Crucible of Fear

by D. W. Whitlock

  CHAPTER 19

  Voices

  Her parents were arguing in the next room again, their voices muffled through the walls. First, Mom’s reedy shrill followed by Dad’s gravelly rumble. Briana hugged her baby doll close, small hands pressed over her ears. Then her mother laughed, her voice swelling, becoming sweet and gleeful.

  Briana awoke, confused for a moment. Then she saw the hyenas staring back at her and remembered where she was. Rubbing her eyes, she scooped up her phone from where it had fallen on the floor and checked the time. 3:36 PM. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since this morning at the airport. The voices started up again next door. It was Leish, talking fast, her voice confident and strong. Briana lay back and curled on her side. She couldn’t hear what Leish was saying but she knew the tone.

  Listen to me. Damn it.

  She smiled. It was awesome to hear another young woman be so confident, so sure of herself.

  A lower voice boomed out, rattling the door. Briana jerked upright. She knew that tone only too well. Mark’s voice was laced with it every time he spoke.

  Listen to me. Bitch.

  Briana waited for a moment, but the voices had fallen silent. A door opened, harsh in the lull, followed by a slam. Footsteps creaked across the wood floor as Leish hummed to herself, growing softer as she moved away. Briana’s stomach cramped again. She couldn’t hide in here all day. Steeling herself, she got up and turned the doorknob.

  Briana walked down the hall, then across the main room to the kitchen. Leish was bent over one of her cameras, fiddling with the controls. She wore chunky high heels and a long black jacket that hung mid-thigh. She turned and her face lit up. “Hey, baby doll. Hungry?”

  “Starving,”

  “Good. I ordered some food. Should be here soon. Go relax on the patio and I’ll meet you out there.”

  Briana turned to go when Leish stopped her. “Wait, take a look at this. What do you think?”

  Briana peered down at the small screen on the back of the camera cradled in Leish’s hands. It was an image of Leish, lips parted and pouty, flipping the bird. Over each nipple were yellow emoji hands, middle fingers extended as well.

  “Subtle,” Briana said.

  “It’s supposed to be sexy sassy. Too bitchy, do you think?”

  “Leish, can we talk about something?”

  “Already? That’s like a new record for me. What’s wrong?”

  “Who else lives here? I heard a man’s voice.”

  “Nobody else lives here. That was Melvin, my manager, over vidcon.”

  “It sounded like he was in the room.”

  “Listen, Briana. It’s just you and me. Okay?”

  “And that contract…”

  “It’s not a contract, just a release form.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it doesn’t feel right.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. THOT attention grabbing instahoe. There must be cams all over. Listen to me. There’s no cameras in your room.” Leish glanced down the hall. “Or your bathroom. Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean I know it’s your thing but I’m kinda private.”

  Leish took Briana’s hands in hers and gazed into her eyes. “Listen, Briana. You’re a beautiful girl but that’s not why you’re out here. You’re here because of your voice. I can’t do this forever. I know that. I’m using what I have while I have it, but I know by the time I’m thirty or so, ass shots are going to be much less of a reality.” She twisted her neck and looked at her backside. “Maybe sooner than that. I want to find and develop talent. It’s part of my larger plan and that starts with you. Understand?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What can I do to ease your mind?”

  “That dragonfly drone,” Briana said. “It was in the bathroom while I was taking a shower.”

  Leish’s eyes narrowed as she scanned the room. She stalked over to her computer and turned, her jaw set. “You mean this drone?” she said, pointing to where it sat perched on the corner of the desk. The wings twitched.

  Briana nodded.

  Leish brought her fist down. Hard. She held the drone up between thumb and forefinger, her face tight. The little orange wings hung at odd angles, one looking as if it was about to fall off. The legs twitched and she dropped it on the floor, crunching it under her heel. She gave her foot a twist then strolled back over to Briana, hands on hips.

  “We good?”

  Briana gazed down at the tiny mangled drone, then back up at Leish.

  “Yeah,” Briana said with a soft smile. Lingering doubt still swirled inside and she pushed it away.

  Leish licked her lips and smirked. “Let’s talk about tonight then, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Lumetri Scopes

  Dante rode the private elevator back up to his office. Dropping onto the couch, he kicked off his shoes. His chest felt tight and he undid the top buttons of his shirt and took a deep breath.

  I’m supposed to feel better, Dante thought. Especially for how much this is going to cost.

  But something Dmitry Molchalin said at the end of their meeting stayed with him, grating on his frayed nerves.

  …this is just beginning.

  “How’s it going?” Naomi said.

  Dante jumped. He hadn’t heard her come in. Gazing up at her, he smiled tightly. “Great.”

  “You don’t look too great.”

  “I’m fine. I need you to write an email for me.”

  “What about?”

  “Tell everyone to take the next two days off. Paid of course.”

  “Two days? We have so many things in flight right now, Dante. Two days is going to hurt.”

  “It’ll hurt worse if we don’t do it. Shadow Trace is coming by tomorrow to setup their security software.”

  “You’re going with these guys after one visit? Maybe you should talk to some other companies first. Shop around a bit.”

