To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  A moment later the man was in shot, standing over the woman. He put his hands on her hips and began to peel off her underwear. Only then did the woman turn towards the camera, so that at last her face could be seen.

  Maggie was looking at herself.

  She gasped, putting her hand over her mouth. There was no mistaking her own face, staring back at her from the screen.

  She looked at her on-screen self, with her mouth open and eyes eager. She watched as this woman, herself, brushed her hair away, and as the man’s hands – you could only see the back of his head – removed her bra and began cupping her breasts.

  Maggie hit the pause button. It was both unbearable to look and impossible not to. It was herself she was looking at, and yet she had no recollection of that room, this moment or that man. She clicked ahead on the video, only to see herself performing oral sex. She clicked ahead again, and there she was underneath the man, as he pushed himself inside her.

  She got up and went to the kitchen. She reached for a bottle of Ardbeg whisky, grabbed a tumbler and poured out what may well have been a quadruple measure. She drank half of it and welcomed the sharp sting at the back of her throat and the warmth that followed it.

  She tried to process what she had seen. Who was that man? It didn’t look like Richard. The build was roughly the same, so was the height. But the hair colour wasn’t right, and nor were the glimpses she had caught of his face.

  Maggie could hardly bear to go back into the room and touch that computer, let alone look at more of that video. But she had to know: who had she had sex with on camera like that, and how on earth had she no memory of it?

  With a finger on the controls, she clicked in and out, watching a few seconds each time. She listened closely, but could hear only fairly muffled grunting and moaning. (For whoever had filmed this, sound was clearly not the top priority.)

  It was then that, for the first time, she allowed in the thought that she had kept out. Other people would be watching that tape. They would include people she knew – friends and former colleagues – and people she didn’t know. Some would be looking out of curiosity. Some would be journalists at work, in offices, looking because it had suddenly become a ‘story’. Others would be acquaintances, long-forgotten contacts or rivals, looking to enjoy the brief delight of schadenfreude at the trials of another.

  But that’s not who she was thinking of at this moment. Instead, her head filled with images of men on their own. Men in mothers’ basements or in potting sheds, in single bedrooms or in locked bathrooms, on phones or at their keyboards, men looking at her, naked and apparently flushed with sex – men who, right now, would be touching themselves.

  As that thought dug its fingernails in, refusing to let go, she glanced again at the screen, and watched as this man plunged into her from another angle. She looked away, a reflex response to what felt like a physical strike. Actually, strike was the wrong word. To see yourself penetrated that way was itself a kind of penetration. Violation. That was the word.

  Unable to bear any more, she pressed pause again. The image froze at a point at which she was once again on all fours, this time in apparent raptures as this man remained lodged deep inside her. Maggie’s eye, though, was not on him but on her. There was one part of her body in profile in particular that she stared at, her focus unwavering.

  Hold on.

  She grabbed the phone, hit the ‘recents’ button and dialled the last number that had dialled her.

  ‘Liz, that’s not me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On the video. It’s not me.’

  ‘Maggie, please. Anyone can see it’s you. I’m sorry, but I recognize my own sister’s face when I see it. That’s—’

  ‘It’s not my body. Have you seen the thighs on that girl? Last time I had thighs that thin I was twelve years old.’

  ‘The camera’s weird like that, it can—’

  ‘And those tits are not mine either.’

  ‘What, too big?’

  ‘Actually, it’s more the shape. Anyway, the point is, it’s not me.’

  ‘But the face—’

  ‘The face is me, that’s true. But it’s not me.’

  There was some rustling at the other end, as Liz explained she was ‘relocating’, doubtless to be a safe distance away from her children before she watched explicit sex on a computer.

  ‘OK. I’m looking at it now.’

  ‘Oh, please Liz, don’t. Not with me listening.’

  ‘I just want to check something. Wait.’

  Maggie could hear some clicking and then grunting sounds emanating from the machine. ‘Liz!’

  ‘Wow, that is incredible. I did wonder, but I thought it was too good for—’

  ‘What’s incredible?’

  ‘The pace of progress with this stuff is just unbelievable.’

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘OK. Click about two minutes in. Two minutes sixteen seconds, just watch that bit.’

  Maggie did as she was told and contemplated her on-screen self adjusting her position, readying to receive her lover’s tongue between her legs. She was looking directly at the camera.

  ‘See?’ said Liz.

  ‘Yes, I can see, thank you very much. What am I meant to be looking at?’

  ‘Look at your face.’

  ‘Hold on, I’m rewinding. OK . . . Oh, that bit? When it sort of moves but doesn’t move?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not tracking properly.’

  ‘Like the face is slightly slower than the head or something?’

  ‘Exactly. The processing can’t make a perfect match. I’ll find another one.’

  Liz began firing out timings – four minutes twenty-three, seven minutes forty-one – when she had spotted similar moments. ‘See?’ she said. ‘That’s a total uncanny valley right there.’

  ‘Is that some porn term?’

