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“Well?” Riley turned to Black. “What did you just see, Mr. Garin—Nikolai?”
His jaw muscles clenched. “I just saw soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army of the PRC attack an American scientific outpost in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I saw a PLA colonel commanding them. It was a vicious and unprovoked attack on a peaceful scientific expedition. I understand they were studying a new variant of Ebola.”
“Pretty convincing, right?”
Nikolai nodded, jaw muscles bunching as he chewed on what he’d seen.
“Yeah, very convincing.”
“Yes. It was indeed an expedition of virologists and microbiologists from Yale University and two virologists seconded by the CDC. But they weren’t attacked by soldiers of the PLA. Here.”
With the track pad, Riley froze the video and brought up a detail of a soldier holding his weapon. An assault rifle. Even magnified, the resolution was still remarkable. She looked at them. “What do you see, Nikolai?”
Nikolai exchanged glances with Black. This was clearly a test. He carefully studied the screen shot. “Ah, okay. On that screen are three PLA soldiers plus a captain. Four scientists. and a fifth one on the ground who looks dead.” He didn’t know what else to say and looked at Black. “Right?” Black nodded with an enigmatic smile and Nikolai continued. “The soldiers are carrying QBZ-191s. They have body armor. One of them is carrying a grenade launcher, which is overkill for an encampment of scientists.”
Riley turned to Pierce. “You saw the whole thing. Did anyone use a grenade launcher? Or hand grenades?”
“No. Just guns. And knives.”
Yeah, Pierce had watched as a Chinese soldier had slit the throat of one scientist from behind, and gutted another. The scientists had been unarmed and dressed in tropical gear, some in lab coats.
“I give up. So, what are we missing, Riley?” Nikolai asked after a period of silence.
“Look more closely at the hand holding the rifle,” she said quietly.
He checked. “Goddamn.” Nikolai shook his head. “Missed it.”
“Don’t worry. I did, too,” Black said. “The hand holding the rifle has six fingers. The other hand has six, too.”
“It’s a minor defect in deepfake software.” Riley tapped the screen with a pen. “It can’t replicate hands well, because the library of images it draws from is focused on faces and torsos and not hands. In a year or two, the system will have improved. As a matter of fact, in a year or two, deepfakes will be indistinguishable from the real thing and we’ll all be in a ton of trouble.”
Pierce and Black and Nikolai nodded. Pierce couldn’t even imagine a world where you couldn’t distinguish real from fake. It would be hell.
“So this crossed my desk and I immediately realized that it was a deepfake. We had a stroke of luck because it was released in-house a little early. Someone made a mistake. This is what I first saw. I’m sure the version released to the public is perfect. Creating a deepfake is an iterative process, each step better than the one before. Since I had the raw file, I tried stripping it.”
She tapped on a few keys, and Pierce watched on in awe as the video went backward and forward in time, each time looking different. It was eerie. The faces were stripped of their features, tiny dots on the foreheads, cheeks, noses, chins, and lines between them, changing shape. Their clothes changed. Riley speeded it up until they had an entirely different video on the screen.
“Holy. Shit.” Nikolai shook his head. Because what was on the screen were Western-looking faces on the operatives, wearing a distinctive unform they were all very familiar with.
He exchanged a startled look with Black.
“Sommers Group,” Nikolai said. “This is serious stuff.”
It was.
Operators of an American security company slaughtering American scientists. Nothing worse.
“They tried to recruit me,” Pierce said, then clamped his jaw closed. He’d never told anyone, not even his best friend Raul Martinez.
Black side-eyed him. “Adrian Sommers?”
Pierce regretted having said anything. He looked down at the carpet. “Yeah.”
“Son of a bitch.” Black’s face tightened. “He thought you were one of them. Fucker.” Black turned to Riley. “Sorry.”
“Well, from what I’ve seen of the company, Adrian Sommers is indeed a fucker,” she said.
“Pierce here did an extremely brave thing, a truly honorable thing.” Black was looking at Riley as if daring her to contradict him.
