Deepfake

Sunday's story about the troubles of a solitary man

Lately I have been imagining a particular type of solitary man who, simply by virtue of his solitude, arouses suspicion. But what seems like shadiness is simply a preference for seclusion and an innate distrust of human company. He has been poorly made for an age like ours, although he also benefits from a number of modern consolations—he lives in the comfort of central heating and electric light, surrounded by books, DVDs, CDs and old vinyl records. He is a great lover of these objects and he categorizes, recategorizes and rearranges them on the shelves every year, preferring the company of these objects over the company of the people beyond his walls.

For years, nothing particularly eventful happens to this man. He has solved the problem of money without any unpleasant effort. He’s under contract to an agency in the West, for whom he does technical writing, mainly for software companies. (He’s got a good working knowledge of computers but doesn’t much care for coding, and so writing about them seems like a decent compromise.) 

Sadly, he has not solved the problem of love. All his relationships go either one of two ways. In the great majority of instances he finds himself the servant of a rather abusive woman who mistakes his slack body and failing eyesight for low confidence and therefore orders him around and belittles him. In the rarer of instances, he has a fleeting encounter with someone more humane who nevertheless concludes, quite quickly, that he is just not manly enough for her. He’s had that word manly brandished several times at the conclusive stage of two relationships. So it is that when he turns forty, he decides to give up on relationships entirely. There has been more than enough pain involved. His solitude only deepens after the death of his parents—his mother first, then his father. His sister long ago moved away to Dubai and he never hears from her. 

About two years ago, our hero discovered a mystery involving the accounting records of the local school board. At this time he was on a contract to write the manual for the school board’s new accounting software. As the software was being implemented, he started poking around in the more obscure regions of the school board’s intranet, to which he had been given temporary access, and he saw two numbers that should have been identical but were so wildly out of alignment that he knew intuitively something must be wrong. Digging deeper, he realized that the amount of money being spent on the bulk purchasing of school supplies did not match up with the amount that the district schools reported having spent at the end of the fiscal year. The more he excavated into the hidden layers of this mystery, the more inexplicable it was, and so he decided to tell his supervisor about it. The supervisor laughed and told him that such matters were not his problem. The contract with the school board was almost over. Just keep your eye on the ball, the supervisor said.

But a mystery—a mystery that hinted at some kind of malfeasance—didn’t sit well with our hero. He could not prevent himself from poking around further in the school board accounts. When his father had still been alive, he had been on the editorial board of a local magazine that published investigative journalism. The editor of that magazine was our hero’s last sympathetic contact with the outside world. One night, our hero stayed up late and typed ten pages of notes about the mystery of the school board’s accounting software. He took screenshots of the accounts and the next day, after re-reading everything, he sent the notes to the editor. A week passed. He heard nothing. And then, finally, the editor wrote back.

This is a very serious matter, wrote the editor. Perhaps there is an explanation for all this, or perhaps there isn't, and so it’s incumbent on us to dig. The editor worked with our hero, making the calls necessary to various board and ministry officials as well as representatives of the school supplies company. The investigation left it in no doubt: they had discovered a kickback scheme. Various trustees had arranged among themselves to place a multi-million-dollar order at the beginning of each school year, disburse less than half the money to the schools, and to share the rest among themselves and several employees of the private company. The article was published in August, just before the start of the school year. It caused a major scandal.

Our hero’s life changed. He signed a contract with the magazine to write another investigative piece, and then another, and each piece was published as a cover story, and he was invited to appear on a local talk show to speak about public education, an area in which he was acquiring a small expertise. These public appearances were so wildly implausible that when he was first walking toward the downtown studio he experienced a strange absence of sensation, as if his heels had become unstuck from the ground, and he could no longer feel the connection of his head to his body or of his hands at the end of his arms. If I have no body, he asked himself, how will I speak? Yet each time he sat down in the comfortable chair opposite the talk-show host and he was asked to say what he knew about the latest controversy in public education, he was able to recite without hesitation everything that he knew, almost as if his mouth had turned into a madly chattering dot matrix printer, the kind he remembered playing with as a kid. 

