In Digital We Trust

by Rahul Bhagat

  “Without evidence, it’s going to be tricky. It’ll be difficult to build a case.”

  EIGHT

  THE next day, Natalie showed up in a whole different incarnation. The bob cut was gone. Instead, her hair was severely pulled back in a bun. She had a black suit on, with a white shirt, and glasses too.

  “Looking sharp,” Stump said when he saw her come through the doors.

  “Thanks. All set for the meeting?” she asked.

  They had a virtual meeting scheduled with the district attorney. He was a new guy that Stump didn’t know. That was why he had hinted to Natalie that they project an image of professionalism during the meeting. He himself was wearing a three-piece suit.

  “If you’re set, then I’m set,” Stump said.

  Natalie sat down in a visitor chair, a little uncomfortable in her new persona. She looked at the time on the living wall. “Still have a few minutes to go,” she said.

  The video screen in the middle of the wall was dark and quiet.

  “He’s new in the job, could even be late,” Stump said.

  “Do you think the doctor meant it when he said we looked like father and daughter?” Natalie asked.

  “He was joking,” Stump said and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “But you do have a daughter. Maybe we instinctively assumed the roles.”

  “I don’t think so,” Stump said harshly without looking at Natalie. “I was never around when my daughter was growing up. My paternal instincts have shriveled and died.” He changed the background of the living wall from patterned gravel bed to dark slate of an underground mine. Then it was to a silhouette of bare trees in a moonlit sky. Natalie quietly watched Stump as he switched from one depressing image to the next.

  The video screen in the middle of the living wall flickered to life. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie, with a shaved head, appeared on the screen.

  “Hello there, Detective Stump. Your new DA, Kevin Yates, here. Man, it’s still so cold here. Way nicer on the West Coast.”

  Formalities aside, they dived into the business.

  “We have a tricky situation,” Stump said. “Our suspicion is on the wife. We believe she coaxed her husband into committing suicide.”

  “That is tricky.” Mr. Yates nodded. “Assisted suicide is not illegal. But this was not a terminal patient. Right?”

  “That’s right. We’re talking about a young, healthy individual here,” Stump said.

  “So he could have been helped with possible remediation—drugs, psychiatric help.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The problem is, we can’t criminalize ‘advising’ or ‘encouraging,’ even if it’s a suicide. A direct violation of First Amendment rights,” Mr. Yates said.

  “What do you suggest?” Stump asked.

  “Let me see. We do have some precedents.”

  Mr. Yates asked his digital assistant to pull up relevant cases and consulted with it for a few minutes. Then he turned back to the screen.

  “Here is a case, way back from 1961. A Mr. Persampieri told his drunken wife of twenty years that he was going to file for divorce and handed her a loaded gun. She shot herself. He was successfully convicted of involuntary manslaughter.”

  “There is no physical exchange here. It’s all verbal,” Stump said.

  “No physical assistance. What about verbal? I’ll need some hard evidence. You have any transcripts of their conversation?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any witness testimonials of her prodding?”

  “Nope. Just anecdotal—what friends and family overheard.”

  “Not going to stick. I need a smoking gun,” Mr. Yates said with distaste.

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before Natalie jumped into the conversation. “Sir, can we get a search warrant to look into his communication metadata? NSA level clearance.”

  “NSA level. Do you have reasonable suspicion?”

  Natalie looked pleadingly at Stump.

  He hesitated for a second then said, “Yes, we do.”

  “Send me the official request,” Mr. Yates said.

  Times had changed. Just like fingerprints and iris scans, there were national registries of everyone’s digital life. The NSA maintained the most extensive database and made it available to law enforcement organizations around the country. It had details of every text message, every phone call, every Facebook comment, everything ever made. The only exception was encrypted communication, but there too, only the communication that had the latest quantum key encryption. Older encryption methods were child’s play for advanced quantum computers.

  NINE

  IT was Friday evening, and the office was empty. Stump hadn’t seen much of Natalie since their meeting with the district attorney, and he was quite pleased about that. The kid was like a dynamo. All that hectic activity with the suicide case had tired him. He liked a slower pace, deliberate and methodical. He had also had time to catch up with his online card game and had become so engrossed that he lost track of time and ended up staying late. He almost missed his church meeting.

  On his way out, he looked over toward Natalie’s desk, and there she was, hunched over in her cubicle. He walked to her workspace. The area around her was cluttered and crowded. There were knickknacks, a lot of cat-themed things spread around. On the table, a toy cat sat on his hind legs, one paw up, with a pink reminder note on it. On the cubicle wall, right in front of her, was a picture. A smartly dressed cop carrying a young girl in his arms, both of them laughing, her arms flailing in the air.

  “Looks like you have police in the family,” Stump said.

  “Yes.” Natalie turned back. “My uncle—he is my inspiration. I was actually planning to become a Nobel Prize–winning chemist before that. That’s him in the picture.” She pointed at the picture.

  “And your parents?”

  “University professors. I’m the only child. They were okay with whatever I wanted to do. Sweetest people ever.”