  ‘Oh, Maggie, come on. Do you not read any of those articles I send you? “Uncanny valley”: like when a robot looks so close to a human being that there’s only a tiny gap between the fake and the real thing. And that gap freaks us out much more than if it wasn’t even close.’

  ‘And in this video—’

  ‘It makes me throw up mainly because it’s my own sister but also because my brain can tell it’s nearly there but not quite. In those bits especially. It’s jarring.’

  ‘Jarring. That’s how you’d describe this video? Jarring?’

  ‘It’s a thing now. Deepfakes, they’re called. When you use AI to face-swap someone for porn. They do it with celebrities usually. No offence.’

  ‘So someone has put my face on a real woman in a real sex tape?’

  ‘It’s not even that difficult. You just use a machine learning tool, which are open-source these days. I bet they used something like TensorFlow, which is actually available to anyone who’s into deep learning algorithms. I have this student, Cameron, who—’

  ‘Liz.’

  ‘I think there’s even an app. And they used to be so obvious. You could spot them instantly. But the processing is getting better and better—’

  ‘Liz!’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I need to know what I can do about this. But before that, I need to know you’re a hundred per cent sure. About it being a, what did you call it?’

  ‘A deepfake. I’m sure. And you know what? Somewhere out there will be the original sex tape.’

  ‘The one they put my face on?’

  ‘Exactly. That’ll prove it.’

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you. And sorry that you had to, you know.’

  ‘Too late. I can’t unsee it. Listen, Maggie. Before you go.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Weird time to bring this up, but I saw Yves again today. You know, my therapist.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We were talking more about my childhood. Quarry Street, Ma, you. Everything.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Yves feels we’re
on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, that my memories are piecing things back together.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Anyway, I have another session on Friday.’ There was a pause. ‘I just wanted you to know.’

  As Maggie pressed the red button to end the call, she wondered why she felt the way she did – as if she had been given yet another deadline.

  Almost physically filing that thought away, she began texting the governor, offering as concise an explanation of what she’d just heard as she could manage. Then she called Gaby, the reporter, and did the same, urging her to get a corrected story up as fast as she could. As it happened, the reporter knew all about deepfakes, checking off the names of the famous singers and actresses who’d become inadvertent and unwilling porn stars.

  ‘Are there lots of regular pictures of you around?’ she asked. ‘You know, on the internet?’

  Maggie thought of those campaign events she’d attended with the former president, the footage of her at negotiations, the news coverage of the craziness that unfolded with his successor. ‘A few. Enough.’

  ‘Well, they only need a few hundred apparently.’

  Maggie told the reporter that she planned to write to the major tech companies, formally requesting the video be removed from their platforms, and that she’d be starting with Google.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Gaby said. ‘Reckon they might have a few other things on their minds right now.’

  Maggie ignored that and thanked the reporter – again – clocking that same tone of scepticism which had greeted her earlier denials of the bogus emails, a tone she could have frankly done without. She wished she was dealing with one of the journalists she knew well from her White House and State Department days. She thought of Jake Haynes, still working the intelligence beat at the New York Times. They’d done some big stories together; there was a solid basis of trust. Besides, he owed her. It was obvious: she should call him.

  Except his number was wiped, along with the rest of her contacts. And even if she did get hold of him, how mortifying would that call be? She imagined herself talking to this man she actually knew and saying, No, fast forward to when I’m sucking the guy’s dick: can’t you tell, that’s definitely not me.

  Maggie went to Twitter, avoiding her own ‘mentions’ and heading straight to the account of Gaby Hutton. Her latest tweet was posted four minutes ago:

  Maggie Costello tells DC Wire #DCsextape is “100% fake, 100% bogus.” Describes it as a “deepfake”, a face-swap porn video like those that’ve targeted Hollywood stars, models. Demands Google, Facebook remove it

  Gaby had threaded it to her previous tweets about the fake emails. The casual reader, Maggie knew with a sinking sense of dread, would be thinking: ‘This Washington woman is waving her arms about to clear a lot of smoke. No way you get all that smoke unless there’s a little bit of fire. So we’re meant to believe those emails were fake and this porno is fake: come on, who’s she kidding?’ Or, in what would doubtless be the arsehole formulation of choice: the lady doth protest too much.

  She drained the rest of her whisky and went back to the kitchen for more. All she could think of was that video. The horror of it. But also the way it seemed to mix in her head with actual, genuine memories – of nights she’d spent with Richard, of nights she’d spent with Uri. She tried to remember sex with Uri especially, the last man she had loved. But the only images that would come were those she had seen on that screen a few minutes ago. Her, but not her. The uncanny valley.

  This was what filled the mind of Maggie Costello, even as CNN flashed the news that the National Archives and Library of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa was burning to the ground.

  She barely considered the text that had consumed her attention earlier, where buried in those thousands of words was the prompt for the thought she had had, but let slip away. The key words were there still, waiting for her to look at them, waiting to offer up their secrets.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Washington DC, 2.14pm

  Another call on her phone, another string of indecipherable numbers. It could be anyone. A friend, another reporter or, she hoped, someone from the Florian unit at FBI headquarters. Maybe there was news of the analysis of the manifesto. They must have something by now . . .

