Fishnet by Kirstin Innes Read Free Book Online

country, across the world. I’m here. I’m here. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, and yet my sister has found a way of removing herself completely from this matrix of nosiness, has wiped her fingerprints off the world.
    Computers are wise, though. Computers learn things about you and use that information, and after a few days in each office, each new machine started to offer me solutions, clusters of one-line-one-link adverts sprouting around my search, her name filled in by automemory after I’d put in Ro-. Clean, bold typeface.
    Trying to trace family members?
Missing persons found!
Track your genealogy!
Families reunited
Looking for someone?
    I followed every link. I paid for trial membership on every single scamming site. There was one that looked properly genuine, though. Findastranger.com . A well-designed webpage laden with testimonials that had email addresses attached. I decided to go for the deluxe package.
    â€˜I’ve found a way to trace Rona,’ I told Mum. ‘I’ll need your credit card. It’s just a payment of about £200 a year, in dollars.’
    She looked at me.
    â€˜Don’t you want to find her?’ I said.
    Mum feels the most guilt, about all of this. She’s sat up nightsweeping into a bottle of wine and blaming herself for having left us. She’s the easiest touch.
    I had to create a profile for her. Not just name, age, sex, last known location, but interests and favourite movies, favourite songs, subjects taken at school, names of childhood friends, childhood pets. Favourite actors. Favourite curse words. Favourite musicians. Teenage crushes on celebrities.
    They would use this, they told me, when the confirmation email came through, to source her. They had technology, they told me, that would track through hundreds of message board users and bloggers, people commenting on other people’s web pages, look for people who declared interests in these things, who quoted from these films, who adopted usernames and passwords with similar configurations of letters.
    I scanned in every photograph I had of her, from childhood up: dressed as a tiger on the bench in our old front garden, scowling at the camera on a beach somewhere. I zoomed in on school pictures where all the girls in the front row had their hands crossed nicely, one on top of the other. A couple from her high school yearbook: cheeks sucked in, arms round boys in nightclubs, pouting. I eased my mouse around the wild fuzz of hair sticking out from a paper hat on the last Christmas before she left, when she drank about three quarters of a bottle of Dad’s crap wine even though she must have been – god, it still makes me angry sometimes. I uploaded them in the box on the secure link. Facial recognition software, the confirmation email said. If there are pictures on any of our online sources featuring subjects with similar features, we will send them to you for review. If you have samples of your loved one’s writing style, or feel that you are able to approximate their speech patterns, please use the form provided to attach examples in Word document format.
    At first I was just putting in stories, things I remembered that I thought were significant, but then I started actually trying to write her . That last year, I thought, when she was living away from home. Try that, try reconstructing that, out of the little cluesshe’d given, accidentally: four bar jobs, three changes of address, the last after she fought with Christina, the boyfriends she mentioned. Jez? Cammy? The crappy presents she bought that Christmas, the long, long interviews we’d done with Christina and her last boss, both of them sleekit at the eye, worried we might be trying to blame them, might be suspecting them.
    She haunted me. The way she’d started saying ‘god’ and ‘like’ as though they were punctuation. The way I could hear her laugh chiming in my own,