The two agents listened, mostly in silence, with occasional questions when Billy skipped past details. He got to the part where he was installed in the boat, knowing the world believed him to be dead.
“Dad was bringing me food, and fuel for the generator, until you bugged his truck.”
“You knew about that..? How the…?”
“I have a sweeping device. I told Dad to use it every day. So after that he had to take the fuel to the caves at Moors point, and I kayaked down to get it. It was nice to get the exercise actually.” Billy turned to Amber.
“It’s my kayak, not the one I borrowed before.”
The agents exchanged confused glances, which grew deeper when Amber replied.
“What about the…” Amber glanced at the agents, as if unable to work out if there was anything she shouldn’t be saying, but she gave up. “You had cameras set up in the road, why didn’t you see these guys coming?”
“I had to take the cams. I needed the processing power for the video.”
West took the opportunity to bring the conversation back to the video. “What is the video? Where is it filmed? And how did you get it?”
Everyone turned back to Billy again.
“I didn’t get it. I made it.”
“What do you mean, you made it?”
“I made it. Look.” Billy turned back to the computer, pulling up a box where he was able to type. He thought for a moment, then turned to Agent Black.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“You what?”
“What’s your name? And what’s your… what’s your favorite food?”
“Huh?”
“Just tell him Don,” West said, impatient to see what Billy was doing. Black replied this time, somewhat chastened.
“Agent Don Black. I like – Jesus I don’t know. I like ice-cream.”
At once Billy’s fingers moved rapidly on the keyboard, and a second later the box was gone, replaced by a front-facing image of the same younger man, the one Billy had called James Richards. Billy hesitated before hitting play though.
“Go on,” West told him.
The voice came from the computer’s speakers, the young man’s lips in perfect time to it. It looked completely real.
“My name is agent Don Black. I like ice-cream. Strawberry flavor is my favorite.”
“I made that bit up,” Billy added into the silence that followed.
“What the hell is that?” Black was the first to respond. “How’d you do that?”
“I used a type of neural network called an autoencoder. It reduces an image into a lower-dimensional latent space, and then reconstructs that image from the latent representation. But the latent representation contains key features about things like facial features and body posture taken from other sources. That’s then superimposed on the underlying facial and body features of the original video, represented in the latent space.”
No one spoke for a long while after Billy finished his explanation. Then Black found his voice.
“You wanna run that by me one more time? In English maybe?”
Billy took a breath. “Most people call it deep faking. I’ve built a computer model of what James Richards looks like, or would look like if he were sitting in that room. And now I can feed in any words I like, and make it look like he’s actually saying them.”
Another silence, while the other made sense of this. Black was the first to respond.
“And Tom Hanks? What’s he doing there?”
“Well I haven’t quite finished. We had to bug his house – James’ house, not Tom’s – and hack his social media and stuff, to get images and audio to feed into the model. But I had to practice first, so I used Tom Hanks. There’s tons of footage of him online, in films and interviews and stuff.”
Black stared, still not understanding. West was the next to speak.
“I’ve heard of deep fakes.” Her voice was slow and thoughtful. “But what you’re saying is this James Richards, he didn’t confess after all, you’ve just made a fake video of him confessing. To convince us you were innocent?”
“Yes. Only I didn’t do it to convince you. I wouldn’t have explained it all if I had.”
“So why did you do it?”
“It’s the only way I can get out of this. But I’m also going to need your help.” Billy stared at West, and for a long time she was silent. Only Agent Black still wasn’t getting it.
“So this kid, James, he didn’t confess?” Black said. “He didn’t do it?”
Patiently Billy turned to him. “He did do it, but he set up fake evidence to make it look like I did it. And he’ll never confess to it. So you have a choice. You can either put me in jail for something I didn’t do. Or you can catch him.”
Chapter Sixty-One
“I’ll have the veal,” Oscar said, speaking sharply to the waitress but not bothering to look at her. He held out the menu for her to remove, and looked around at his friends. Jennifer was sitting next to Lily, who was next to James. Eric was there, but he was fine – the grit in the oyster that produced the pearl. With a dash of irritation he noticed the serving girl was still there.
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry sir, I said the kitchen has run out of veal.”
“Run out of veal? What is this..?” He couldn’t think of a suitably caustic analogy, so instead he snatched the menu back and looked over the options again.
“Then gimme the fillet steak. I assume you’ve got some of that?”
“Yes sir. How would you like it?”
“How about properly cooked?” Oscar offered her a sneer, then handed her the menu a second time and leaned forward, cutting her off from the exchange. He poured himself some more wine, muttering under his breath. Jennifer watched him coolly the entire time, and he knew she liked it, delighted in it. And he liked that.
“Should be fresh snow by the weekend.” It was James speaking, one of his arms draped casually around the shoulder of Lily. “Anyone up for the slopes?”
“I’m in,” Jennifer
