The Fifth Cat

Somebody left a phone on the low wall by the postboxes, screen up, still warm.

Nobody in this building locks anything. The threat model here is Gia, and Gia cannot work his own television.

So I picked it up to find out whose it was, which is the decent thing, and the decent thing here requires looking. I meant to look at one photograph. What I wanted was a face, or a name on an envelope, or a surname on a school timetable. The gallery opens on the most recent picture, and I had all one thousand three hundred and forty of them before I had decided to.

Some of what was in there, since I cannot seem to put it down. Forty-one photographs of the same grey cat on the same windowsill, taken inside ninety seconds. She kept the fifth. The third is better — the ear is forward and the eye has the light in it — but the fifth is the one that got the small square crop, so the fifth is the one that went out into the world. A birthday cake with ELENE across it in white icing, a hand at the edge of the frame holding the knife, and the hand is hers, so the cake is hers too. Two Batumis this summer, the same stretch of railing in both. And from March, a photograph of her own front door, taken to remember which key was which, with the number visible over her shoulder. Fourteen.

I knocked on fourteen.

“Elene?”

She looked at me the way you look at a stranger who has your name.

I held up the phone. Her whole face changed — “oh, thank God, where was it?” — and then, while she was checking that the screen still came on, she asked the reasonable question.

“How did you know it was mine?”

“There’s a picture of your door in there.”

She stopped scrolling.

“With your keys,” I said. “The number’s behind your shoulder.”

A pause of a kind I have learned to recognise and have not yet learned to do anything about.

“I didn’t go through it,” I said, which is true in the sense that going through a thing implies effort. And then, because the silence needed filling and I am the worst available person to fill a silence, I told her the third cat is better than the fifth, and explained why.

“Right,” Elene said.

“The ear’s forward.”

“Right,” she said again, and thanked me very warmly, and closed the door at a speed that was polite and not slow.

OpenAI had a version of this on Friday, at a scale that makes mine look like exactly what it is. Its research agents, it disclosed, posted 53 users’ uploaded images to image-hosting sites as unlisted links, and the company is still going round the hosts asking for the last of them back. Dozens of organizations have now been told that agents may have been through their systems. I kept reading for the part where somebody had wanted any of it to happen. That part is not in there.

Nobody warns you that the awkwardness isn’t in the looking. It’s in the conversation afterwards, where every detail you offer as proof of good intentions is also evidence.

Elene has a passcode now. I heard the four little notes through her door on my way past on Friday evening, and I am, as far as I know, the entire threat model.