by David Brin
Will tech do any good …
… if we refuse to wise up?
PUBLIC DOMAIN
SCOTT SIGLER
She’s cheating on me.
“Hoyt, will you put that thing away?”
He did not. Instead, he forced a smile.
“Oh come on,” he said, moving his cell phone to keep Bridget in-frame. “Just tell me how we met, then tell me you love me.”
Bridget put a hand over her face, shook her head.
“You know exactly how we met. That’s why we’re at a shitty Starbucks, drinking shitty coffee.”
A year ago to the day, he’d been in one of those BS “preferred partners” meetings. Company A gets together with Company B, tech is shown, talks are had, and—perhaps—business gets done. Hoyt had watched the visitors present their product. Pure garbage, all smoke and no fire, but the woman presenting the product … well, Bridget Amsing had been another story altogether.
Bridget’s company had been at the tail end of the startup stage. Their strategy: offer a suite of hardware that turns retail stores into biometric scanners, tack on the software to analyze the captured information. Unethical, in Hoyt’s opinion, and borderline illegal—even with the huge gray area created by the Transparency Acts. Remote measurement of skin temperature, pupil dilation, heart rate, respiration rate, body tension, voice analysis and a few more goodies. Pretty much the same stuff they used at airports, but with a new mood-recognition algorithm tied into “a broader consumer-behavior database that accurately predicts purchasing potential.” Know the customer’s true mood, and you can make sure people willing to spend money actually spend it.
Hoyt’s company created eyetracking hardware. He was the software team lead, and as such, he’d been there to give his take. But he hadn’t paid much attention to their product—he’d been unable to do anything but gawk at the startup’s presenter.
He knew he was staring. Perhaps leering was a better word. He tried to look away from the gray-eyed woman. Tried, and failed. Such a strange feeling—he was powerless to stop himself from acting like a total creeper.
In a day and age when the slightest breach of etiquette can land you in the HR director’s office—or flat-out get you fired because you make someone “feel uncomfortable”—he stared and stared and stared.
She rolled through her presentation, so smoothly he assumed she was like every other woman in the world and simply hadn’t noticed him. Women like her didn’t go for guys like him.
He’d been wrong.
At the post-presentation cocktail reception, she cornered him by the plastic supermarket deli tray half-covered with scattered slices of sausage and cubes of cheese.
She leaned close, spoke quietly so no one else could hear.
“We had an in-service last week. You’d have loved it. Staring as sexual harassment. I saved the course attachments. Want me to e-mail them to you?”
He thought he was screwed. Words like that make careers disintegrate. Well, hello, Mr. Man who was fired for being a perv—no, we’re not hiring right now. Trapped halfway between those gray eyes and the feeling of his stomach plummeting into his balls, Hoyt said the first thing that came to his mind.
“Your product is stupid.”
A pause, then her eyes lit up like a little kid who just discovered a new toy. She glanced over her shoulder to see if any of her coworkers were listening. They weren’t.
“It is stupid,” she said. “Like you need a heat map to tell you if a customer is pissed off? I swear, I’m the only one in my company that’s ever actually worked a retail floor. Bunch of programmers and Ivy-leaguers who’ve never had to watch a size five insist she should be able to fit into a size three.” Bridget shrugged. “Wanna leave these walking-dead asshats behind and go get a coffee? I mean, if you’re going to stare at me like my clothes are transparent, you can probably see my tits better from across a table instead of across the room.”
That was how they’d met. Romance abounds.
Hoyt had assumed it was a trick meant to embarrass him. He’d said “yes” anyway. In the months that followed, he learned Bridget’s coworkers thought she was an asshole—and with good reason. She had a horribly inappropriate sense of humor. She pushed at everyone, challenged everything, trying to find those who didn’t wilt. If you showed weakness? Sensitivity? She wouldn’t stop poking and prodding. Stand up to her, and she liked you.
