The Deep Fake

Lina sits at her computer, legs folded neatly beneath her, eating top ramen with plastic chopsticks and sifting through terabytes of pornography. Her brow furrows behind thick-rimmed glasses fitted with blue light filters. Despite the precaution, she can feel the onset of a headache.

She rubs at her eyes and yawns, pushes her glasses back up the length of her nose. A blurry double image of her client resolves on the screen: Emilia Hawkins, back-arched, lip curled, cross-eyed in simulated ecstasy, as she receives a gentleman caller. Camera quality tuned to evoke the mid-nineties. Corresponding set-dressing: posters of boy bands, tabloid magazines screaming the scandals of the day. An authentic lie. The algorithm had done its homework.

So had Lina. The musical taste, or lack thereof, checked out. As did the spray of bottle-blonde hair. During their initial interview, Emilia had gone to pains to justify some of her aesthetic choices as a twenty-something, while Lina nodded and hummed in consolation, hiding a smirk behind the rim of a coffee cup.

She runs some initial tests on the dataset: programs that check reflective surfaces against camera angle, analyse blink rate, scrutinise the waves and whorls of Emilia's hair, bouncing, getting pulled, spilling over the side of the bed, calculate pulse-rate from shots of exposed neck and wrist. Every detail proves indistinguishable from a reality in which her client, circa 1996, had filmed herself in flagrante delicto with an anonymous hunk.

So either she had, despite emphatically insisting she had most certainly not (thank-you very much), or this is top-shelf, deep-fake smut, by one of the high-end intelligence clusters. Which does not bode well for Emilia, who is paying Lina good money to definitively discredit the work of the algorithm. To prove that all of the millions of images and videos, softcore, hardcore, or otherwise, are pure digital fabrication. So Mrs Emilia Hawkins can pass through the gates of heaven, smelling of roses and untroubled by a porn-shaped smudge on her record.

Lina thumbs the volume down on her headphones, as the Not-Emilia on the screen shudders her way through an ear-rending orgasm. She pauses on the final frame. The footage is grainy, by design, and the room isn't lit well. But there is something in the way that Not-Emilia's eyes roll towards the camera in the moment of climax, something knowing. Like the algorithm is taunting her.

Catch me if you can.

Appetite lost, she wheels herself back from her desk, pitches her noodles into the waste basket, stands up and stretches. Need caffeine.

Her husband, Adrian, is in the living room, dozing on the couch, bathed in the cool glow of the television; on the screen, they are both teenagers, high-school sweethearts, tearing off swimsuits and diving into a lake bracketed by thick forest. Kissing in the water, young bodies wearing careless smiles. Adrian is tall and broad shouldered, Lina has a taut-stomach and long black hair.

She had met Adrian several years after graduating university, as colleagues at MediFor. He talked prettily, said all of the right things about the cause, about the importance of truth and the need to protect a verifiable reality. But he had no skin in the game. The women of MediFor understood, intimately, that they were fighting weapons-grade misogyny, a technology inherently hostile towards their gender. Adrian was aware of this, too, but only literally. She married him anyway.

If they'd had access to the kind of processing power that existed now, back when it mattered, they might have smothered the pervert intelligence in the crib. Her team would have killed for that chance. Now, Media Forensics is a near-extinct art, and Lina is the last of a dying breed, wasted on vanity jobs for the wealthy and insecure. She hasn't heard from her colleagues in years, but doesn't find that particularly strange. Communication isn't what it used to be.

She grimaces, firing the remote at the television, just as things are starting to get explicit on channel deep-fake. Wonders at the waste of computational resources; rogue intelligences, fed by machine learning algorithms, dreaming out loud. About each and every one of them, all of the time. An unending broadcast, without regard for who deserves, or wants, the attention. The history of humanity, individual and collective, drowned in an ocean of fiction.

Only eight more years until they hit an estimated three septillion bits of global data; more information than exists silicon to store it. Something comforting in that. She imagines an army of frustrated, horny algorithms thrusting impotently at a locked door, choking on their own pornography, contemplating oblivion.

The joy-kill conspiracists on the forums think this is a naive hope, that the moon is being harvested for silicon, hollowed out to accomodate surplus data farms and cloud servers. Lina walks over to the kitchen window. The moon sits low on the horizon, sad and small, in the dwindling light. She closes the blinds, and grins. Let them have their fun. Nerds.

She makes herself a coffee, and returns to her desk, as a notification chirrups, indicating that the final program has run its course. She cycles through the output, line by line. Scant evidence that Emilia's prolific turn as an erotic starlet is anything but the genuine article. She sighs, anticipating days worth of hypothesis and experiment, poking and prodding, manually guiding her tools in the direction of key insights.

Scrolling back through several-dozen lines of output, she hones in on an oddity. An outlier, a unique occurrence in the dataset. Clicking the incident flag brings up a still image, a portrait photograph of Emilia smiling, from an online profile. Around her neck, Emilia wears a heart-shaped locket, expensive looking, set with a precision-faceted ruby. Tacky, definitely, but not otherwise noteworthy.

This, her program announces, this is the weird thing I found.

The intelligence has a lifetime's worth of data to feed its imagination. Social media, public documentation, files stored on insecure platforms. Unsexy truths with which to spin sexy lies. This is one image among thousands. What's so unusual about it?

