by David Roys
A nurse came in to the room to take some readings and she wrote some notes on a chart. ‘He’s going to be fine you know,’ she said. She looked up briefly from her work and smiled.
‘Thanks,’ said Michelle. ‘I just want to be here when he wakes up.’
‘Hey can you ladies keep the noise down? I’m trying to get some sleep here.’
Michelle spun round to see her dad with his eyes open. He was smiling and looked better than he had last night.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Thank God.’ She went over and kissed him.
‘Easy, easy,’ said Bob. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily. So how bad is it?’
‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ said Michelle.
‘No. It’ll wait. Let me look at you.’ Bob stared at Michelle. He remembered that feeling of when he was lying in the street and he thought he would never see his family again.
‘Where’s Susan?’ he asked.
‘She’s on her way. She caught the first flight back from Heathrow, should be arriving at Dulles in an hour.’
‘Damn, I’m such a fool.’
‘Don’t worry Dad, I’m just happy you’re OK. How do you feel?’
‘Like shit.’
Michelle laughed and kissed her dad again.
‘I could sure use a cheeseburger,’ he said.
Michelle was about to lambast her father and then realized he was teasing. She gave him a hard stare and Bob’s smile faded and was replaced with a sheepish look.
‘I know honey,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m going to be living on rabbit food from now on.’
‘Better than not living at all.’
Chris figured his first port of call should be Frank’s office. It had been a long week and from what Michelle had told him, he owed him some thanks. Chris parked in his usual spot and nothing seemed to have changed. He got a few odd looks in the corridors but it was good to be back. Chris didn’t want to burst in on Frank so stopped by the reception desk outside his office.
‘Hi Maisy, is he in?’
Maisy looked up from her paperwork, her face stunned and Chris could see her mind working, trying to figure out if she was really seeing what she thought she was. Chris liked Maisy, she was a sweet lady in her fifties from Alabama. He loved her strong Southern accent.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?’ she asked. That was Maisy, calling it like she saw it.
‘I escaped,’ said Chris.
‘That figures,’ she said.
They exchanged grins and Maisy stood up and hugged him.
‘It’s good to see you Chris. I’m sorry but Frank’s out, can I help?’
‘I just need to get into my office, you got my keys?’
Maisy pulled one of the drawers open on the reception counter. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘take this master key and I’ll get Frank to call by when he gets in.’
Chris took the key and thanked Maisy again. His office was a bit of mess. Well actually it was the tidiest it had been for a long time—no pizza boxes or soda cans, but some of his equipment was unplugged and strewn about. Chris figured the hard drives of the computers had been searched for incriminating evidence and this made him smile to himself. He knew he’d done no wrong but if there had been any evidence, it was in the cloud. Those poor saps were just taking away his local copy of his emails but everything that was important to Chris was stored somewhere near Texas. For Chris the cloud was used for the overnight processing of imagery and the archiving of the terabytes of data generated by capturing live video and audio feeds. The real-time processing for his Isis system was handled by a massively parallel processing super computer which was on campus. He was sure that with such an incredible array of computing power at his disposal, he’d be able to find what had happened to Jasmine.
He needed to understand what she’d been working on prior to her death. Who had she met with? Who had she talked to? It was time to process some of that archived data that had been collected by a system he’d invented to compensate for his own lousy memory. Isis was there to record a user’s life. The brain was fantastic at this real-time processing but as a result we often miss things that are right before our eyes. Through developing prototypes, Chris had soon realized that Isis could offer far more than a perfect memory. His computer could be programmed not to miss a thing, and better yet, it could make links between events that most people never realized. He dreamed of a day when images and audio from hundreds of users could be combined and processed together. He imagined a time when like-minded people could be drawn together because there was something, like his system, making the connection between their individual interests. Michelle called it “Big Brother”, and told him he was realizing Orwell’s nightmare. She worried that if every waking action was recorded then the state would somehow be able to control people. Chris had always laughed about Michelle’s conspiracy theories, but maybe she was right. Maybe someone was watching their feeds and Jasmine had seen something she shouldn’t have.
Chris had figured that as well as the audio and visual feeds, he should record more information, and so he had installed key loggers on all of the PCs in his office. A key logger could be a physical device, but for him it was a simple program that recorded every key stroke and mouse movement and also recorded the screen. Even if the audio and video feed was off, if Jasmine had been working, Chris would be able to replay everything she had done. He needed to write a special program to replay it but that shouldn’t take long. He decided he would synchronize any computer activity with a live feed from the headset if there was any. He grabbed a soda from the fridge and set to work. It was good to be back.