Due to the popularity of these public appearances, the editor encouraged him to run as a school board trustee, to help keep the system honest. Our hero was initially very reluctant to do so, but then he thought about all the implausible things that had already happened in just the space of two years, and he decided that his customary caution and reclusiveness was a habit to be discarded like an old overcoat. Using his small renown from the journalism work, he obtained the requisite number of signatures to have his name added to the ballot, and he was officially in the race.

This was when the great trouble started. 

To be perfectly candid, our hero was not a very good candidate for school trustee. There were a great many meetings that he should have attended—meetings that would have further raised his profile—and he failed to show up for most of them. This was a failure of nerves but even more so a failure attributable to his ignorance about such matters. When he did attend the meetings, he didn’t know what to say. People would shake his hand, congratulate him on something he’d published or said on the talk show, and they would expect clever words to come out in reply, but our hero fumbled his responses, took off his thick glasses, wiped them on the bottom of his T-shirt, put them back on, blinked, and looked to the ceiling as if for salvation. Nevertheless, everyone told him he had a great chance of winning the election.

One evening, just after dinner, he received an email with the subject line, IS THIS YOU?

He opened up the video in a separate browser, noticing as he did so that it had already been viewed over a thousand times. The video had been filmed by an amateur with a phone on a city bus. Initially the camera flitted about the back of the bus shakily, uncertain where to land. Even in these early moments, our hero was able to catch a glimpse of his own face. He was sitting in a two-seater, next to the window. It was nighttime, and the window enclosed a square of blackness with the occasional bright streak of light passing by rapidly. After surveying the bodies of several of the other passengers, the camera settled on our hero’s face, coming in for a close-up. The camera seemed to be saying, you are the object of interest, the protagonist of this story.

Our hero had previously been under the impression that he knew what he looked like. He kept a clean-shaven face, a result of meticulous work with a razor while staring closely at his skin in the bathroom mirror every morning. Yet he was not familiar with what his face looked like from an outsider’s perspective. About a minute passed, the camera not moving from the video version of him, while the real-life version of him watched with a rising feeling of apprehension. Who exactly was it that was so curious about him that they had decided to film him in a moment of open-mouthed idleness? How foolish he looked! His neck was now so soft that it jutted out over the collar of his shirt. How much weight he had gained over the years. The camera left it in no doubt: he was an ugly, middle-aged man.

That was the first great shock. What happened next was a far greater shock. A teenage girl came and sat next to him. Our hero could remember this moment. It was from a month ago, one of the last of the winter months, when the daylight is gone by six o’clock. He remembered the girl as young and very pretty and that her decision to sit next to him made him feel prickles of anxiety all over his body. Even watching the moment on video, he could see the stiffening of his body. He could imagine a caption for the video: Beauty and the Beast. The girl’s striking, youthful loveliness next to his slovenly, hideous body was so dreadful he could hardly stand to look.

More awful than that was what happened next. The camera zoomed in even closer. It landed right on his big face, like a spaceship approaching a craggy, inhospitable planet. To his dismay, he saw himself turning to the girl, he saw the predatory smile, and he watched himself talking to her.

How old are you?

Visibly uncomfortable, but nevertheless smiling to be polite, the girl replied, sixteen.

The action proceeded with disorienting speed.

What kind of music do you like, asked the man in the video.

Oh, the girl replied, I don't know. Nothing modern, to be honest.

The man seemed enormously pleased by this response. Do you like the Beatles?

Yes, I love the Beatles, said the girl.

Really? I have an original pressing of Let It Be at home. Do you want to come over and listen to it?

No, thank you, said the girl. 

Come on, said the man in the video. Do you live in Verdun? I will make us tea and you can go right home afterwards. 