  “Well, they came highly recommended by the FBI for one, and you should have seen this place. Very high tech. Totally secure. The guy who runs the place, Dmitry Molchalin, calm and cool. A total pro. I felt better just talking to the guy and what they could do for us. Not to mention they’re close, right over in Van Nuys.”

  “Van Nuys?” she said, one eyebrow going up.

  He’d felt the same way when he’d looked up the address. A world class cyber security firm in the armpit of the valley? Dante ignored her. “Can I rely on you to be here? I need your backup on this.”

  A slight smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “Of course.”

  “Good, because I’m bringing Abigail in tomorrow and I need somebody to watch her while I’m busy with Shadow Trace. I don’t feel safe having her at school.”

  “What about your friend. Kelly.”

  “I just need you to do this, okay?”

  Naomi’s eyes hardened. “Understood.”

  She turned on her heel and left, leaving the door wide open. Dante sighed, got to his feet and eased the door shut. He understood why she was angry. They’d have to talk about it, and soon, but he couldn’t worry about that right now.

  He opened a browser and googled deep fakes. Video links along the top showed the highest viewed videos, most of which seemed to be replacing someone’s face with the Internet’s darling boy, actor Nicolas Cage. Other videos described what the technology was and how dangerous it was going to be in the very near future.

  Dante had experienced firsthand just how true that was.

  He clicked on the Wikipedia article and scanned through it. It was like Boucher had said, the software was developed by academia within a field called computer vision, using deep learning and neural networks. The software analyzed hundreds of source pictures to create a 3D model of the actor’s face. It also used something called a GAN, or generative adversarial network to determine the best way to map the model onto another person’s body. The technology was then furthered by amateurs with the best intentions for all
humanity clearly in mind.

  Pornography.

  Celebrity porn made up most of the deep fakes with entire sites and message boards devoted to sharing the final results. There were commercial options available as well as an open source alternative that could be updated by anyone with adequate programming skills. It meant that this technology was accessible to anyone with a PC and time to kill.

  Scrolling down, Dante stopped on the heading: Concerns. The first article described a CEO being fooled into transferring funds by someone using audio deep fake technology to impersonate the voice of a chief executive over the phone. Bainbridge said Dante had spoken at the end of the video.

  The next article was called effects on credibility and authenticity. Dante didn’t bother reading any further. Closing the browser, he leaned back in his chair and considered getting the bottle of bourbon from his desk drawer before doing what had to be done. Taking a deep breath, he moused over to the email icon and double clicked.

  He scrolled down past the hundreds of shocked and angry return emails before giving up. Naomi could handle all of that. He switched over to sent emails, found the deep fake video and saved it to the desktop. It unnerved him that someone could use his private email to send something like this without him even knowing. Steeling himself, he opened the file and clenched his jaw as it filled the screen.

  Raucous voices leapt out from the speakers and Dante dialed down the volume. The video was dark, shot in crowded room with a round stage at the center. Drunken faces of men jeered in and out of the shadows, ties loosened, all of them dressed in black suits. The view moved to the right then whipped down, jostled by the crowd. The camera swung back up and panned over, closer now, pushing past a man’s bald head. Two blurry shapes filled the screen, overexposed by what appeared to be a bright clutch of bare bulbs overhead. The camera’s digital iris adjusted, rendering the leering faces encircling the stage almost invisible. The center of the room came into sharp focus and Dante held his breath, heart thudding in his chest.

  A rail thin, naked man stood onstage, directly behind a donkey. He was thrusting his hips back and forth while the animal chewed, its dark eyes glazed over. The man turned and peered at the camera with a lopsided grin as the camera zoomed in closer. Dante hit the pause button.

  Deep fake Dante, he thought with dark humor.

  The whole thing was fake, he realized. A collection of videos artfully stitched together from different sources. To his trained eye, it had all the earmarks of being post processed, well beyond the deep fake part of it. The lighting on the man looked a bit odd and the overall image had a dreamy, smeary quality to it. That made it no less disturbing though.

  Acid bubbled up, burning the back of this tongue. He’d heard of such things of course. There was always that guy in every group of college buddies who swore that donkey shows were real, hand to god, they had a cousin in the navy who’d been to one. But seeing one, especially with him as the star made him feel violated in a way he’d never thought possible. His face burned as he thought of everyone on his contact list seeing this disgusting farce.

  This is bad, he thought.

  The glee in Bainbridge’s voice rang through his head and he was glad the smug fuck wasn’t here right now. He’d probably break his face. Dante shook his head. Watching the whole video was almost too much but it had to be done. He hit play again and the video stuttered back to life.

  Deep fake Dante continued to leer at the camera before licking his lips and speaking.

  “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

  The screen went black.

  Dante sat for a moment, stunned. The voice sounded like him but was clipped and scratchy. He’s said those words a hundred times or more, but couldn’t recall where they were from.

  Didn’t matter, he thought. Time for a closer look.

  At the beginning of his career, Dante had done rough cuts of commercials before passing them onto the senior editing team. He wasn’t sure what he would discover but it was worth a shot.