  “Good. How’s the investigation coming along?” Stump asked.

  Natalie hunched her shoulders, rolled out her tongue, and gave a sad-dog look. “Nothing. We were so wrong. You have a few minutes?”

  Stump pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “So I tapped into the NSA database and pulled out a history of his communication with his wife,” Natalie said.

  “Okay,” Stump said.

  “Their talk is just regular talk. She is very preachy and does have this holier-than-thou attitude, but she thought he was pretending to be depressed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and she was trying to sign him up for these retreats and go for long vacations.”

  “What about taunting him to end his life?”

  “That came later, in the last year of their marriage.”

  “What changed?”

  “I don’t know. He acquired a digital partner, which she just hated by the way, and he took over the family business. Nothing drastic.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a wife pushing her husband to commit suicide.”

  “No. Actually, if you look at this trend line, the frequency of their conversation actually went down in the last months. They had even started sleeping in separate rooms.”

  “Shit.” Stump pursed his lips and nodded.

  “Yeah, shit,” Natalie said.

  “So what’s the plan, boss?” Stump asked Natalie.

  “I’ve pulled together a list of twenty people he talked to most,” Natalie said. “I’m going to check if I can find anything.”

  Stump got up from the chair. “I have to go. I have a meeting with my church group,” he said. “Don’t stay too long. It’s Friday night. Live life. Otherwise, you’ll end up like me.”

  TEN

  ON sunday morning, Martin Stump got up early. He was having difficulty falling asleep, and it was a downer of a day; he could tell. He made some coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. He debated if he should add a little Bailey�
��s to perk up his mood, get the tiredness out of his body. The decision was no. It was a slippery slope, and he didn’t want to go down that path again.

  He was not sure how long he sat like that. It was the ring of the phone that brought him back to the present. The caller was Natalie.

  “I think I found something.” Excitement dripped from her voice.

  “Who is it?” Stump asked.

  “Not sure. Not a person.”

  “Not a person?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Have you had breakfast yet?” Natalie asked.

  “No. I was about to.”

  “Good. Come on over. I’ll fix some breakfast.”

  Stump tried to wriggle out of the idea, but Natalie would have none of it. She was firm that he needed to socialize, break his self-imposed isolation. Stump dragged himself to her place, a skinny glass-and-concrete structure. He took the elevator to the seventh floor. At the door, along with Natalie, there was a fluffy white cat. Her place was a bigger version of her cubicle. Cluttered and full of knickknacks. The living room was shaped like three quarters of a circle, cut at one end by a straight living wall. Red couches in a semicircle were set against the curving wall.

  Natalie guided Stump to a small kitchen on the other side of the circular wall. There were a small table and two chairs at the far end. A sliding door led to the balcony, which a thriving vine called home. Stump took a seat at the table, while Natalie got ready to prepare breakfast.

  “So what’re you going to have? Yogurt and granola or bacon and eggs?” she asked.

  “Bacon and eggs,” Stump said.

  “Sounds good. I’ll have yogurt, though.”

  Stump looked down. The cat was poised on his hind legs and looked intently at the table. The next moment, he was up on the table.

  “Fatso, get off the table.” Natalie swatted him with the kitchen cloth.

  “Fatso.” Stump started laughing.

  “Yes. Look at him. He’s so fat. Even since he was a kitten, he’s been chubby. So I called him Fatso.”

  Stump took Fatso in his lap and rubbed his ears. “What kind is he?” he asked.

  “Flame-tipped Siamese. They’re friendly and intelligent and bond closely with people. He will follow you around the house and have long conversations with you. Females are moodier and more independent, but the males are like a puppy dog—easygoing, happy-go-lucky. Just look at him.”

  “Maybe I should get a cat,” Stump said.

  “Yeah. Ask others in your close circle. See what they think,” Natalie said.

  “What close circle?”

  Over breakfast, Stump told her about his isolated life. He used to be a workaholic, devoted his life to the service. One day, out of the blue, his wife left with their teenage daughter. She stubbornly turned down his every attempt to reconcile. She just stopped existing in his life. Then it was his battle with alcohol. The church saved him, helped him kick the habit. He loved working with the kids, mentoring them.

  “You should get in touch with your daughter,” Natalie said.

  “I don’t think she wants to see me,” Stump said. “Her mother has filled her with hatred for me. She believes that I abandoned the family.”

  “Time changes a lot of attitudes.”

  “Look at you talk like a grownup. I don’t even know how to contact her. Okay, show me what you’ve found.”

  They went back to the living room, and Natalie pulled the files on her living wall.

  “Remember after I failed to find anything incriminating against Nancy? And I expanded my search?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Stump settled himself on a red couch.

  “Well, that was another dead end. I mined that data with a comb, but nothing. Not a single person encouraged him to commit suicide.”

  Stump felt full and sleepy. He shouldn’t have eaten so much.

  “Then last night,” Natalie continued, “I had an idea. I had looked at the people he talked to, but what about his digital partner? And guess what I found? Vinur.”

  “What’s Vinur?” Stump asked.