A year ago to the day, they’d left the mixer separately, met up at the shitty Starbucks across the street, bought shitty coffee, and sat at this very same shitty table.
Except the first time, Hoyt hadn’t been pointing his cell phone at her.
“Come on,” he said. “Just tell me what you think about our first twelve months together.”
Twelve months that you’re pissing away, because I was wrong about you, because you’re just like the other lying harpies that made me look like a fool.
Bridget sighed. She reached across the table. Her fingertips traced veins on the back of his hand. As always—even now—her touch shot through him, an absent spark landing in a barrel of gunpowder. She smiled, gray eyes crinkling at the corners.
“A year, Hoyt. It’s crazy. This is the longest I’ve ever been in a relationship.”
That surprised him. Bridget never talked about her pre-Hoyt life. He accepted her insular nature, sure, but he’d just assumed she’d had long relationships before. Hadn’t everyone their age?
Her smile confused him. Can’t fake a smile like that. Not in the eyes, anyway. If Hoyt knew one thing in this world, it was eyes. Gateway to the soul. Metaphysical bullshit, sure, but not far from the truth. Only the greatest actors can fake the contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscles, which caused Bridget’s raised cheeks and crow’s feet, or contract the zygomatic majors, the muscles that turned up the corners of her mouth. She wasn’t an actor. The science of a Duchenne told him that her smile was real.
Which, somehow, made this even worse.
“Now tell me you love me,” he said.
Her smile faded. He knew those words were hard for her to say. Saying I love you meant admitting someone could get to her, could hurt her.
But she did it anyway.
“I love you, Hoyt.” She smiled again, relieved.
Hoyt grinned back.
She frowned. “Something wrong?”
Two minutes of running video. Hopefully, that was enough. He put the phone in his pocket.
He shook his head. “Everything’s fine.”
Fine, except you said you were going out with Kaylee last night, dinner at Yard House, then I saw Kaylee’s Instagram movies at Fluxx—she was with four other people, none of whom were you.
Bridget pointed to the corner of her eye.
“Your orbicule thingie you told me about,” she said. “Your smile gots no crow’s feet, my man.”
That was the problem with dating smart people—they paid attention. They learned. Maybe he shouldn’t have told her so much about what he did for a living.
He shrugged. “Nothing’s wrong. Honest.”
Bridget leaned back, looked at him guardedly.
He didn’t know her past, but he knew someone had shattered her heart. Her swagger, the too-loud laugh, the baiting insults … it was all surface stuff. Battle-scared armor that protected delicate, hidden glass within. It had taken him months to learn that, to find the real person hiding within the hard shell. He’d been patient, of course, because he’d given himself over to her almost from the first.
In retrospect, he’d been a fool to do that. Maybe he should have had armor, too.
“You’re the one who wanted to come here, to celebrate,” she said. She crossed her arms. “Remember? So I come here like you want, and you’ve got some kind of stick up your ass?”
Subtlety—Bridget’s strong point.
“What, I can’t have a moment where I’m not dancing for you like a trained monkey?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What the hell does that mean?”
Hoyt didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know why he’d said it. All he knew was that it hurt to look at her. He’d thought she was different. In truth, she was probably just like the others. Bridget stood. Hoyt knew her so well now, read the emotions she was so bad at hiding.
“Know what, Hoyt? Thanks for ruining this with another one of your goddam moods.”
From in love to pissed off in the blink of an eye. That was Bridget’s way.
“I’m going home,” she said. She took one step, then paused, her face caught somewhere between anger and confusion. “Are … are we okay?”
She said it as if he might suddenly break things off with her. Maybe he would. He was ninety percent sure she was cheating on him, but swirling in that ten-percent remainder was the hope that he was wrong, that this was some kind of silly mistake.
He loved her.
“We’re okay,” he said. “You still going to dinner with Kaylee tonight?”
She winced, so slightly most people wouldn’t have noticed. Hoyt did.
“Yeah, she’s having a hard time,” Bridget said. “That okay?”
