Authors: Michael Marshall
She efficiently connected my phone to the battered laptop on the desk and waited until it had chirped to confirm it was getting juice. “All systems operational. All we can do now . . . is wait.”
She poured me half a glass of wine and a full glass for herself and sat down on the edge of the kinda-sofa.
“So, my friend.”
I felt lumbering and awkward, an untidy older man in a young woman’s just-so room. “So . . . what?”
She looked up, glass in her lap. Her face was open, very pretty, and unlined. “We’ve got a little time. You totally don’t have to, but . . . do you want to share?”
A
n hour later, to my surprise, I’d told her quite a lot. About the e-mail with the joke, about the book from Amazon, about the fact that the police were claiming David Warner was dead when I had the evidence of my own eyes to prove he was not. We were sitting on the floor by then, our backs against the kinda-sofa, and I had been informed that, should I wish, I could call her Cass. In my defense, I’d tried both the house phone and Steph’s cell again, twice. It was now well after eleven, and the world felt like it was teetering in the balance. Midnight is a feasible time to get back: I’d returned home around that time after the evening trying to meet Warner. Midnight can happen if the evening gets away from you just a little. Much later than that, however, and either you’re trying to make a big and serious point, or . . . I couldn’t complete the thought. That
or
led in directions that tangled and became poisonous.
“Okay, well, that’s pretty strange,” Cassandra said, after thinking about what I’d told her. She poured us both another glass of wine. It was not the first refill. “Weirdness-wise, you can tick the box.”
“Yeah.”
“But what I don’t get is why your wife is so mad at you. I mean, a salacious photo book, even if you
had
ordered it . . . not such a big deal, right? I’m not getting the impression she’s notably uptight or a total vanilla wife, so why the spat?”
Red wine on top of beer, I’m not sure what it was . . . but I reached in my pocket and pulled out the thumb drive. “Last night,” I said, “I got home, and she’d been on my laptop looking for pictures I took at a friend’s party. Instead, she found what’s on here.”
I had been intending to describe the images, in very vague terms. Cass grabbed the stick from me, however, and was on her feet and up at the desk, slipping the drive into a port on her laptop, before I’d had time to react.
“Hang on,” I said, struggling to my feet. By the time I got there, however, the first of the images was already on-screen.
“A bad photo of a window, at night,” Cassandra said. “Yeah—I can understand why that would . . . Oooh, oh, I see. Gotcha. La-di-da.”
By the time the fourth picture was up—the first showing Karren White with nothing above the waist—I was standing beside Cass. “I didn’t take these,” I said, about as embarrassed as I had ever been. “But they’re dated to a night when I was kept out all evening.”
“Kept how?”
“Chasing the meeting with Warner, which his assistant now disclaims all knowledge of.”
The next picture came up. “Who’s the pretty lady?”
“Her name’s Karren. She works in my office.”
Then the next picture, frontal, in better focus. I was uncomfortably aware that I was standing close to a young woman while we looked at pictures of another woman, in a state of undress.
“So how did these end up on your machine?”
“I have no idea.”
“And this is why you met up with Kevin?”
“I didn’t tell him about the pictures, only that it seemed like someone had gotten remote access to my machine.”
“What’d he say?”
“That it was possible. Though he liked the idea of physical access better.”
“Is the woman aware of her starring role?”
“No.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
“I thought I should wait until I had some clue about how to explain the pictures being on my laptop,” I said, aware of how lame an excuse this was.
“Hmm,” she said, and then ducked her head closer to the screen. “This interests me.”
“What?”
Her hands flashed around the keyboard for a few seconds, causing small, semitranslucent windows to pop up and disappear almost too quickly to see. “You mind?”
“Mind what?”
Then the first picture was back up on-screen. A couple of finger taps, and it jumped in size—first to fill the entire screen, then twice as large again. Cass used a diagonal movement on the track pad to scroll to the bottom right-hand corner of the image, and leaned back, cocked her head, squinted.
“Yep,” she said. “I
am
as cool as everyone says.”
She closed the window and opened another from the folder, apparently at random. A three-quarter view of Karren was treated in the same way. “Again. See?”
“See what?”
She tapped a key combination and the image popped down a level in resolution. She caused the cursor to circle around the date and time stamp in the corner. “Examine the edges of those numbers.”
I looked more closely. “I don’t get it.”
“They’re not real.”
“Not real?”
“The way date- and time-stamped numbers appear on digital photos is pretty distinctive. These look off. The edges are too sharp, don’t have the halo. Could just be the camera in question, it does vary from brand to brand, but I don’t think so. Let’s check something else.”
Another key combination, and a long thin window popped up next to the image, filled with orderly lines of text. She ran a finger down it, humming to herself.
“Aha.”
“What’s all that?”
“The EXIF data for the image. Let me check another.” She reopened the first image, and the side window filled with similar data. “Bingo. My awesomeness abounds.”
“I don’t understand what you’re showing me.”
“E-X-I-F,” she said, spelling out the letters as if to an illiterate cat. “That’s Exchangeable Image File format to you. A way of storing metadata about a picture, in the file itself. When a digital camera takes an image, it injects pieces of information into the JPEG or TIFF, where it can be accessed by any viewer application. It will typically store the aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and ISO setting—and some will even log geolocation data in there, too.” She placed the slender tip of her finger near the top of the data window. “And of course, basic, it will log the time and date when the picture was taken.”
