Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  “I can do that. How many people do you think will see it?”

  “Hundreds of millions,” Kurt said. “No pressure.”

  Ty laughed. “Is it ready for me to start now?”

  “Not yet. I’ll transfer the videos onto your laptop then call you again. It could be a while.”

  “Cool,” Ty said. Everyone behind him waved and wished Kurt luck.

  Ernesto and Michael heard everything, so Kurt didn’t need to tell them that Ty was going to help. He went to get Ty’s laptop, which was hidden under piles of Ty’s clothes, and brought it back to the workstation to transfer the videos.

  Even this took a good amount of time, such was the quality of the video and the cumulative length of acquired footage.

  While this was going on Minter explored other areas of the ECI, out of curiosity more than anything. Kurt booted up the other laptop — the one connected to Ernesto’s internet via the trusty yellow cable — and searched for new videos or articles from Adeline Lemarchand. There were none.

  Kurt knew that even if Lemarchand’s claims about Sycamore’s involvement in several deaths came to be taken more seriously, Amos would deny them to the hilt and concoct whatever fake evidence was necessary to silence her. This was why Kurt planned to attack Sycamore from multiple angles, using AR to display the leaked footage in the sky for Lens-wearers while simultaneously broadcasting Amos’s reaction live to news networks around the world.

  Although there were no new articles written by Lemarchand, there were dozens about her. The top news story featuring her name was typical of the others. This story, from a London-based newspaper, said that the British station she gave her last interview on had apologised to Sycamore and “fully regretted inviting Ms Lemarchand onto the show.” It was “an inexcusable editorial oversight which will not be repeated,” they promised.

  It disappointed Kurt that Sycamore held such sway in the UK but it pleased him that France, a language as well as an ocean away from Amos’s primary sphere of influence, still afforded journalists a degree of freedom to do what journalists were supposed to do: ask the big questions.

  Kurt moved his cursor to the browser’s search bar and typed: “contact Adeline Lemarchand.”

  She had no social media accounts that Kurt could find, and the only email address he came across was underneath her weekly column for the Sunday newspaper DRN. It looked like a personal address rather than one provided by the newspaper, so Kurt gave it a shot. He made a throwaway email account of his own and typed a very simple message for Lemarchand:

  “FAO Adeline Lemarchand: We have evidence of everything and need mainstream exposure. You have mainstream exposure and need evidence of everything. Reply with a picture of yourself holding two brown shoes to confirm you are in control of this email account. Sample evidence attached. DO NOT SHARE.”

  The brown shoes trick was an old one which made sure that anyone else who might have access to the email account couldn’t just grab an image of Lemarchand from an internet search and pretend to be her. It would have to be a new photo. This was much like the more common technique of writing the day’s date on a piece of paper and holding it up, but that was too easily photoshopped.

  Kurt turned to Minter for assistance with the sample evidence. He wanted to send Lemarchand a still image from the footage that would show her that he had something worthwhile, but he had to ensure that she wouldn’t publish it.

  As he often did when it came to things like this, Minter had the answer. He took a single image from a single piece of footage: Kurt grabbing Amos by the throat. Minter then watermarked the image with bold white letters which didn’t obstruct Kurt’s face but couldn’t possibly be cropped or edited out. The watermark read: “SENT IN TRUST TO ADELINE LEMARCHAND @ DRN. LIVES AT RISK IF PUBLISHED.”

  “There’s no way she’s publishing that,” Minter said.

  Kurt liked it.

  Minter put the image on a memory card and gave it to Kurt to put on the other computer. Kurt attached it to his email and pressed send. It was all in English, but Kurt knew she could read it.

  Kurt tapped his fingers on the keyboard, already impatient.

  “She might not see that for days,” Minter said. “It’s worth a shot, but don’t expect too much, man.”

  Minter might have been right, but Kurt left his throwaway email account open on the cable-connected laptop, anyway.