No hostility in the voice this time, not the usual crass, in-your-face Bridget. She was asking. Hoyt wanted to say no, have her stay with him tonight, hold her and love her and give her a chance to tell him what was going on in her own terms.
Instead, he gave her enough rope to hang herself.
“It’s fine, honest,” he said. “Still coming over after?”
Bridget smiled, an awkward, unsure thing that looked odd on a face usually burning with confidence. She leaned down and kissed him.
“Sure am,” she said. “See you nine-ish.”
Hoyt watched her leave.
He took another sip of coffee. Tasted burnt. Starbucks always tasted burnt.
A broken heart was nothing new. He’d suffered through them before. Hadn’t everyone? In high school, sure. In college, of course. But this? This was supposed to be different. He and Bridget were at that age, when a year of dating meant something more.
You’re such a fucking idiot. She played you.
Hoyt threw out his shitty coffee, and he left.
* * *
He’d been down this road before. This time, perhaps, he wouldn’t have to suffer in the zone of lies and denials. He could get to the truth and move on.
There was another man. Or another woman, maybe. That had happened to him once. Gender didn’t matter. What mattered was simply that one word—another.
It was supposed to be different this time. Bridget was supposed to be different.
He was such a fool.
Hoyt’s face felt hot.
I have never wanted more to be wrong in my whole life.
“Upload today’s video,” he said.
The computer complied.
The video taken an hour earlier at Starbucks appeared in a tiny box, playing at three times normal speed. Beneath it, a progress bar started filling from left to right. Two minutes and thirteen seconds of her talking. The site said it needed one minute of video for the analysis, but Hoyt had wanted to be sure.
He’d tested the system by uploading a recording of himself. It had worked like a charm. Seemed unreal, though, that any public video of you was simply out there, available to anyone. While the algorithm could identify the same face in dozens or even hundreds of videos, it didn’t know who that person was—not unless you opted in for that, filled out multiple forms and proved your identity. Hoyt had done just that. Most people had not. So far, anyway. They were too busy with shows or games or life to pay attention to new laws, to understand the technology that surrounded them. He knew Bridget hadn’t taken the time to opt-in—she was more interested in trashy reality programming than C-SPAN or CNN.
Hoyt understood the facial recognition part of the system. His company had been doing work like that for the past three years. Key identifiers like the width of the nose, length of the jaw line, distance between the eyes, the position and angle of cheekbones, those things combined to make a faceprint. Even from a good distance, a decent camera could identify an individual with unerring accuracy. That part of analyzing footage was easy; it was the access to footage that he could barely get his head around.
Thanks to the Transparency Acts, if a camera shot streets and sidewalks, restaurants, stores, bars, stadiums, etc., the video had to be synced to public-domain databases. That included police body cams, dashboard cams, even cell-phone video if it was shot in a public place. Surveillance footage was available to anyone, so people could see where they were being watched, know who was watching them. Have a camera monitoring a public area, and that footage was kept private? Welcome to the nation’s latest felony charge, friend. The Acts dictated that no one—not even the government—had a right to watch you without you knowing you were being watched.
The progress bar continued to fill.
That kind of data had once stayed mostly in private hands. Now it was available with a few clicks. Maybe it would soon be taken for granted. Hoyt’s older brother had told him how people had, at first, flipped out that Google Maps would let you zoom down to someone’s doorstep—coverage that had once been the domain of spy satellites and shadowy government agencies. Hoyt, on the other hand, had never known a time when map detail like that hadn’t been available.
The progress bar filled all the way. Text flashed above it: 100% ANALYZED.
And below that: RUN AGAINST PUBLIC DOMAIN VIDEO?
“Yes,” he said.