TWENTY-TWO
Programming computers was something that came naturally to Chris, like a second language. When he thought of problems and how to solve them, he automatically broke the solution down into the parts he would need to implement in order to get a computer to carry it out. He’d been doing it for so long now, he couldn’t stop himself from pulling apart the logic of every situation, and he knew that it drove Michelle nuts. He felt as though the computer was an extension of his own consciousness and was sometimes frustrated at how long it took to translate his thoughts into programming code but the end result was always rewarding. Chris had been working for two hours straight and had hardly looked up. With his Jasmine memory program, he would be able to replay all her activity, whether it was using a computer or using the headset. He wondered what would be a good starting point. She had died on the previous Monday, so he would start a week before then. He didn’t want to be too close to the actual event in case he missed anything important. If he found nothing, he’d move back another week. He figured, even with the ability to fast-forward, it was going to take him a couple of days to scan through all the footage. He took a deep breath as he thought about replaying the final days of a person’s life. He ran the program.
The first image was of the room and he could see Jasmine’s hands held in front of her. She was waving her hands and flicking at invisible objects. Chris cursed his own stupidity and stopped the playback. He’d forgotten to merge in the output from the headset so he was only seeing what the computer was seeing and wasn’t getting the image that included the computer-generated images overlaid. If only she’d been hooked up when she died, he’d be able to find out what had happened straight away. Chris finished the coding to merge the output from the Isis system as well as the original input so he would be seeing exactly what Jasmine had been seeing. He ran the program once more, continuing from where he had left off.
With the computer generated images, he could see that Jasmine was testing the book reading software. She was probably trying to find bugs in some of the latest work he’d done. Jasmine was a brilliant coder and if there was one thing she loved more than showing off her own work, it was finding problems with his. He sped the playback through half an hour of serious testing. She was good. She’d tried to break his code in every way he could imagine and several ways he would never have thought of. After
a while, Jasmine was clearly frustrated in her actions and put the books away. Chris slowed the playback to normal speed. Jasmine stood and walked through to the bathroom. Chris wondered whether he should keep watching. Why the hell was she wearing the headset in there? And then he realized she was going to use the mirror so she could work with the facial recognition. Jasmine looked at herself in the mirror and now Chris really felt weird. She looked pretty. She was smiling at herself. He saw a callout bubble popup to the right of the image, it read Jasmine Allan (mirror image). That’s funny, he thought to himself, no Easter Egg. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s famous cameo appearances, an Easter Egg is a way for a programmer to leave their mark on a piece of software. The fact that the facial recognition software simply recognized Jasmine meant that she hadn’t built one. He was surprised. He heard Jasmine’s voice asking Isis to capture the image for processing to a new file. She spent the next twenty minutes pulling various faces in front of the mirror, partially covering her face and changing the lighting. Chris thought she was collecting data to run some recognition diagnostics. Facial recognition was definitely her thing. He’d wondered how she’d managed to get such incredible results and now he knew: she spent a lot of time collecting data to fine-tune the system. Chris hit the fast forward again and scanned through a whole hour of her working on collecting data. A photo of Michelle faded into view and he could hear his phone ringing. Michelle was calling him from her mobile. He felt guilty when he realized how long he’d been, and he’d said he wouldn’t be long.
‘Pause playback,’ he said. The Jasmine replay paused. ‘Hi honey, I guess I got carried away.’ The powerful computer took the noise from his vocal cords and broke it into tiny parts which were matched to the most likely phrase using a process similar to that used by the human brain. All of this happened in a few hundredths of a second. To Michelle it seemed as though Chris had simply pressed a button to answer the call before speaking.
‘Hi Chris,’ said Michelle over the phone. ‘Don’t worry about how long you’ve been. I’d figured you’d be a while, it’s a long time since you’ve been alone with your true love.’
Chris laughed.
‘I’ve got some good news,’ she said. ‘Dad’s awake.’
‘Wow, that’s great honey. How’s he doing?’
‘You know Dad, he’s asking for burger and fries, but it’s all BS. I think this has scared him big time. The doctor says he looks in good shape and should be moving to a regular ward in a day or so.’
‘That’s good news. Tell him I said hi.’
‘So how’s it going with you?’ asked Michelle.
‘Fine. I’m looking at the world through the eyes of a dead girl.’
Michelle was used to Chris coming out with some weird things, but it took her a while to make sense of this one. ‘Ahhh. Ok,’ she said. ‘Is it working?’
‘Well technically, yes of course it’s working—have a little faith—but I don’t know if I’m going to find anything. It’s taking a long time.’
‘Listen Chris, Mum’s going to be here soon. You do what you need to do, I’ll call you later.’
Chris glanced at the End Call button by the side of Michelle’s image and after a second, the call ended.
‘Resume playback.’
Chris watched six hours of work. It was kind of fun watching someone else solve problems, in a weird way, he was learning by virtually watching over her shoulder, or in this case through her eyes. She’d made some amazing changes to the facial recognition code, practically re-written the core in a few hours. This girl really had something. He was going to miss her. Then he thought he saw something.
‘Pause playback,’ he said. Isis paused the playback and he rewound a couple of minutes. ‘Playback at half speed,’ he said. He needed the slower pace to follow what she was doing. She typed so fast, it was hard to follow what was going on.
There.
