The first image was of the room and he could see Jasmine’s hands held in front of her. She was waving her hands and flicking at invisible objects. Chris cursed his own stupidity and stopped the playback. He’d forgotten to merge in the output from the headset so he was only seeing what the computer was seeing and wasn’t getting the image that included the computer-generated images overlaid. If only she’d been hooked up when she died, he’d be able to find out what had happened straight away. Chris finished the coding to merge the output from the Isis system as well as the original input so he would be seeing exactly what Jasmine had been seeing. He ran the program once more, continuing from where he had left off.
With the computer generated images, he could see that Jasmine was testing the book reading software. She was probably trying to find bugs in some of the latest work he’d done. Jasmine was a brilliant coder and if there was one thing she loved more than showing off her own work, it was finding problems with his. He sped the playback through half an hour of serious testing. She was good. She’d tried to break his code in every way he could imagine and several ways he would never have thought of. After a while, Jasmine was clearly frustrated in her actions and put the books away. Chris slowed the playback to normal speed. Jasmine stood and walked through to the bathroom. Chris wondered whether he should keep watching.
Why the hell was she wearing the headset in there?
And then he realized she was going to use the mirror so she could work with the facial recognition. Jasmine looked at herself in the mirror and now Chris really felt weird. She looked pretty. She was smiling at herself. He saw a callout bubble popup to the right of the image, it read
Jasmine Allan (mirror image)
.
That’s funny
, he thought to himself,
no Easter Egg
. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s famous cameo appearances, an Easter Egg is a way for a programmer to leave their mark on a piece of software. The fact that the facial recognition software simply recognized Jasmine meant that she hadn’t built one. He was surprised. He heard Jasmine’s voice asking Isis to capture the image for processing to a new file. She spent the next twenty minutes pulling various faces in front of the mirror, partially covering her face and changing the lighting. Chris thought she was collecting data to run some recognition diagnostics. Facial recognition was definitely her thing. He’d wondered how she’d managed to get such incredible results and now he knew: she spent a lot of time collecting data to fine-tune the system. Chris hit the fast forward again and scanned through a whole hour of her working on collecting data. A photo of Michelle faded into view and he could hear his phone ringing. Michelle was calling him from her mobile. He felt guilty when he realized how long he’d been, and he’d said he wouldn’t be long.
‘Pause playback,’ he said. The Jasmine replay paused. ‘Hi honey, I guess I got carried away.’ The powerful computer took the noise from his vocal cords and broke it into tiny parts which were matched to the most likely phrase using a process similar to that used by the human brain. All of this happened in a few hundredths of a second. To Michelle it seemed as though Chris had simply pressed a button to answer the call before speaking.
‘Hi Chris,’ said Michelle over the phone. ‘Don’t worry about how long you’ve been. I’d figured you’d be a while, it’s a long time since you’ve been alone with your true love.’
Chris laughed.
‘I’ve got some good news,’ she said. ‘Dad’s awake.’
‘Wow, that’s great honey. How’s he doing?’
‘You know Dad, he’s asking for burger and fries, but it’s all BS. I think this has scared him big time. The doctor says he looks in good shape and should be moving to a regular ward in a day or so.’
‘That’s good news. Tell him I said hi.’
‘So how’s it going with you?’ asked Michelle.
‘Fine. I’m looking at the world through the eyes of a dead girl.’
Michelle was used to Chris coming out with some weird things, but it took her a while to make sense of this one. ‘Ahhh. Ok,’ she said. ‘Is it working?’
‘Well technically, yes of course it’s working—have a little faith—but I don’t know if I’m going to find anything. It’s taking a long time.’
‘Listen Chris, Mum’s going to be here soon. You do what you need to do, I’ll call you later.’
Chris glanced at the
End Call
button by the side of Michelle’s image and after a second, the call ended.
‘Resume playback.’
Chris watched six hours of work. It was kind of fun watching someone else solve problems, in a weird way, he was learning by virtually watching over her shoulder, or in this case through her eyes. She’d made some amazing changes to the facial recognition code, practically re-written the core in a few hours. This girl really had something. He was going to miss her. Then he thought he saw something.
‘Pause playback,’ he said. Isis paused the playback and he rewound a couple of minutes. ‘Playback at half speed,’ he said. He needed the slower pace to follow what she was doing. She typed so fast, it was hard to follow what was going on.
There.
Chris laughed to himself.
I knew it
, he thought. She was coding her Easter Egg. He stepped slowly through the code as she wrote it. He was genuinely learning from a master. She’d used the hours-worth of image recognition to create a three-dimensional model of herself which she was now animating. She was replacing the mirror image of herself from her reflection with a real-time computer generated analog. Clever. She could now look at her reflection and, as if through some enchantment, see a subtly different reflection. She programmed the reflection to playback a twisted version of De Niro’s famous monologue from
Taxi Driver
.
‘You lookin’ at me?’ she said. ‘You lookin’ at me? You lookin’ at
me
? Then who the hell else you lookin’ at? You lookin’ at me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re looking at?’
It took Chris a minute to stop laughing but when he eventually did, and had wiped the tears of laughter from his face, he felt sorrow for his loss. What a girl. He watched her take the Easter Egg to the next step. Instead of being triggered by a mirror image, she built some code in to be triggered by her regular image. The human-analog projection was scary. It meant that if he was looking at her through Isis he couldn’t be sure if he was seeing her or a computer-generated image overlaid where she should be. She could really have screwed with him with this little trick. From what he could tell she’d been making it so that whenever someone looked at her, they saw little pink floating love-hearts. Chris wondered whether this was meant for him. Maybe she had the hots for him after all. She’d had her fun and removed the headset. He switched to watching just the input on her computer screen.
