wasn’t, in fact, putting it past her aunt to have some involved dirty trick up her sleeve with this trip to Jontarou. Nora’s mind worked like that. And, since Amelia thought of it, so did hers.

So far there had been no actual indications of purposeful mischief. But logic did seem to require a connection between the various puzzling events here. A farcaster’s rather forced interest in TikTok? Well, Nora could easily have asked, or even paid, for that interview. Then TikTok’s disturbed behavior during their first night in Port Nichay, and Amelia’s own formless anxieties and fancies in connection with the guest house garden.

The last remained hard to explain. Amelia wasn’t psychic, and it’s not like any of her apps would be keying off data coming from the garden. Perhaps the apps were causing interference? She ran then in debug mode, but it was worth evaluating. But TikTok, and Nora, might know something about Jontarou that she didn’t know.