I looked at the date next to her finger. Then at the numbers in the corner of the image itself.
They were different.
“Hang on,” I said. “The numbers on the picture say it was taken midevening on the twelfth, Tuesday. But the EXIF data says the eleventh. Which was Monday.”
“That would be my point.”
“But wait . . .
wait
a minute,” I said, as it dawned. “On
Monday
night I was out with Stephanie. All evening. From before dark. So if these were taken on Monday, then it
couldn’t
have been me, and she would know that.”
Cassandra tipped her hand like a seesaw. “Don’t get
too
excited. The EXIF data relies on the camera’s settings as much as the old-school time/date stamp would. If someone set the camera to the wrong date or time, the EXIF stamp will be wrong, too.”
“But I set the date and time correctly.”
“I’ll bet. But you can’t prove it. You could have changed it to take the pictures, then changed it back, for some fell purpose of your own. You can’t use those numbers to actually
prove
when the picture was taken.”
“But
something’s
hinky with them—because either way, the two dates should be the same. Right?”
“Yes. Someone faked the date and time onto those images to pin it to a specific day and time. Which—”
She stopped talking abruptly, mouth hanging open. Slapped herself upside the head. “Well, duh.”
“What?”
She appeared pained at her own stupidity. “What’s the word you keep seeing?
Modified?
”
“They modified the dates, I can see that, but—”
“No no
no
. Not only that, my friend. It’s not just one thing being modified, or even a bunch of little things. It’s an actual
mod
.”
“What the fuck is a mod?”
“Rewind. I play games, okay? Computer games, online. This has been established in prior conversation. Recall?”
“Yes.”
She looked perplexed. “You
really
don’t know what a mod is?”
“No.”
“Okay. In gaming terms, a mod is what it sounds like—a modification—but actually it’s more than that. It’s ontological, world changing. It’s a file or patch you deploy in a computer game that alters a player’s circumstances—or the world—in fundamental ways. It’s an old-school idea—been around since people were playing Middle Earth text-based games back in the 1960s.”
“Alters them . . . how?”
“Depends. A weapons mod might mean that a character in a fantasy medieval universe suddenly has access to unlimited arrows, or even a gun. An environmental mod could mean anything from castle walls turning rainbow colored, to there being no trees or horses or gravity. You see?”
“I still have gravity and I do not have a gun.”
“But some things
have
changed, right? There’s people who feel differently about you because of a joke e-mail you never sent. Your wife thinks you ordered a book of arty porn—not just that, but lied about it—and
not to mention
thinks you might have gotten Peeping Tom around a coworker. People see you differently, behave differently toward you, and your world ends up different as a result, in a snowball effect, and you have to play catch-up.”
I was getting there, albeit slowly. “But who the hell would be doing this?”
“That’s the question. Old college buddy? Drinking pal? Some friend who’s close enough to know your life?”
“I don’t really . . . have friends. Not like that.”
“
Really?
You can’t think of anyone?”
I could not. I had colleagues. I had contacts. I had blogs I followed. I came up short after that.
“O-kay,” Cass said. “You might want to get onto that. Friends, well, I hear good things about the concept.”
I was feeling tired, confused, and drunk. “I’ve got to get home. Right away. I’ve got to show this photo thing to Steph, tell her about all this.”
“You do. Going to be a long walk, though.”
“Only twenty minutes to get back to the car.”
“Dude, driving-wise, you are in even worse shape than when you got here.”
She was right, of course.
“You got a number for a cab firm?”
She grinned. “Let me ask my good friend Mr. Google.”
A
nd she did, and got a number, and I called it, and they said they’d send a car.
In the meantime, we had another glass of wine. It was probably a kind of fuzzy jubilance that eventually had us sitting close together on the floor: mine at discovering actual evidence that I was innocent and that someone was absolutely, definitely, and for sure fucking with me; hers at having helped me get to this point.
It gets foggy after that.
I remember a call from the cab firm saying the driver had broken down or been abducted or something, and another would be sent at some point. I recall an additional bottle of cheap wine being opened. I remember trying all available phone numbers for Steph yet again. I remember—for god knows what reason—talking up my plans for clawing up the property ladder; perhaps because I thought Cass would disapprove, and I seemed to have started to care what she thought of me. She appeared to feel that my ambitions did not make me the devil incarnate.
I remember her phone ringing, and her looking at the screen and not taking the call. I asked her if it was the cab firm, and she said no, it was Kevin.
“He, uh, he likes you,” I said. I was drunk enough to think I was sounding avuncular and man-of-the-world. “I think he likes you a lot, in fact.”
“I know. But it’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“Not right now,” she said, and settled back next to me, perhaps a little closer than before.
I remember, but by then it’s getting patchy, flash images fading in and out as if illuminated by a failing strobe light of recall, getting to a point where she was leaning against me, my arm was around her shoulders. I remember her smoking, and I remember looking down as she took a drag on her cigarette, and looking not just at her hand, but at two small, pale shapes just beyond.
“Mr. Moore—are you looking down my shirt?”
“Sorry,” I said.
She looked up at me, and smiled. “S’okay.”
“It’s not, really.”
“You see me moving away?”
“I’m . . . married. And older.”
“True, both. But I’m not, like, an actual infant. I can do up my own laces and everything.”
“I know,” I said (though now I felt very ancient indeed), and tightened my arm around her shoulders, to show that I was taking her seriously.