  Dante opened up Reel View video editing software. Reel View consisted of a time line window where video and audio clips could be assembled and edited along with two video windows above: Source and Output. He dragged the video from the desktop onto the time line and the source window lit up with a still image from the video, as did the output window. The two images looked the same, but the output window would update based on any changes Dante made.

  Zooming into the image, he scrubbed his mouse pointer along the time line, causing the video to shuttle back and forth. He could see the telltale shimmer of pixels along the edge of the man’s body. The shadows didn’t really match the rest of the scene as well. The man had been cut out of another video using what was called a traveling matte and composited into this one. Dante breathed a sigh of relief. Whoever the guy was in the video was definitely up to something sexual, just not with an animal.

  He panned over to the donkey and the matte lines were more obvious. It was much harder to pull a matte on fur or hair, the pixels being so small. To Dante, it looked like the video was shot in a shitty strip club and the man and donkey were composited in later.

  Dante clicked on a small dial icon and opened up the “scopes.” Lumetri scopes were a set of five tools that displayed the color information of a video signal. He selected a waveform scope and a window opened, displaying a white, jagged mountain range against black. Numbers ranging from –20 to 120 ran along the side, going from bottom to top. The waveform for standard videos lay somewhere between 0 and 100, but the peaks in this video reached far below and above what he’d expect. This wasn’t standard video, but an HDR or high dynamic range video. He looked at those spiking peaks again and a sudden thought occurred to him.

  There’s something hidden in the white levels of this video.

  Dante adjusted a slider on the panel and the output window changed, the video becoming pale and bleached out. Dante scrubbed along the time line, watching as the video updated frame by frame. There in the background, beyond the group of leering men, was something that turned his blood to ice.

  It was Michelle.

  Her dark hair drifted slowly as if underwater, sad eyes watchful. A sudden thought struck him and the room tilted, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  It was Michelle from Abigail’s dream.

  Whoever was harassing him, they had eyes and ears in his house.

  CHAPTER 21

  Long Game

  Abigail stared out the window as Dante drove. There had been no other texts from unknown, but those words from the earlier text still rattled in his head.

  The more a thing is perfect…

  He’d spent the rest of the day calling up future tenants of the Ellis Media building as well as high-profile clients he knew personally. He assured them something like this would never happen again, security was going to be tighter than ever. Most were very understanding but cautious. He had no doubt he’d lost a few of them over this.

  “Dad,” Abigail said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Some of the kids were talking about you at school.”

  Dante’s heart sank. “What about?”

  “Your video.”

  Oh shit. “What did they say?”

  “It was Joe Haley. He saw your NAB talk on YouTube. He wants to be a YouTuber. I said the real money was in producing the videos like you. It’s the long game.”

  “You said that?” Dante said as relief flooded through him. “Good for you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Part of the Cackle

  The city coursed by outside the convertible limo, intermingled lights and darks easing by. The driver glanced into the rear-view mirror, checking on the two young women in the back seat. He made sure to keep his speed under forty miles an hour, otherwise a relaxing nighttime ride would become the eye of a hurricane.

  The air was warm, thick with odors of a long day drenched in the late August sun. A hint of metal on the back of the tongue. Wet concrete
with a hue of old coffee and cigarette ash. Street dogs with fried onions, gyros and the oily stench of food trucks. Very different from the natural scents of fresh cut corn and recently tilled earth.

  Briana loved it.

  She twirled a single lock of hair from over her ear as the breeze washed over her, dyed purple earlier that afternoon. It stood stark against the natural blonde of the rest of her hair.

  Leish was watching her, hazel eyes glittering in the dance of lights, blue hair shifting in the wind. She reached up and pulled a matching purple lock straight out and grinned.

  “Part of the pack now,” Leish said.

  “Cackle, don’t you mean,” said Briana.

  “Very good.” She tucked the lock back over her ear and tilted a silver flask to her lips. Her long, slender throat pulsed as she swallowed. With a grimace, she passed it over to Briana.

  Briana took the flask but hesitated. Her mother’s dire warnings seemed so very far away now. Putting the flask to her lips, she took a tentative sip, then slugged it back.

  “There you go!” Leish said, clapping.

  Briana shivered and stuck her tongue out, almost dropping the flask on the floor.

  Leish pulled a small pipe from her purse and stuck it between her lips. The sound of glass against teeth made Briana wince. The tip of the pipe was a bright shiny eye, the iris an icy blue. With a snap of her fingers, she flicked open a shiny silver lighter. The flame guttered as she puffed, the thick gray smoke swirling on the breeze. Briana wrinkled her nose, but took the proffered pipe and lighter. She tried to flick the lighter as she’d seen Leish do but the small wheel bit into her thumb, the flame refusing to catch.

  “Ouch!”

  “Here, gimme,” Leish said, scooting over close. She snapped her fingers and held the flame over the bowl of the pipe as Briana inhaled deeply. Her eyes watered as she held her breath, lungs crawling with flaming green gnats. It wasn’t the first time she’d smoked weed, but whatever this stuff was, it was strong. She exhaled with a wheezing cough as Leish rubbed her back.