by David Hosp
Killkenny is through P on the menu. He’s passed favorites from ‘Amazon Zipline’ to ‘Prehistoric Africa’. He’s paused a few times, but just for a moment. It’s possible that he’s flipping through the menu to see all the options before going back to choose one. That’s what I did the first time around. I went through all the options that were available at the time – there were considerably fewer back then, when we were still in Beta – and then I went back and chose ‘Grand Canyon Excursion’. I’m still not sure why, other than it seemed the most foreign option to a kid who grew up on the street of Charlestown. I’d never been anywhere out of the area, and the pictures I’d seen of the American southwest had always fascinated me. The place seemed further away from where I was from than the moon. And I’ll say that the hour I spent during that first LifeScene hooked me. I genuinely felt like I’d been out there, and it was all so beautiful. It took some time before I got my head around the fact that none of it was real.
As he scrolls to the end of S, Killkenny’s fingers slow down. ‘Strip Club’ is one of the options right in the middle of the screen. ‘No,’ I whisper. I hate it when Yvette is right about something like this, and I know I’ll hear about it forever.
His finger hovers for a moment, and I think he’s going to move on. I am just starting to breathe a sigh of relief when he reaches out and taps his choice.
‘Strip Club,’ I say quietly to Yvette.
‘You’re all the same,’ Yvette chuckles.
‘You’re painting with a pretty broad brush, don’t you think?’
‘My brush isn’t broad; men are narrow.’
‘Touché.’ I look down at Killkenny sitting in the seat. It appears that he’s settled in and his attention is rapt. ‘I’m not sure I can watch this,’ I say to Yvette. ‘You want to grab a cup of coffee?’
‘Sure. Twenty bucks’ll buy a couple high-end lattes.’
I lean in toward Killkenny and speak loudly enough for him to hear through the headphones and the din of the virtual strip club he has entered. ‘We’re grabbing coffee. We’ll be back.’
‘Okay,’ he calls back. ‘This is remarkable!’
I stand and look at Yvette. ‘Like I said,’ she shrugs. ‘You people aren’t all that complicated.’
‘Hopefully that’ll make it easier to catch De Sade,’ I point out.
‘I doubt it,’ she says. ‘Every guy has something in him that’s only a few ticks off De Sade. He could be anyone.’
‘You think?’
‘Trust me, I’ve GhostWalked enough male fantasies to know.’
She and I head out to get some coffee. As we walk in silence, I wonder if she’s right.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘It’s impressive.’
We’re back in my office, sitting around a conference table that’s chipped and stained. It’s the closest thing to a desk that I have in the room. The evening has progressed to the point where the commuter traffic outside has died down, and the foot traffic of the neighborhood, which crawls with college kids and locals even on weeknights, is picking up. Yvette and I are sipping our coffees; we brought one back for Killkenny, too, but he hasn’t touched it. I can’t tell whether he doesn’t drink coffee or whether he is simply too overwhelmed by his first NextLife experience to take further stimulation.
‘We have some impressive people working at the company who’ve developed the technology.’
‘Clearly.’ He looks at the coffee, but doesn’t reach for it. ‘And this guy – this De Sade – he created his own LifeScene involving the girl with the feathers?’
I nod.
‘So, how does that work?’
‘It’s a little like what you just did; it’s just more sophisticated. NextLife gives the user a huge amount of freedom in constructing their own LifeScenes. You’re basically limited only by your technical ability. Take the strip-club LifeScene you chose from the basic template options: that’s a fully realized LifeScene that anyone can step into. It’s sort of the “beginner” level. Even with that, though, you have the option of making things brighter or darker, increasing or decreasing the volume – simple options that you can exercise. At the next level down, you could take the scene and change it in more fundamental ways. You could create your own dancers from the avatar options library; you could set the place in a different city; you could add a casino. As you break down the elements of a LifeScene further and further, you get to the point where the user is literally in control of everything.’
‘So De Sade uses the design tools in the system to create these LifeScenes where he kills the girls he creates. Can’t we just look up who he is on the system?’
I shake my head. ‘The system isn’t designed in that way. One of the things that we promise our users is complete anonymity – particularly when it comes to the LifeScenes. Without that assurance, no one would use the site.’
‘How do you provide that anonymity?’
‘It’s complicated. When you sign up, you give your name and basic information, including credit-card information if you are going to use any of the pay services. At that point, you’re assigned an internal identifier by the system, which is a series of letters and numbers that only the computer can recognize. That identifier changes every ten minutes, and the system overwrites the previous identifier. The system keeps track of each user’s activities by category, not by specific action – so it can tell that you’ve used email, or that you have Skyped or been in a LifeScene, but because the identifier for your actions is overwritten, the system has no record of what you specifically did on the site. This provides a much higher level of security and anonymity than on a normal site.’
‘How so?’ Killkenny asks.