  ‘Hello there. Is that Maggie Costello?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hi there, Maggie. Hope you’re having a great day. This is Justin, from TMZ. We wanted to reach out to you, to see if you might want to share with us the story of the tape? You know, from your perspective?’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘Ha, no, Maggie,’ he said warmly, his voice offering a nice, illustrative chortle. ‘Not at all. There’s just great interest in your tape right now and so—’

  ‘My tape?’

  ‘That’s right. You know, people are kind of intrigued by politics and Washington right now, and it’s so rare for them to have this kind of insight into life in the nation’s capital and so we’d love for you to do one of our “TMZ on TV” spots—’

  ‘It’s not my tape.’

  ‘No. I understand. Your boyfriend seems to have released the—’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend!’

  ‘I’m sorry. Your former boyfriend. And that’s part of the story? Do you feel betrayed maybe by what he did? Is this a revenge porn kind of a deal?’

  ‘What I mean is, that’s not me in the tape. It’s some kind of face-swap, digital, algorithm thing.’

  ‘Right,’ Justin said in a tone that translated as, Whatever, honey, if that’s what you need to tell yourself.

  ‘I mean it. Haven’t you seen the DC Wire story?’

  ‘I haven’t looked at that yet, no.’

  ‘OK. So why don’t you “look” at that and then you can—’

  ‘One thing, Maggie, real quick? Can you tell us who the man in the tape is?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never met him!’

  ‘You’d never met him before. OK, I’ve got that.’

  ‘No, no. Not “I’d never met him before”, I have never met . . . Oh, you know what? Just fuck off.’ She hung up, savouring the thrill of telling that dickhead where to get off. It lasted all of two and a half seconds before she accepted that she had just made the hole she was in deeper still.

  The phone rang again. Another fucking set of mystery digits. She willed herself to keep calm as she took the phone into the kitchen and eyed up the bottle of Ardbeg.

  ‘Hi Maggie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Dan, in Governor Morrison’s office.’

  Strange, Maggie thought. Normally Donna always called directly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So I just came off the phone with the governor and I’m afraid it’s not good news. We’re going to need to release you from your work on the current situation.’

  ‘Release me?’

  ‘She’s spoken with Director Lofgren and he’s reached the same view. About your involvement with Florian. It means we’re going to be revoking security access for you on this and all related matters.’

  ‘But she wanted me to . . . What about the Keane trial? The verdict’s on Friday, she was worried it could turn into—’

  ‘Hey, I’m just the messenger here.’

  ‘But I’m making progress. I’m finding—’

  ‘As I say. My role is limited to conveying the decision which the governor feels it is necessary to take at this time.’

  ‘Necessary? Why’s it necessary?’

  ‘Well, that’s clearly something you’d need to put to her. But in light of the current controversy, both she and Director Lofgren have come to the view—’

  ‘You mean this tape business? It’s fake! I’ve told her. It’s bogus. It’s a total invention.’

  ‘Well, it’s now a story and, given the gravity of the situation nationally and internationally, their shared view is that there can be no further distractions from this work. It’s too important. She said that you’d underst
and.’

  Maggie stopped herself. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Her exact words were, “Maggie Costello of all people will understand.” ’

  Half of her wanted to say fuck off to this jerk as well. But she could hear Donna saying those words and could imagine her meaning them too. Because of course she understood.

  We’re stage hands, you and me, Stuart had said. Our job is to make the people out front look good. We’re the ones in the black pants and black T-shirts, maybe even black gloves, so that no one even knows we’re there. The second the audience notices you schlepping the scenery, the spell is broken – and it’s time you got out the way.

  She had become the story. And right now the Governor of Virginia and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had more important things to do than field questions about whose face belonged to whom in a porn video. Donna had made the right call. If Maggie had still been on the team, and thinking straight, she’d have advised her to do it.

  What’s more, this was surely a chance to get back on track. Hadn’t she wanted to take a break, to study and use the time to collect herself after everything that had happened at the White House? She had resisted Donna’s efforts to pull her back in. Well, now she was free again. She could get back to her life. (Even her ‘so-called life’, to use a phrase Liz had hurled in her direction more than once.)

  Maggie didn’t allow herself to dwell on that thought. There was no way she was going to retreat into playing at being a semi-academic now. There was too much at stake. Underway was a global plot to erase history, to destroy what human beings knew about their own past – and so far, it was enjoying great success. On the TV at that very moment were mute images of the blaze in Ethiopia, turning one of the great archives of Africa into clouds of grey smoke. There were pictures of a crowd watching, looking upward at the sky. As the camera lingered on an old man, Maggie saw that his face was slowly becoming coated in ash.

  The twelve great libraries of the world were vanishing in a matter of days. And once they were gone, the original texts they once held would be lost forever. They had housed records and documents that were stored nowhere else, proof of the events and deeds that comprised the story of humanity’s life on this planet. Just as bones and fossils were our only record of the age of the dinosaurs, so these were our only clues to the infancy of human culture. And within forty-eight hours, they would almost all be gone.