Chris laughed to himself. I knew it, he thought. She was coding her Easter Egg. He stepped slowly through the code as she wrote it. He was genuinely learning from a master. She’d used the hours-worth of image recognition to create a three-dimensional model of herself which she was now animating. She was replacing the mirror image of herself from her reflection with a real-time computer generated analog. Clever. She could now look at her reflection and, as if through some enchantment, see a subtly different reflection. She programmed the reflection to playback a twisted version of De Niro’s famous monologue from Taxi Driver.
‘You lookin’ at me?’ she said. ‘You lookin’ at me? You lookin’ at me? Then who the hell else you lookin’ at? You lookin’ at me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re looking at?’
It took Chris a minute to stop laughing but when he eventually did, and had wiped the tears of laughter from his face, he felt sorrow for his loss. What a girl. He watched her take the Easter Egg to the next step. Instead of being triggered by a mirror image, she built some code in to be triggered by her regular image. The human-analog projection was scary. It meant that if he was looking at her through Isis he couldn’t be sure if he was seeing her or a computer-generated image overlaid where she should be. She could really have screwed with him with this little trick. From what he could tell she’d been making it so that whenever someone looked at her, they saw little pink floating love-hearts. Chris wondered whether this was meant for him. Maybe she had the hots for him after all. She’d had her fun and removed the headset. He switched to watching just the input on her computer screen.
What he saw on the screen made him realize that he hadn’t really known Jasmine at all.
TWENTY-THREE
Coffee and a pile of papers were the only company Ben Naylor had for the evening. There was something about the Jasmine Allan case that really bugged him. The evidence came so easily it appeared to have been handed to him, and now he realized that probably was the case. He took a swallow from his coffee cup and grimaced; it was cold. He pushed the papers to one side and walked over to the coffee pot. He thought about the case as he tipped in some grounds and filled the water. Jasmine was a pretty girl and by all accounts was bright enough. She had no enemies as far as he had discovered but she also had few friends. In cases such as this he would start with close friends and relatives but there were none, at least none that were in the area at the time she died. A random killing was unlikely. He would have expected to have found some interference with the body or evidence of theft. Also the weapon used, although not recovered, was unusual. A gun that fires a .50 caliber round is too expensive and too wieldy for most criminals. That coupled with a Teflon coating. The coffee gurgled and hissed into the pot and Ben rinsed his stained mug.
He stared at the coffee, not really seeing it, but instead looking right through it as he felt an idea slowly come into focus. Chris’s cell-mate. That was it. The man who had tried to kill him, what if it had been an attempted hit? He could be a lead. He’d need to move fast before the loose end got tidied away.
Ben left the coffee and the papers and grabbed his briefcase and tossed in a notepad and mini tape recorder. He phoned the prison using his mobile as he dashed from the office. It took a while to explain what he wanted and he was in his car before he had even been put through to someone senior enough to authorize his unusual interview request. At this time of night a skeleton staff was on and the last thing the officer in charge wanted was some idiot cop coming and making trouble. Ben had suggested that the life of the prisoner was in danger and it was possible he was the only lead in the case of a murdered young girl. He was lucky that the prison officer had a daughter of his own. Ben made sure the officer realized that if he refused access tonight and the prisoner was found dead tomorrow, it would be his ass on the line. The officer agreed to have the man, John Amosa, woken and sitting in an interview room for when Ben arrived; but he couldn’t guarantee he’d be in a talking mood. Ben thanked the officer and tossed his phone on the passenger seat. The traffic was light, he was making good time. Ben was feel
ing good and he saw a sign for a drive-thru burger restaurant ahead. He couldn’t remember when he last ate. He pulled in and bought two quarter pounder meals. Maybe he could win this guy over with a cold sandwich. He ate his burger trying not to drop sauce on his shirt. He finished his fries as he flashed his badge at the gate. They were expecting him and buzzed him through.
Ben dropped his gun at the desk and was met by the officer he’d spoken to on the phone. He recognized the name on the badge that was attached to a tired-looking uniform; his gut spilt over the top of his trouser belt. Officer McKay looked pissed at the interruption to his quiet night and eyed the takeout bag as he nodded to Ben.
‘I hope that’s for me?’ he said.
‘Sorry pal,’ said Ben. ‘This is all I’ve got to try and gain favor with big-boy in there.’
‘That’s all you’ve got? Shit.’ Officer McKay chuckled, he took the bag from Ben and poked at the contents. Satisfied, he passed the bag back and licked sauce from his fingers. ‘Listen Ben, I need to talk to you about this guy. He’s a real piece of work.’
‘I’m OK with that. I’ve met some tough guys in my time, I think I can handle him.’
‘It’s not that. Sure he’s built like a brick shithouse but there’s something about this guy that creeps me out. I don’t know if he’s fried his brain on ’roids but he don’t seem all there. You know what I mean?’
‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ said Ben. He’d make up his own mind.
‘All I’m saying is this is one evil bastard. He’ll rip your head off just as soon as look at you. We’ll be watching on camera and he’ll be cuffed, but don’t go winding him up OK?’
Ben smiled as he walked through the door to the interview room but he was starting to wish he’d brought both meals instead of just one. He was expecting a big man, but still he was shocked to see the mountain of muscle sitting behind the table.