  With the vista footage still copying to Ty’s computer, Kurt watched Minter explore the ECI. The power in their hands was frightening.

  Had they so desired, Kurt and Minter could have locked people out of their houses. They could have blocked people’s access to their bank accounts. At the touch of a button they could have disguised people’s faces, revealed their secrets, terminated their accounts. It was too much.

  Kurt remembered another boastful quote from Amos: “Power like this has never existed.”

  And nor should it, Kurt thought to himself. Nor should it.

  Minter then asked if Kurt had decided which footage they were going to “show through the Star’s Eye View girl,” whose name he pronounced as something closer to Trikk_Stikk than Trixilicious.

  Kurt said he hadn’t decided yet, but that he was leaning towards Amos’s direct confession. That would definitely be the main focus of their sky-based campaign.

  Ty’s laptop made a noise to announce that the data transfer was finally complete. As soon as it did, Kurt decided to transfer the footage Stacy had captured of The Orwall from his computer, too, so that Ty could also use that. All vista recording was blocked in The Treehouse, which meant that this was the only Orwall footage they had.

  But more importantly for Kurt, Stacy had died for this footage. This footage was going to play its part.

  Kurt Chifi’d Ty when the Orwall footage finished transferring, which seemed to take no time at all given the relatively low resolution of the mini-camera compared to the unparalleled UltraLenses.

  “I’ll be right there,” Ty said.

  Kurt wanted to take a break to check on Julian and Sabrina, anyway, so he took Ty’s computer out into the food court to wait for him. Minter came too, just to give his eyes something different to look at.

  No one else was around and Kurt realised only then that the kids had probably been asleep for a while.

  Ty arrived with Lisa, from Home rather than the cinema. They had left over an hour ago, he said, and the kids had indeed gone to bed.

  Minter asked what movie they had watched in the cinema, apparently keen to give his mind something new to think about, too.

  “We were playing games,” Ty said. “We tried a movie but the sound just dies in there when you have to listen through the computer. The room’s too big.”

  Kurt could understand that. Only Randy, Mary and the kids were lucky enough to have in-earphones. “Four In A Row?” Kurt asked.

  Lisa started smiling. “Ask him who beat him.”

  “No way,” Kurt said. “Sabrina?”

  Ty shrugged. “It wouldn’t be fair if I was good at everything,” he said. “But I perform when it counts.”

  Lisa moved her fingers across her lips, zipping them shut in the universal sign for “I’m saying nothing.”

  They all sat down at their usual table and went over the basics of what Ty’s videos should be like. Kurt wanted them to be clean and easy to watch, with transitions that added something but didn’t distract from the content.

  Kurt opened a notepad document and wrote which footage he wanted spliced in the same video. He gave Ty more specific details about the sky video than any other: he wanted a 16:9 video collage, with Henry Gardiner’s footage of Amos’s confession cropped square to fill the left side of the screen. He then wanted two smaller videos playing at the same time in 14:9 landscape on the right: Mike Poole’s vista of the limo explosion on top, and Henry’s footage of Kurt grabbing Amos by the throat underneath.

  Ty liked having unambiguous instructions.

  “And we don’t want anythin
g fancy with this collage,” Kurt said. “Just make sure that the three videos loop neatly without any of them losing anything important. Stick with the audio from the confession.”

  Ty nodded in understanding. “But does that mean you do want something fancy with the others?” he asked, hoping for a yes.

  “We’re aiming for a young crowd with the videos we’ll be showing through Trixilicious’s Lenses,” Kurt said, “so yeah. Do whatever you think. Quick cuts, pauses for effect, anything. Seriously, you know better than us. Just don’t mess around.”

  “I won’t,” Ty said, wearing the most serious face Kurt had ever seen on him. “You know I like fun, dude, but I know this is real.”

  Kurt stood up. “And you’re okay working all night?”

  “Totally.”

  “Good. We’ll take a break at breakfast and see where we are. Nine o’clock.”