What he saw on the screen made him realize that he hadn’t really known Jasmine at all.
Coffee and a pile of papers were the only company Ben Naylor had for the evening. There was something about the Jasmine Allan case that really bugged him. The evidence came so easily it appeared to have been handed to him, and now he realized that probably was the case. He took a swallow from his coffee cup and grimaced; it was cold. He pushed the papers to one side and walked over to the coffee pot. He thought about the case as he tipped in some grounds and filled the water. Jasmine was a pretty girl and by all accounts was bright enough. She had no enemies as far as he had discovered but she also had few friends. In cases such as this he would start with close friends and relatives but there were none, at least none that were in the area at the time she died. A random killing was unlikely. He would have expected to have found some interference with the body or evidence of theft. Also the weapon used, although not recovered, was unusual. A gun that fires a .50 caliber round is too expensive and too wieldy for most criminals. That coupled with a Teflon coating. The coffee gurgled and hissed into the pot and Ben rinsed his stained mug.
He stared at the coffee, not really seeing it, but instead looking right through it as he felt an idea slowly come into focus. Chris’s cell-mate. That was it. The man who had tried to kill him, what if it had been an attempted hit? He could be a lead. He’d need to move fast before the loose end got tidied away.
Ben left the coffee and the papers and grabbed his briefcase and tossed in a notepad and mini tape recorder. He phoned the prison using his mobile as he dashed from the office. It took a while to explain what he wanted and he was in his car before he had even been put through to someone senior enough to authorize his unusual interview request. At this time of night a skeleton staff was on and the last thing the officer in charge wanted was some idiot cop coming and making trouble. Ben had suggested that the life of the prisoner was in danger and it was possible he was the only lead in the case of a murdered young girl. He was lucky that the prison officer had a daughter of his own. Ben made sure the officer realized that if he refused access tonight and the prisoner was found dead tomorrow, it would be his ass on the line. The officer agreed to have the man, John Amosa, woken and sitting in an interview room for when Ben arrived; but he couldn’t guarantee he’d be in a talking mood. Ben thanked the officer and tossed his phone on the passenger seat. The traffic was light, he was making good time. Ben was feeling good and he saw a sign for a drive-thru burger restaurant ahead. He couldn’t remember when he last ate. He pulled in and bought two quarter pounder meals. Maybe he could win this guy over with a cold sandwich. He ate his burger trying not to drop sauce on his shirt. He finished his fries as he flashed his badge at the gate. They were expecting him and buzzed him through.
Ben dropped his gun at the desk and was met by the officer he’d spoken to on the phone. He recognized the name on the badge that was attached to a tired-looking uniform; his gut spilt over the top of his trouser belt. Officer McKay looked pissed at the interruption to his quiet night and eyed the takeout bag as he nodded to Ben.
‘I hope that’s for me?’ he said.
‘Sorry pal,’ said Ben. ‘This is all I’ve got to try and gain favor with big-boy in there.’
‘That’s all you’ve got? Shit.’ Officer McKay chuckled, he took the bag from Ben and poked at the contents. Satisfied, he passed the bag back and licked sauce from his fingers. ‘Listen Ben, I need to talk to you about this guy. He’s a real piece of work.’
‘I’m OK with that. I’ve met some tough guys in my time, I think I can handle him.’
‘It’s not that. Sure he’s built like a brick shithouse but there’s something about this guy that creeps me out. I don’t know if he’s fried his brain on ’roids but he don’t seem all there. You know what I mean?’
‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ said Ben. He’d make up his own mind.
‘All I’m saying is this is one evil bastard. He’ll rip your head off just as soon as look at you. We’ll be watching on camera and he’ll be cuffed, but don’t go winding him up OK?’
Ben smiled as he walked through the door to the interview room but he was starting to wish he’d brought both meals instead of just one. He was expecting a big man, but still he was shocked to see the mountain of muscle sitting behind the table.
‘Hey,’ Ben said with a smile as he held up a brown takeout bag, ‘I brought you supper.’
Ben had met more weirdoes than he chose to remember, but now he understood what McKay had meant when he’d said evil. The man’s eyes were dark, almost black, and vacant, not of thought, but of emotion. His face showed very little expression, certainly no hint of a smile. When he spoke his voice was deep and slow.
‘Who the
fuck
are you?’ he said.
Ben dropped the bag on the table and pulled out a chair. ‘My name’s Detective Ben Naylor,’ he said. ‘I’m with the forty-first precinct. I’ve been investigating a murder that took place a little over a week ago, and I’m the man responsible for putting Chris Sanders in here.’
Ben watched for a reaction to Chris’s name, but there was none. The man kept staring as though Ben had not answered his first question to his satisfaction.
‘Do you know Chris Sanders?’ Ben asked.
Amosa shrugged.
‘He was the prisoner that shared your cell yesterday.’
Amosa raised his right hand to his face and stroked the side of his nose, subconsciously feeling the bruising and tenderness as he thought about his encounter with his cell mate the previous evening. The voice came low again. ‘Oh that guy,’ he said. ‘Where is he now?’
‘He got out. Turns out he didn’t do it—who’d have figured? He says you two didn’t get along.’
The man shrugged again. He didn’t seem to care about Chris.
‘So why are you in here?’ Ben asked.
Another shrug was his only reply. Ben had heard the story from McKay. Amosa had been working out at a gym and had picked a fight with a random stranger, just some poor schmuck working out for the last time. Witnesses had said that he’d finished a set of reps, then walked up to a man and grabbed his hair and repeatedly beat his head against the edge of a bench-press machine. It took four men to drag him off. He’d offered no reason for his actions during any interviews and had entered a guilty plea at his trial.