  “It’s Icelandic, means friend. It’s a company that makes specialized digital partners. Gabriel’s digital partner was a Vinur.”

  Stump didn’t like where the conversation was going.

  “It was communicating with its parent server just before Gabriel jumped into the river. His digital partner was very active in the last half hour of his death. We thought he was talking to himself, but we were wrong. He was talking to his digital partner.”

  “Can we see what they were talking about?” Stump asked.

  “That’s the problem. It was encrypted, so there is nothing in the NSA archive.”

  “Another dead end.”

  “Not really. I think the people at Vinur might be able to help us.”

  “That Icelandic company?” Stump perked up. The sleep and laziness vanished from his eyes.

  “Yes,” Natalie said.

  “Okay, get ready. This is my moment. I’ve been waiting for a case that needed a field trip. Chief is not going to say no. Land of fire and ice, here we come.”

  ELEVEN

  DETECTIVE Stump and Natalie sat in the waiting area of Vinur’s head office, which was located in the heart of Reykjavik. It was still cold here, and neither of them had packed a coat. A promotional video played on the wall in front of them.

  “Vinur is no ordinary digital partner. It’s a companion powered by next-generation, post–Turing test AI. It’s always there, waiting for you, to talk to you. You’ll never be alone again.”

  Stump looked toward the hallway to see if anyone was coming.

  “Vinur comes preinstalled with a virtual assistant module to manage your day-to-day life—emailing, scheduling, blogging, tweeting, texting on your behalf. So what’s special about Vinur?” the narrator asked. “There are dozens of digital partners. Where Vinur excels is in providing emotional support. No one can match our level of expertise. Developed by psychologists, it has an intimate understanding of the emotional makeup of the human mind that no other digital partner can match.”

  Stump had had enough of the blabber. He got up and went to the see-through glass wall of the building.

  “Look at these roofs. So colorful. Red, blue, green, orange—mostly red, though,” he said.

  “They use corrugated iron roofs in Iceland. If you don’t paint them, they’ll start rusting,” Natalie said, looking down at her phone.

  “You know everything,” Stump said.

  “Not really. Drooper heard what you said, and he texted me the answer. He knows I’m a sucker for trivia questions,” Natalie said.

  “Drooper?”

  “My digital assistant,” Natalie said. “Time for you to get one, and what better time?”

  The sound of heels on the floor interrupted their conversation. An attractive woman emerged from the hallway. She was wearing a tight pencil skirt, a blazing-white top with elbow-length sleeves, and secretary glasses.

  “Isabella Jonsdottir, director of public relations. Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said.

  Stump stammered. “Hi. Yes. Martin Stump. We’re the investigators from the United States,” he said.

  The director took them to a sleek, futuristic office for discussion. Stump quickly made it clear that Natalie was the expert; she was going to drive the conversation.

  “Could your digital partner encourage someone to commit suicide?” Natalie got to the point.

  The director sat up straight. “That’s preposterous. Our digital partners would never do that. You know its origins?”

  “No,” Natalie said.

  “It started out as a tool for psychologists to help clinically depressed patients, to monitor their health. The results were so encouraging that the founders formed this company to bring this miraculous technology to everyone. We all need a little pep talk sometime; that’s what Vinur does. It’s a wellness product for people who struggle with depression.”

  Stump wondered if he should gi
ve Vinur a try, but this was no time for seeking product information. He felt uncomfortable in the high-tech surroundings.

  “What about the source code? Is that proprietary?” Natalie asked.

  “No. It’s actually built on an open-source platform developed by NASA, in your country. You can download the code and see for yourself. We do have some proprietary algorithms, but they’ve all been vetted by eminent psychologists. We can make arrangements for you to look.”

  “In this case, the victim’s last conversations were with his Vinur. Can we see his account? His chat logs?”

  The director called someone to help with technical questions. A young man carrying a laptop showed up in the office.

  “Gunther, our technical guru,” the director introduced him.

  Gunther was a tall, square-jawed Norse god. Natalie instinctively preened her hair and asked him if she could see the chat log of Gabriel’s account.

  Gunther, in a heavy accent, said, “I can only give you metadata. Time and duration.”

  “Why? Encryption?”

  Gunther started explaining, “All our comm is encrypted with quantum key distribution. It uses photon polarization to...”

  “I know QKD,” Natalie snapped. “Impossible to crack. How long has he had the account?”

  He checked his laptop. “Four years.”

  “Why did his digital partner communicate with the server so much? Won’t that affect response time?”

  “You’re right, it will,” Gunther said. “During training, there is a lot of back-and-forth with our server here. But once the Vinur gets to know its human partner, communication with the central server tapers off.”

  Natalie had to strain her ears to follow Gunther’s heavy accent. Stump wasn’t even trying to follow the conversation.

  Gunther continued. “People have a predictable set of problems, and once the Vinur has handled a problem, it saves that algorithm in local memory. After that, the Vinur will communicate with the server only if a novel situation arises.”

  “Like someone standing on a bridge, ready to jump,” Natalie said.