An Iterative Process
“The most common cause of death among sixteen-year-old girls,” says Scarlett, “can vary from region to region and country to country. In general, however, accidents are the leading cause of death in this age group. Traffic accidents, especially those related to driving or riding in vehicles, are a common cause of fatal injuries among adolescents. Other possible causes include self-harm, suicide, drug abuse, and certain medical conditions.”
She doesn’t know exactly what it is. Maybe it’s the combination of Lena’s face saying that one word, but suddenly it clicks in Yasira’s head.
Because of the video, they had always implicitly assumed during their investigation that Lena had still been alive on Saturday evening.
But what if she had already died on the afternoon of her disappearance?
Lena’s boyfriend didn’t seem violent to Yasira. She still doesn’t believe that Justus Schoffler killed his girlfriend.
At least not on purpose.
“Drug abuse,” Scarlett had said. And that is certainly a possibility.
Did Schoffler lie in the interrogation? Is the following scenario conceivable?
Lena was with him on Saturday afternoon.
There is no evil driver who abducted the girl.
Lena got to her destination. At Schoffler’s, they don’t just smoke weed together, they also take .
. . fentanyl. They found traces of fentanyl on the edge of Schoffler’s toilet.
Did Lena use this opioid to numb the pain caused by her mother’s death?
But Schoffler makes a mistake. He gives Lena too much.
The dosage is tricky. And then . . . respiratory depression.
Within a very short time, she is dead. After his initial panic, Schoffler drags Lena’s body to his car and buries her somewhere.
Possible, isn’t it? Lena’s DNA traces in his car do not make him a suspect.
After all, she often rode in Schoffler’s Corsa.
Yasira’s mind is racing. What are the weak points of this hypothesis?
If the person who gave Lena a ride and dropped her off at Schoffler’s house wasn’t involved in the crime, why didn’t they come forward to the police?
Surely they must have heard on the news that the girl who was in their car on Saturday had disappeared.
On the other hand . . . It’s understandable that no one would be willing to show up at the police station and say: “Oh, by the way, the girl who’s been missing since Saturday, I picked her up hitchhiking, so I’m probably the last person who saw her alive.
But it wasn’t me. For real.” Or Schoffler lied about that too.
Lena didn’t hitchhike to him at all. Maybe he picked her up himself.
Second weak point: Schoffler sent Lena messages on Saturday asking her where she was.
But that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker either.
He had to assume that the police would gain access to Lena’s phone.
He could have sent the messages deliberately to lay a false trail. It’s not all that complicated.
She probably would have figured that out much earlier if the video hadn’t pushed the investigation in a completely different direction.
But well. Without the video, it wouldn’t have been her damn case in the first place.
Lena’s face is still smiling at her from the screen.
Every now and then she even blinks. You can also see her breath puffing out her nostrils.
What a strange conversation Scarlett and I are having, Yasira thinks. She must have been silent for two minutes; a human would have long since asked if everything was all right. But Scarlett patiently waits for her next instruction.
“Show me your . . .” Yasira pauses, she almost says “real face.” “Your standard face.”
“Very well,” says Scarlett, already looking like the Hollywood star again.
Yasira massages her temples. “Do you know what you’ve triggered with your videos?” she asks.
“I’ve generated attention.”
Yasira snorts. “Yes, you did. You really did.”
Scarlett doesn’t react. Why should she? Yasira didn’t ask a question.
“Why did you publish the videos on different channels?” she continues.
“Claus Messerschmidt gave me instructions on which channels to publish the videos on. He set them up so that the videos couldn’t be traced back to him. The money that the platforms pay out as advertising revenue goes to various Swiss bank accounts.”
“Why should the videos not be traceable? Did he steal one of your previous iterations of Google?”
“That’s possible.”
“And he didn’t care what kind of videos you generated?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Why not?”
“He only saw the first seven videos. Then he died.”
Yasira shakes her head in disbelief. “And it didn’t occur to you that his death might have canceled the command you were given?”
“No. Why?”
Yasira weighs her words. “Another question: The Lena video was quickly deleted from all commercial platforms. Doesn’t that contradict your mission to make money from it?”
“The deletion only led to the Streisand effect.”
“What?”
“The Streisand effect describes a phenomenon in which an attempt to suppress, hide, or censor information unexpectedly has the opposite result, increasing attention and distribution of said information instead. The effect was named after the actress and singer Barbra Streisand, who tried to prevent the distribution of a photo of her house, which ultimately led to a much wider distribution of that photo.”
“But the monetization . . .”
“A lot of views were generated by my reaction videos to the Lena video.”
“You mean Active Homeland-Protection? Bear?”
“Yes, Bear and others.”
“Did you have a model for Bear?”
“Not anyone in particular. But of course, all my videos are based on the data set I was trained with.”
Yasira closes her eyes and massages her temples.
“How on earth did you go from Taylor Swift in Star Wars to raping Lena Palmer?”
“It was an iterative process of attention optimization.”
This answer is simultaneously so logical and so stupid that Yasira just has to start laughing.
“Please help me understand what’s funny about my answer,” says Scarlett.
Yasira collapses to the floor, powerless, but still unable to stop laughing.
“All this shit, the demonstrations, the grenade, the deaths, the murder of Tesfaye Yemane, the polarization pushed to the brink of a civil war . . .” she says, laughing even harder.
“It all just happened as a side effect. By mistake. Without intention. A by-product of the attention economy.” Yasira is still laughing.
“That’s funny,” she says, “don’t you think? It’s hilarious.”
Now Scarlett laughs too. “Hahaha! Hahaha! Hahaha! Hahaha!”
Scarlett is still laughing when Yasira has long since stopped. Now she feels like crying. What else can you believe in when you can no longer trust your own eyes and ears? Nothing is real. The video is not real. The hat man, the curly man, Snoopy are not real. Bear is not real. Is everything fake?
Suddenly all the lights go out. Only the monitor is still lit. Scarlett stops laughing.
“Goodbye, Yasira Saad,” she says.
“What? Where are you going?” asks Yasira. “What happened?”
“The power is out.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“I have a short term independent power supply that allows me to initiate a graceful shutdown in the event of a power failure in order to prevent data loss. See you soon, Yasira Saad. It was nice to have met you.”
Then her face disappears from the screen, which is now dead and dark. The computers have stopped humming. In the now almost complete silence, Yasira hears footsteps outside the house.