PIONEERING WORK
Yasira has put together a PowerPoint presentation. Something she hasn’t had to do since, well, since she helped Zara with a school presentation. It actually hasn’t been that long.
It’s not just the Magnificent Seven who are gathered in the meeting room. Yasira has also invited the boss to join them. Everyone stares at the big screen.
“You recognize these pictures, don’t you?” Yasira asks. She clicks through three pictures and names what’s in them. “The Pope in a white down coat. Trump being arrested by the FBI. Putin kneeling before Xi Jinping. What do these photos have in common?”
Yasira looks around. How ridiculous. She just asked a question to which she knows the answer. As if she was really giving a school lecture and wanted her classmates to get involved. Of course, no one is willing to answer.
“Exactly. They’re all fake.” Yasira clicks on. The website of Mila, the virtual influencer that Zara follows, opens up. “But you might not have seen anything like this before. At least it was new to me.”
The website automatically plays videos. You can see Mila looking lasciviously at a photo shoot, playing a tag game and having a chat with friends. You can see her on a soccer field, on a stage, in an art gallery.
Yasira shakes her head. She doesn’t want to believe what she’s about to say. It looks so real.
“This girl here doesn’t exist. And I can’t stress this enough. I don’t mean that an actress is pretending to be this so-called Mila. This isn’t even film footage in the traditional sense. These are all computer-generated images.”
Mila doesn’t miss her mark. Most of her team, like Yasira, don’t seem to have known how advanced the technology is.
She clicks further. The Lena video is now playing. Everyone here had to watch it so many times that it’s lost most of its horror. It’s just Exhibit A now.
“Who says we’re not dealing with a fake in this video as well?”
Chairs are shuffled. Heads are scratched.
“I understand your doubts,” Yasira continues. “I’m skeptical too. I’m not saying the video is definitely fake. I’m just saying it could be fake. All the hate, the street battles, the polarization. They wouldn’t be a side effect of the video, but exactly what was intended with its release.”
She gives her colleagues a moment to familiarize themselves with this outrageous suspicion. The boss also seems to need a moment to wrap his brain around this theory. You can read his thought processes one-to-one in his facial expressions.
Finally, Yasira continues: “The idea that we can no longer trust our own eyes is frightening. But when you think about it longer, it’s logical that technology like this would eventually be used for crimes of this nature.
Damned bad luck that we may have caught that case.
Either way, we will have to do pioneering work in investigating this suspicion.
There’s no procedure we can follow yet.”
“You’re serious about this?” asks the boss, perplexed.
Yasira nods.
Katja Grebe raises her hand. Now Yasira really feels like she’s at school.
“Yes?” she asks, looking at Katja.
“But what about Lena?”
“Good question. Lena is real. Or she was real. Don’t worry. I’m not questioning that. So how does a real girl end up in a fake video?”
No one answers.
“There are several possibilities here: Firstly, she could be in cahoots with the people who made the video. Then she would have volunteered to model and hidden herself away somewhere afterwards.”
“Unlikely,” grumbles Michael.
“Exactly. In all our research on Lena, we haven’t found a single indication that she was interested in sparking any kind of political firestorm—or even had contact with people who were.”
Yasira pauses.
“And secondly?” asks Jenny.
“Secondly,” Yasira continues, “Lena could have been kidnapped by the producers of the video. Therefore, her abduction would have been part of the video production. That would have two advantages for the makers. Not only would Lena have been used as a model, but her disappearance is what put the video beyond doubt in the first place. It would have been an extremely perfidious but clever move. I think that’s possible, because whoever is unscrupulous enough to make a video like this would certainly have no problem kidnapping a girl. ”
“But?” asks Michael. He has known her for quite a long time. He knows there’s a “but” coming.
“But,” says Yasira. “There’s a third option.”
She continues with the PowerPoint presentation and clicks through numerous photos and videos of Lena.
Most of them taken with the selfie camera.
Some with a self-timer. Lena in front of the mirror, Lena at the Baltic Sea, Lena in front of a lasagna, Lena in a café with dark-haired Emily.
Lena on Halloween, Lena on her birthday, Lena on Christmas.
Lena with a smoochy mouth, Lena as a seductive temptress.
Lena with her father, with her brother, and lots of photos and videos of Lena with her cat.
“And so on,” Yasira finally says. “As you can see, there’s more than enough material to get Lena into this video without her voluntary or involuntary participation.
So what if we’re dealing with two separate crimes?
It could be that Lena’s disappearance isn’t connected to the video after all.
According to Schoffler, she had planned to hitchhike to him.
Maybe she got into the wrong car this time.
Perhaps the driver of that car is responsible for her disappearance, but has nothing to do with the video.
Then Lena’s disappearance would only be related to the video because it had already made headlines.
And that could have given the creators of the video the diabolical idea of using the missing girl from the news as a model for their evil deed.
And they simply used the image material that was publicly available. ”
“Fuck!” says Timo.
“But in your theory, isn’t it also possible that Lena wasn’t kidnapped at all, but just ran away?” asks Jenny.
“That would be nice, of course,” replies Yasira, “and it’s quite possible, but I don’t think that’s what happened.
I mean, even if Lena had run away, she must have realized by now that she had become the leading actress in the movie of the year and would surely have at least contacted her father.
I didn’t get the impression that her relationship with him was so bad that she would wish him the hellish torment he’s currently going through. ”
The room falls silent for a while.
“We don’t yet know whether there’s any truth to Yasira’s suspicions,” says Michael. He is the oldest member of the team. And the most skeptical. He’s just used to trusting his eyes.
“Yes,” says Yasira. “But it would explain why we haven’t found any traces of Lena’s rapists!”
“Another explanation would be that we were too stupid to find any,” grumbles Michael.
“Granted,” says Yasira, “it also sounds like a good theory to cover up our failure.”
She looks around. Neither her team nor the boss are convinced yet. Time to present her trump card.