  “Thanks for believing in me with this,” Ty said. His voice made clear that he really did appreciate it.

  “No problem,” Kurt said. “Prove me right.”

  They went their separate ways.

  Kurt stopped after a few steps. “Oh, and Ty…”

  “Yeah.”

  “We want it to be good, but done is better than perfect. Nine o’clock.”

  “You got it,” Ty called back.

  Minter let Kurt through the workstation door ahead of him. As soon as Kurt was inside, he noticed something.

  The screen on Ernesto’s laptop still displayed the ECI as Minter had left it, but the screen on the other laptop had changed.

  An email had arrived in Kurt’s throwaway account. He couldn’t read it from the door, but he could see the attached image:

  Adeline Lemarchand, holding two brown shoes.

  25

  Lemarchand’s email contained only eight words: “What do you have? What do you want?”

  Kurt took a few seconds to decide how to reply.

  “We have evidence of everything,” he typed, repeating his previous line. “We want mainstream exposure. If you can get on a major news network this Tuesday at 10am ET, we can provide you with a live stream of the biggest story you will ever cover.”

  Kurt sent the email.

  There were simpler ways to get the live images out to the wider unseeded world, but Kurt felt sure that using Lemarchand was the best option. For one thing, she had the kind of clout needed to be invited onto networks with large viewerships. If Kurt had wanted to live-stream the takedown directly to foreign viewers, he would have had to advertise it ahead of time, which was naturally out of the question. But if Lemarchand was on the news at the right time anyway, with an already interested viewership, all she would have to do was ask the network to show the feed on one side of the screen while she commented on the other. As with live coverage of any other developing news story, the stream would soon be picked up by competing networks.

  Minter agreed with Kurt’s view on this, as had Ernesto. They all knew that revealing the truth about Amos and Sycamore to the seeded population was their first priority, but they all knew that streaming the whole thing to an outside audience came a close second. Sending live and irrefutable evidence around the world would decisively eliminate any chance of Amos and his behind-the-scenes cronies dismissing the revelations as some kind of AR trick.

  The limited version of Star’s Eye View available through the Sycamore International website was another way that the truth could reach foreign shores, but Kurt knew that relying on any Sycamore service was risky. As such, arranging a direct and Sycamore-independent connection between his hacked UltraLenses and a motivated third party was by far their best option.

  Right on cue, a reply appeared on Kurt’s screen from Adeline Lemarchand: “I need more than a single photograph to believe that you have such a story.”

  Kurt turned to Minter. “What can we send that’s big but has nothing to do with us?”

  “Something political,” Minter said. “Amos meeting with a well known person about stuff the public aren’t supposed to know. Because that way, the other person could have leaked it.”

  The only thing that came to Kurt’s mind was a discussion between Amos and the president. Amos had replayed the audio for Kurt in the meeting room, and Kurt remembered being outraged. The revelations now seemed incidental compared to what had followed, but they would still be explosive.

  “Go to Amos’s vista on the first Friday morning after launch,” Kurt said. “It was the day after I met Stacy. I went into HQ because me and Amos were supposed to be meeting the president, but he had already done it on Thursday night. He played the audio for me, so if you get that from his vista it might look like someone leaked the call from the president’s end.”

  Minter navigated back to Amos’s vista recordings and typed in the date. He started at 9am and ran through it until Kurt and Amos were in the meeting room.

  Minter saved the whole conversation but they would only use a few parts of the phone call itself. Lemarchand would probably publish the audio very quickly, so they didn’t want it to be clear that Amos was playing it for Kurt. The incriminating part for the president was his agreement to block the release of a rival microchip in exchange for favourable SycaNews coverage in the run up to the election. Dirty politics was always a story, and this was as dirty as it got.

  It took a while for the footage to download and then transfer to Kurt’s computer. But trimming audio was far easier than editing video, so it didn’t take much longer for Kurt and Minter to make a file that only included the parts they wanted Lemarchand to have.