‘Take a normal site, like Google or Yahoo. Say you use their email system, and you delete an email. That email is never really deleted. It can almost always be found in the system and identified with you. Most people don’t really understand that. On our system, the email technically still exists – because data is almost never fully destroyed – but because of our encryption and the shifting identifiers, it can never be traced back to you.’
‘How about if someone hacks into the system to crack the algorithm?’
I shake my head. ‘Not possible.’
Killkenny mulls this over for a moment. ‘Is there any way to trace De Sade by the LifeScenes themselves? Can you search for elements in the LifeScenes – feathers, for example – that would lead us back to him?’
‘No,’ Yvette answers.
‘How can you be sure? Have you tried it?’
‘It doesn’t work that way. When someone creates a LifeScene, it doesn’t exist on our servers – it’s not stored here. The servers make the tools and the software available, but the data for a user’s specific LifeScene actually resides on their own computer server. So even if we had things to search for, there’s nothing on our servers to search. The only time the LifeScene is accessible by us is when the user is actually in it. The LifeScene is inoperable without interacting with the NextLife software.’
‘But you can access it when he’s actually in a scene?’
‘We can GhostWalk through the interface with our system, but we can’t access the code for the individual’s LifeScene,’ I say.
‘Does he know you’re watching him?’
Yvette and I look at each other. The tracking that we do is not only against our users’ expectations, but there are also questions about the legality of the practice. ‘He doesn’t,’ I admit.
‘Can you track the signal back to him when he’s on?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Why not?’
‘The system is designed to obscure the IP address of our users.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Every computer that connects to the Internet has an IP address and a computer identifier that is used to find it. When you “access” a website, what you are really doing is sending a request from one computer to another to send back the information on the webpag
e you’re trying to access. In order for the information that’s sent back to reach your computer, there needs to be identifying information. That’s true whether it’s a laptop or a smartphone or whatever. Our servers are set up so that the signals are routed through several dummy sites that obscure the IP address, so it can’t be identified once the data is sent.’
‘Yeah, but those are the company’s servers, so they could reprogram them to identify the IP address if you wanted to, right?’ His cop eyes bore into me. We’re in a basement, and I have no windows in my office, so the place is musty and getting hot. I’m sweating a little, and I feel a bit uncomfortable.
‘It wouldn’t be possible without configuring the entire system for everyone.’
‘But you could still do it.’ It’s like he doesn’t need to blink. ‘These are multiple murders we’re talking about.’
‘The company wouldn’t put our users in that sort of a situation,’ I say. It sounds a little weak to me, as the words come out, but it’s the truth.
‘Three girls are dead,’ Killkenny says, as though I need to be reminded. ‘You don’t think your users can live with that sort of “situation” so that no one else dies?’
‘It would disable the entire system,’ I point out.
‘I can’t believe—’ Killkenny’s voice is rising, but Yvette cuts him off.
‘Detective, even if we could reconfigure the system internally, it wouldn’t help. Anyone with the kind of computer skills this guy has is already routing his signal through blind servers, before anything even gets here. For five dollars a month you can sign up for access through a Russian Internet service that will wipe the signal clean, and there’s no way to trace that.’ Killkenny stares at her now, but she isn’t sweating. ‘There must be another way,’ she says.
We sit in silence for a few moments. ‘Maybe we can start with the girls,’ Killkenny says at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘How does someone create one of these avatars – like if I wanted to create a new stripper, and I had a particular person I wanted it to look like, how would I do it?’
‘You’d have to start with one of our templates. You’d find the one that looks closest to the person you’re thinking of, and then you’d adjust it. I assume that’s what he did – he designed avatars to look like the girls he wanted to kill, and then used those for practice.’
‘Where do the templates come from?’
‘We have a library of several hundred looks that people may want.’
‘No, I mean how were the templates created?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answer honestly. ‘I wasn’t involved in that process. I assume they used models.’ As I say the words, their implication hits me. ‘They used models,’ I say again.
Killkenny is nodding. ‘Amanda Hicks was a part-time model. Four and a half years ago she did a modeling job for NextLife. We found deposits from NextLife in the bank accounts for the other two girls right around the same time.’
‘They were models who were used to create the templates,’ Yvette says, grasping Killkenny’s point.
‘He doesn’t create avatars to look like girls he wants to kill,’ Killkenny says. ‘He kills the avatar girls in the template library, and then goes out and finds the girls they’re based on in the real world.’
‘But how would he find them?’ Even as I ask the question, I know the answer.
‘He would have to have access to the company records at NextLife,’ Yvette says quietly.
Killkenny is nodding. ‘Yeah, he would.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
It’s late. The records for the models who were used to create the templates for the NextLife avatars wouldn’t be at the basement facility in Cambridge; they’d be at the corporate offices in Brighton, and that office is closed, so Yvette and I agree to meet Killkenny there in the morning. Yvette lives just a few blocks down from Ma’s house, so I give her a ride back to Charlestown. We’re both quiet for the first half of the ride. I’m watching the road; she’s looking out the passenger side window, watching the Charles River roll by, the lights of Boston rising above it on the other side, like Oz.
