Page 127 of Lone Wolf

“Which involves source sequencing, expression editing, pose editing, expression plus pose plus blinking editing, punctuation imitation, tonality, speech and movement patterns—”

“Joey, slow down.”

She was dressed nicely in anticipation of her outing—jeans, black button-up shirt, touch of makeup—and she was chomping on caffeinated cinnamon gum with caffeinated vigor.

“What’s the logical extension of all that?” She gave him a split second to respond. “Okay, okay. Just—watch.” She clicked on the screen, and Evan appeared on the facing wall of monitors.

“Hello,” Screen Evan said. “This is my KINDER profile. It’s, like, ironically named Tinder for killers. My hobbies include vodka and the fetishization of sharp objects. My likes are: control. And, uh, control. Dislikes: wrinkled sheets, out-of-order books. Wow. I sure sound like a loser.”

The deepfake was semi-convincing, but there were modulation issues, his hand motions glitched in a few places, and the background ate slightly into the side of his neck, a green screen-esque effect.

“This is a shitty version,” Joey said. “I literally made this off a single freeze-frame of you I pulled off your internal security cam when you stepped through the door twenty seconds ago and one recorded sentence.”

Evan rewound to answering his phone downstairs. “When I said, ‘There in five.’”

“Yes. I wrote out the dialogue and off it goes. The new machine learning insanely reduces the amount of video required to make a skinlift. It can be used for everything—porn featuring your favorite celebrity, spreading disinformation from the mouths of world leaders, bringing back Elvis for a movie. You can make anyone say anything. And? Hill created a video deepfake AI that is literally indistinguishable from reality. Even to me.”

Evan gestured at the image of him up on the screens, his mouth frozen half open. “Then why do I look so shitty?”

“Aside from the obvious jokes, because this is a beta version, not the deepfake perfection that Doc Hill created. Where is that deepfake perfection, you ask? Doc Hill stole all his code, corrupted his files, and wiped the program from Solventry. Just before he was killed. That’s why Lopatina tossed Hill’s place after shooting him. It wasn’t just cover to sell a home invasion gone awry. She was searching for the code.”

“Oh,” Evan said. And then: “Oh.”

Joey watched him, humming with heightened focus.

“And he wiped the program from Solventry because he’d discovered from the access records or whatever that Allman had used it outside of protocols,” Evan said.

“Yes.”

“Illegally.”

Joey’s eyes shone. “Witness.”

Another click brought up the leaked video of Nathan Friedhoff in the conference room. A flawless reality, sunlight and shadows and organic movements. Every fold of his crow’s-feet, every stray hair and mannerism in ultra high definition. There were crumbs on the conference-room table and a perfect reflected glint off the burner phone at his cheek. The words came perfectly modulated: “Yes. You’re greenlit for Dr. Hill. Usual fee. Nothing that can trace back to me or this company. Cut with wide margins.”

“Watch this now.” Joey brought up the wireframe, zooming in on Friedhoff’s face and the phone pressed to his cheek. “That’s a TrakLess T81.” She scanned over to the interior glass wall where Friedhoff’s reflection was weakly captured. Then she tapped the mouse, enlarging the mirrored phone, enlarging it some more, and then sharpening the image with an AI de-blurring tool. The pixels bled away, dissolving into clarity. “See that MEID on the back of the phone? Right above the barcode?”

There it was in the reflection, a Mobile Equipment Identifier rendered faintly in the plastic, coaxed to visibility by the glint of sunlight off the phone.

“Guess what? It doesn’t exist. The last digit was altered. Which means that phone doesn’t exist. Which means?”

Evan said, “That Friedhoff doesn’t exist.”

“That’s right. Not that iteration of him.”

They stared at Nathan Friedhoff on the wall before them. Flesh and blood, ones and zeros.

“One motherfucking digit,” Joey said. “And you know what? Next time there won’t even be that, ’cuz if I figured this shit out, you can bet your ass AI has by now, too.” She jabbed her finger at the screen. “If not for that single number, this happened. Friedhoff made this call. It’s indistinguishable from reality. That’s not playing God. That’s being God.”

“We were focused on Friedhoff knocking out the competition. But it was Allman.”

“Right. Youtopia’s synthetic-media division is still zeroing in on the perfect deepfake. They’re a few steps behind but closing the gap. It’s all in the internal emails.”

“What about Martin Quinn? And Anwuli Okonkwo?”

“I did some deeper digging. Turns out Quinn was stockpiling weapons. And Okonkwo had a brother who owed a lot of money to the wrong kind of people. But it’s not just them. In the past eighteen months, there are nine suspicious deaths. ‘Accidental.’” Her pronunciation evoked air quotes. “I’ve been digging through internal comms with HR and legal and I think I figured it out.”

“Say more.”