The display flashed video clips so fast he couldn’t begin to process what he saw, other than split-second images that stuck: a blond girl, a black man, a boy smiling under a stop sign. As the seconds rolled past, he noticed that people of color stopped appearing. Then, no more images of men. Or boys. Just women. Then, no more old women. Young girls, gone. The rapid-fire images slowed, still too fast to make out individuals, but enough to see the pattern: white women, late 20s, brunettes. Slower still, each clip visible for a quarter-second, perhaps—hundreds of women, all who looked a little bit like Bridget. Slower still, enough that Hoyt could briefly focus on the women … some looked so much like Bridget they could have been her sister.
The first few months of dating Bridget had been exciting. The months after … those had been terrifying. Falling in love was always scary, but never more so than with her. Why? Because he’d fallen first. He’d been the one out on a ledge, exposing his heart, opening himself to possible rejection.
He remembered the first time he’d told her he loved her. She hadn’t answered with the hoped-for I love you, too. No, she’d said just one word: why?
On the display, many women that looked like Bridget, then, unmistakably, Bridget herself. Security-cam footage, her and Hoyt leaving a bar in the Gaslamp. They both looked happy. Was that just last week?
That question of why? Not just the two of them, but for everyone. Why does one person love another? Are there even words for it? At first, he hadn’t known how to respond. Then, the reasons started flowing. Easy pickings at first: her eyes; the way she smelled, the way she kissed, that she liked the same old sci-fi movies he did. More reasons next, deeper reasons. How every hug started out stiff, then she relaxed into him, almost despite her natural resistance to do so. How she poked at him constantly, but when someone else teased him, she focused all of her considerable wit on that person, ridiculed that person until they understood that no one messed with Hoyt, no one but her. How she seemed to talk constantly, to fidget endlessly, an always-full battery with a cracked shell that couldn’t contain her energy—except when she was alone with him, and she was quiet, she was still, slowing down enough to feel the world spin.
Only a couple of months ago had she finally said it to him; I love you. Unlike her, he hadn’t asked why. Honestly, he didn’t care why.
Playback slowing to normal speeds: Bridget at Ralph’s, shopping for groceries; in a crowd on 5th Avenue; at a stoplight while driving Hoyt’s car.
The program had locked her in
.
Hoyt felt awful. He felt justified. It was all public-domain footage—what was wrong with looking at that? If she wasn’t doing anything wrong, then she had nothing to hide. Right?
Bridget at the library.
Bridget at the bank.
Bridget at the Prado Restaurant at Balboa Park … not alone.
“Stop searching,” Hoyt said. “Continue playing current clip.”
Bridget, sitting at a table, across from a man.
A man Hoyt didn’t recognize.
They were talking. They were smiling.
Hoyt looked at the meta info: yesterday, 5:47 pm.
Right when Bridget said she was out with Kaylee.
A creeping sensation, the feeling of sliding backward while sitting perfectly still. Who was this grinning asshole? Hoyt watched the silent movie. He wished there was audio. Was she talking about sex? Was she saying the things she’d said to Hoyt, that she was a bad girl deep down, that in public they were equals but behind closed doors she wanted Daddy to control her?
The same things she’d claimed she’d said only to Hoyt, to no one before him? The same things that made Hoyt feel like a king.
On the playback, the man said something. Bridget laughed. Orbicularis oculi. Zygomatic major. A genuine laugh, a laugh of delight.
Hoyt felt that heat in his face again. Tears blurred his vision. His eyes stung. He closed them. When he did, he saw that strange man on top of her, saw her screaming in pleasure, screaming and laughing.
Laughing at Hoyt.
“I’m so fucking stupid.”
He didn’t want this to be true. He loved her. He’d thought she loved him.
Hoyt watched the silent movie. Wait … the man … did he look familiar after all? Something about him did, yes, even though Hoyt was sure he’d never seen this man before. Or, maybe he had … at a bar, perhaps?
Tears again. He should have known better. So gullible. He’d trusted her.
He’d loved her.
Hoyt checked the time: 7:30 pm.
“Stop playback. Still images, make new JPEGs, same folder.”
She would be there soon. He had to get ready.