Chapter 98
Nikki
Hey, what’s happened to the Coco’s Cold Case YouTube channel? There’s just a message saying, ‘this account has been terminated’. I loved her content
Nikki has her phone on the kitchen counter, on speaker mode so her hands are free to check her laptop. Her head is throbbing and she feels sick, but she doesn’t know if that’s down to the booze she drank yesterday, or what she saw on YouTube last night.
She’s also struggling not to throw her phone across the room because Tom – one of her oldest friends, and more relevantly, the only person she knows who works in cyber security – is not freaking out as much as she is.
Last night, drunk, she managed to label what she saw as fucking weird and go to bed.
But when she woke up at dawn – hungover but sober – she realized that a serious crime had taken place.
So she called Tom every ten minutes until eventually he picked up.
‘Yeah, it’s fucked up,’ he says now. ‘But it happens a lot. Identity theft.’
‘But I don’t get it!’ Nikki cries out, sounding more like a dramatic teenager than she intended.
‘It’s me, all of me, but from when I was a kid, and in clothes I never wore.
Modern stuff that teenagers wear now, not twelve, thirteen years ago when I was that age.
I mean, how did this Coco even get hold of my image? ’
‘Were your parents into Facebook when you were growing up?’
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘We used to do big road trips to Florida in summer break. Mom would take a gazillion photos of us and then do a kind of travel log on Facebook.’
‘That’s probably it then. Back in the day, a lot of people didn’t get the importance of keeping their page private, which meant photos became fair game for everyone on the internet.
And now, with AI, you can scrape an existing photo off a random page – or a bundle of photos to make it more accurate – and make infinite new ones in the same image. ’
‘God, I guess I knew that, but why would she choose me?’
‘I don’t know. I guess you’re kinda photogenic.’
A flash of a memory from junior prom, Tom’s hand on her back as they danced like wooden soldiers to Justin Bieber’s ‘Love Yourself’. But Nikki swallows down the awkwardness. She’s got something way more disturbing to deal with right now.
‘And, sorry to freak you out even more,’ Tom goes on, ‘but I doubt it is a “she”.’
Nikki straightens her spine. ‘What?’
‘Well, it’s my professional opinion that this Coco chick is actually a dude. Probably a middle-aged white guy who lives alone and can’t form genuine social bonds, if you believe the profilers.’
Nikki drops her forehead into her palms, feels tears burn her eyes.
‘Tom, can you do me a favor and stop treating this like another day at the office? This is my face staring back at me, attached to a website I knew nothing about until it was linked to the case of a missing child. And I still don’t really have a clue how I’m involved in all of this. ’
‘Shit, sorry,’ Tom says, instantly contrite.
‘Because yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
As soon as AI-image-generation models became open-source a few years ago, this problem of fake images exploded, so the sad fact is, this kind of thing has become normal for me.
But you’re right, each time it happens is still horrific. ’
Nikki takes a long, slow breath. ‘So you’re saying that Coco is most likely some kind of online predator?’
‘I’m sorry, but yeah, that would be my guess. That Coco is a whole fake persona using your image to befriend kids.’
Nikki shudders, breathes. ‘This channel though, it’s not your average teen content,’ she says, still clinging to the hope that Tom’s somehow wrong.
‘She – or he – says they’re investigating the murder of a teenage girl.
’ Nikki searches through her hungover brain for the name.
‘Sophie Lyle,’ she spurts out, suddenly remembering.
‘And that’s pretty niche, isn’t it? So why would they do that? ’
The line goes quiet for a while, and Nikki finds herself suddenly desperate for Tom’s blasé office voice.
‘I don’t know,’ he finally says. ‘Maybe it’s a fetish thing.
Or maybe he thinks vulnerable teenage girls are more into true crime than makeup or whatever these days. But you said a girl’s gone missing …’
‘You think he could be the one who killed Sophie Lyle?’ Nikki asks, her voice breaking.
‘No. I mean, how would I know?’ Tom says quickly. ‘I guess it just feels like a creepy coincidence.’
‘Fuck,’ Nikki spits out. ‘What is it with these kids who make their besties on Snapchat?’
‘Well, if the guy’s tech-savvy, and can afford hardware with the fastest processing speeds, he’ll be able to do a lot more than send snaps.’
‘Like what?’
‘Voice notes, video messages. Even live video calls.’
‘Live video calls as me? How can that be possible?’
‘AI makes the gap between virtual and reality microscopically narrow. Too narrow for the naked eye basically. You know, a finance worker in Hong Kong was persuaded to transfer twenty-five million dollars of company money to a fraudster presenting as his CFO in a video conference. It’s crazy.’
Nikki closes her eyes. ‘So what do I do?’ she whispers.
‘Report it to the Cyber tip line. And if there’s a missing child involved, call the police.’