  Kurt attached the audio file to a new email and typed a message: “Here is something for free. Audio only. A big story for you but nothing compared to the rest. You got this from a disgruntled campaign staffer. Potential office-tapping. Stick to that line or we take the rest somewhere else.”

  He looked at Minter. “Do you think that’s too sharp?”

  “No,” Minter said. “Send it.”

  Kurt sent the email. They watched the screen for two or three minutes, which was all it had taken for Lemarchand to reply last time.

  “She’ll be listening to it a few times and then planning what to do with it,” Minter said.

  Kurt accepted that he was probably right.

  Minter then navigated to a section of the ECI which allowed him to view and control Sycamore’s hard cams in various locations. Hard cams were simply AR cameras placed in fixed locations, much like traffic cameras. Some were viewable to Seed-wearers, primarily those located in popular tourist destinations, but some were purely for traditional surveillance. Wary of a potential butterfly effect, Minter didn’t risk moving any of the cameras around.

  He did, however, use the four hard cams surrounding Sycamore HQ to plan the safest way to get the truck nearby and the quickest way to get it out of there. Kurt showed an interest in this, too. He compared Minter’s live footage of the street with the SycaStars United security information. The position of the crowd on Tuesday meant that there would be only one way in and one way out. A quick escape might prove difficult.

  This put a slight damper on the night as it was their first real disappointment. Earlier setbacks had led to later and greater victories, like when their inability to access Kurt’s vista had led them to Mike’s and eventually Henry’s, delivering the undeniable and irrefutable evidence they had been looking for the whole time.

  Kurt opened a new tab on the other computer and pulled up some more information about the SycaStars United launch event. He read about it properly for the first time, learning that the ten most popular SycaStars would be placed together in a house for a month-long reality TV extravaganza.

  Amos wanted to bring the show in with a bang, so he had invited the competing SycaStars to meet him and their adoring public for a scripted Q&A session right outside Sycamore HQ.

  Kurt clicked on the list of contestants. All ten places were now confirmed, based on who had the highest week-long simultaneous viewership average. Trixilicious was still
way out in front with an increasingly ridiculous 4.1 million, but number two was a man Kurt didn’t recognise from the previous list: Damian Dangerman, who called himself “the world’s first 24-hour stuntman.” Kurt asked Minter if Sycamore had lifted the ban on pseudonyms and usernames. Minter said no; both Trixilicious and Damian Dangerman, along with many others, had legally changed their names to help improve their positions in the Star’s Eye View charts. It was definitely working.

  Kurt clicked on Damian Dangerman to see his live vista. He was asleep. So much for a 24-hour stuntman, Kurt thought. Kurt moved to Damian’s highlight reel from the past week. The “stunts” he carried out were verifiably insane. Most involved no physical skill beyond being able to stand somewhere he knew he was going to get hurt. The highlight reel was short and snappy, like Kurt hoped Ty’s videos would be, showing Damian doing things like jumping in front of cyclists and letting bodybuilders drop dumbbells on his feet.

  There were no shortage of would-be stuntmen on Star’s Eye View, but Damian stood out thanks to his aggressively excitable persona and his total disregard for common sense. He was at least 30 — old enough to know better — but Kurt had no doubts that most of his followers would be younger. Despite his own misgivings, though, Kurt couldn’t really say that Damian was a fool; the 2.4 million average viewership he had sustained over the previous week showed that his pain was profitable and his lunacy was lucrative.

  What encouraged Kurt about Damian Dangerman’s presence in the top ten was that his audience was likely to be highly distinct from the audiences of the other SycaStars, almost all of whom were basically updated versions of the lipstick-and-lattes lifestyle bloggers who had been so popular on the old video sites. Trixilicious was the undisputed queen of this new breed, but it was very helpful to have a polar opposite like Damian.

  “It’s almost 6am, man,” Minter said. “Do you think we should sleep for two hours?”

  Kurt decided that it would be a good idea to try.