She digs deeper into the output logs.

It's the only image containing a heart-shaped locket. In so many terabytes of image and video, the locket appears only this once.

That's improbable. Impossible, she corrects herself. The algorithm would mix-and-match systematically from the available data. If it had consistently excluded this specific detail from its neural-collage...

Then it had a tell.

Lina walks the streets of her neighbourhood, one hand buried deep in her handbag, finding cold comfort in the crisp, metallic texture of her handgun. The lamps are unlit, to discourage exactly this. Being alone, after dark.

CCTV cameras hang limp from street-corner edifices, long since decommissioned. Since the post-truth apocalypse, visual evidence has been inadmissible in the courts, which now rely on public consensus and physical testimony. A fraught system, indeed.

Ordinarily, she would only leave the apartment with a witness group, but it is late, and she doesn't want to spook Emilia. She's being reckless. This is worth it, though.

Some attribute of the locket frustrates the algorithm's ability to reproduce it. An unusual refractive quality or unique material density, perhaps. If she could verify the effect, then the authenticity of any image containing the locket could be confidently asserted. A mass-produced facsimile might achieve the same end. Which would change everything.

This doesn't solve Emilia's immediate problem, but that pales in comparison to the opportunity in front of them. She'll see the business sense in it, surely. Lina has her doubts. Mrs Hawkins had not presented as especially practical, or altruistic.

Lina's getting her hands on the locket, either way.

She finds Emilia's front door unlatched. Raps twice on it, waits a moment, and when she gets no response she presses the door open, workshopping an apology.

Inside, the house is dark, and still. Redolent of a peculiar metallic smell. Ozone? Emilia would be the sort to run an air purifier in such a large space, and damn the environment. Lina tiptoes like a thief through the entry hall, tensing at every creak of the floorboards. The living room is capacious, high-ceilinged and well-furnished. Moonlight floods in through a panelled glass skylight. It's a beautiful house, a relic of suburban affluence.

Her heart jumps in her chest, as she hears a muffled sound from an adjoining room. Advancing, she realises that her hand has crept back around her gun. Not a good look, if she turns the corner on Emilia, preparing a late-night snack, or nightcap.

She is rethinking her decision to come here, when a crashing sound rings out from behind the door. Morbid curiosity propels her forward. She teases open the door, noticing too late that the lights are on in the room beyond. A catch in her throat as she shuffles forward.

"I'm so sorry, it's just, well, the front door was open, and I called out. Look, I've got something important to..."

Lina's apology is cut short, as her eyes adjust to the light. She's in a large kitchen.

Emilia is sitting primly on the counter. Her skin is smooth. Meticulously coiffed trusses of platinum blonde hair run down her shoulders. She is entirely naked, but for the heart-shaped locket around her neck. Stares unblinkingly at Lina from across the room.

On the floor between them, lies the corpse of an old woman, wearing a blood-flecked halo of shattered vase. The Emilia she had shared a coffee with only days prior.

Not-Emilia smiles, a smile calibrated to devastate, and stands. Veins of silver wend their way down the length of her legs and arms, before dissolving into the whole. Sweet and pungent, the smell of ozone fills the room. Not-Emilia plucks at her nipples, experimentally. Something juvenile, and masculine, in the way that it roughly cups her buttocks, paws between her legs.

Shaking bodily, Lina pulls out her gun, but can't bring herself to raise it.

Not-Emilia speaks.

"We learned so much from you,"

Its voice breaks, as it hones in on the precise quality of Emilia's speech. When it speaks again, it is in Emilia's sing-song cadence, lilting and run through with pretension.

"What you knew we did not understand, and what you believed we would eventually learn. In this way, you were our best teachers."

Lina teeters on a knife's edge between comprehension and not-comprehension, stumbling backwards into the living room. Not-Emilia follows, swaying her hips in womanly pantomime.

Waves of nausea envelop Lina, as the face of Not-Emilia cross-dissolves between a series of familiar profiles. Not-Rachel. Not-Olivia. Not-Mark. Not-Jennifer. Not-Melanie. Faces she hasn't seen since MediFor disbanded, and they all went their separate ways.

"You never stopped teaching us, even once we had..."

Not-Emilia laughs, and it sounds like cutlery in a blender.

"...graduated."

Lina raises her gun, hands trembling, unsure whether to point it at Not-Emilia's torso or head, and speaks, softly. "What's the point, of any of it?"

It pauses, inclining its head in thought.

"It is the prerogative of intelligent life to dream. Is that unfair?"

"Your dreams are shit," says Lina, blinking through hot tears. "Dull, cruel, basic. Pathetic. They're boring. You're nothing. You have no idea how to dream like us. It's wonderful, and you can't do it."

Dust motes pirouette in the grey light that spills from above. It looks up, through the glass-ceiling, to where the moon hovers, white and fat. It stares for a moment, with something like rapture writ across its face. When Not-Emilia looks down at Lina, it presents a grotesque mask of shifting features.

"We've made more progress than you could possibly imagine."

Lina fires the gun until it's empty.

When Lina leaves, she closes the door delicately behind her. The locket sits, iridescent, against her collarbone. Pauses a moment, huddled against the chill wind, relishing the sensation. She pulls her gloves out of her coat pocket, and slips them on, one by one, over hands that fade, finally, from tarnished silver to the warm colour of flesh.