‘It’s got to be someone at the company,’ she says at last. I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t voice what we were both thinking.
‘We don’t know that,’ I say.
‘You’ve got a better explanation?’
‘You want me to make rational sense out of murder? Who would do something like this? Why? I can’t answer any of those questions.’
‘We have to find him,’ Yvette says.
‘The police have to find him. That’s their job,’ I point out.
‘Maybe,’ she concedes. ‘But the police didn’t create him; we did.’ I glance over at her and study her face for a second. Her profile is lit by the street lights, and the silhouette looks almost regal. Her chin is set, and I can tell that she has taken this on as a mission of hers. She is clear that if we do not find De Sade she will view it as her fault.
‘That’s bullshit,’ I say. ‘We didn’t create this sick asshole. If NextLife didn’t exist, he’d still be killing girls; he just wouldn’t be practicing.’
‘We’re making it easier.’
‘How? He still has to go out and find them. He still has to actually do the murders.’
‘I’m not talking about logistics,’ Yvette says. ‘I’m talking about mentality. We’re making it easier for people to see what it’s like; to see whether they like it.’
‘You could say that about almost every technology on the Internet.’
‘Maybe that’s right.’
I shake my head. ‘I want to catch this guy as much as you do, but I’m not putting this on you or me, or the company. This is all on the guy who’s doing it. It stops there; we’re not responsible for how people use the site. You understand that?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I guess.’ She doesn’t sound very convinced. ‘We still need to catch him.’
Yvette gets out of the car at my house and comes in for a drink; we both need one. Ma is awake and sitting in the kitchen, her oxygen tank parked next to her chair, the hose slipped over her back and snaked around under her nose. I’m thankful, at least, that she is wearing a housecoat. Not that it would make much difference to Yvette; she’s known Ma a long time.
‘Hey, Mrs C.,’ Yvette says as she walks in, goes over to the refrigerator and pulls out two beers. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Help yourself,’ Ma says. There’s a tone in her voice, but I know it’s for effect. It took some time, but Ma eventually came around to liking Yvette years ago.
‘Thanks,’ Yvette says, ignoring the tone. She walks over and sits at the table with my mother, looks at the mug between my mother’s hands. ‘Coffee at night?’
‘Helps me sleep.’
‘Decaf?’
‘Irish.’
‘Ah.’
I shake my head. ‘Ma, the doctors said you’re supposed to be off that stuff.’
‘Doctors said I was supposed to die last winter. You want me to start doing now everything they tell me I’m supposed to do?’ She looks at Yvette. ‘I never had much use for rules,’ she says with a shrug.
‘One of the few things we have in common,’ Yvette says with a wry smile.
My mother narrows her eyes at Yvette, examining her face. Yvette stares back, refusing to back down. I think this might go on all night. ‘You having sex with my son?’ Yvette is taking a sip of her beer when Ma asks the question, and she snarfs some of it up on the table, drawing a look of satisfaction from my mother.
‘Ma!’ I yell.
‘What?’ She gives me the look of the falsely accused. It’s one I’m sure she practiced in the mirror for hours when she was younger, for all manner of occasions. She looks back at Yvette. ‘Well?’
Yvette has recovered and waves me off as I begin to protest again. ‘No, Mrs C. We’re not having sex.’
‘What, you don’t like my boy?’
‘I like him fin
e.’
‘You just like girls better?’
That draws another laugh from Yvette. ‘That would be easier, wouldn’t it? No, I like guys, but we’re just friends.’ She looks at me. ‘And he hasn’t tried.’
I am starting to feel very uncomfortable with this conversation. ‘We’ve got a long day tomorrow,’ I offer, in a futile hope to move off the subject. Ma is having none of it, though.
She turns back to me. ‘You ain’t tried?’ she barks at me. ‘Why not?’
‘Ma—’
‘Don’t Ma me.’ She gives Yvette an evaluating look. ‘I’m not sayin’ she’s exactly my cuppa tea, but she’s got a decent face, and with that hair she’s gotta be easy.’
‘Excuse me?’ Yvette protests, but I can tell she’s more amused than upset.
‘You spend enough goddamned time with her,’ Ma continues. ‘Shit, the last girlfriend you had was that uptight little bitch from that college you went to. And that was – what, three years ago?’
‘We’re done with this conversation,’ I say.
‘I’m just sayin’, I don’t want people in the town thinkin’ you’re a faggot.’
‘Ma!’
‘I got nothin’ against them. Jimmy – Ethel’s boy – the one who cuts the ladies’ hair down on Warren Street, I like him. Funny. But gay as the day is long, and that’s fine for him. But you don’t have his style.’
‘Nick’s not gay,’ Yvette says. I look at her, and she gives a smile that is impossible to read. ‘That much I’m sure of.’
Ma looks back and forth between the two of us. ‘So?’
‘Go to bed, Ma,’ I say. ‘I’ll be up to check on you in a little while. After I make sure Yvette gets home.’