No, no. I have to get to a friend's house, said the girl, now looking around nervously. 

Ok, said the man. Suit yourself. 

He then sat there looking sulky while the girl got up and walked toward the front of the bus, out of the frame. The camera remained on the man, who looked angry and disappointed. Under his breath, he muttered slut. A second later, the name of our hero came up on the screen. After his name it said: FUTURE SCHOOL BOARD TRUSTEE?!

Panicked, our hero called the office of the magazine but there was no answer. It was outside regular hours. The editor's voice on the answering machine was tired and hoarse, as if he had recorded the message while fighting a flu. Our hero didn't leave a message. He hung up. He wrote to the editor by email instead. 

No, that is not me in the video. I didn't do those things. What is going on? How did this happen?

I hardly need to tell you that things became much worse for our hero. Various online pundits had already started to investigate the circumstances surrounding the now infamous video. One of them wrote a short essay about it.

So, this person wrote, it turns out that our crusading local journalist, who styles himself as the savior of the school system, cleaning up corruption and exposing lies, has a few skeletons in his closet. When he thinks he's out of the public eye, he harasses underage girls. This video was taken on the same night that our local crusader attended the All Candidates Forum at Atwater Library. Within minutes of leaving, he was on the bus, trying to convince a sixteen-year-old girl to come home with him. What else does he get up to when no one is watching?

Our hero could not sleep that night. He waited for the magazine's office to open and as soon as it was nine o'clock, he called again. It wasn't the editor who answered but rather his assistant. The editor wasn't available, she said. Why not? He had been rushed to hospital, said the assistant. When? Some time around nine o'clock last night, she replied. He had suffered a massive heart attack.

Our hero looked at his emails again. The editor had sent him the link to the video just after seven o'clock. The difference of two hours between the email and the heart attack didn't seem coincidental. The editor was almost seventy. To discover such a sordid video circulating about one of his writers, who was also the son of one of his oldest friends, had evidently been more than his heart could endure.

The online jury rapidly became a crowd of hundreds. The parent council of an alternative, all-girls’ school wrote an open letter to the chair of the school district. The letter explained that the man in that disturbing video had visited their all-girls’ school a few months earlier, before announcing his candidacy for trustee, claiming to be researching a story about trans youth. But the article this man had claimed to be researching had never been published. So what had the man been doing there? Grooming future targets? It was essential, the letter argued, that this candidate be banned from the ballot.

Our hero vividly remembered the assignment from the all-girls’ school. He had been uncomfortable with it from the beginning. The idea was to profile a student who had once been a boy but had transitioned into a girl. But the story had been hell to write. He had started to doubt the editor's judgment which heretofore had seemed impeccable. Quite simply put, there was no scandal, no controversy. He had spent hours in the company of teenage girls, even spending an entire evening watching a riotous field hockey game out in the driving rain, becoming increasingly ill at ease on the school grounds, the only man in sight. 

It was easy now to see how the assignment could be seen as a ruse to get extended access to teenage girls. All of his prior actions in life had now been cast in a new light. He had had the makings of a sex offender all along. One of his former girlfriends gave an interview in which she claimed he had a creepy vibe and couldn't have sex unless he was drunk. “I don't think he was ever actually interested in a woman his own age” was the headline quote. 

Our hero withdrew his name from the school district election. This wasn't enough for his enemies. A new coalition called Concerned Parents for School Integrity was running its own slate of candidates. One of them wrote to our hero's supervisor and asked for him to be disciplined. Two weeks later, our hero's contract was terminated.

After a month, the video had over a million views. Probably no one watched it more times than our hero. He discovered a few things that on initial viewing he had not noticed. The most striking was that while the girl who sat next to him on the bus bore a very close resemblance to the girl from real life, her facial features had been subtly altered. Her eyes had been made bigger, giving her an expression of permanent dismay. Her nose had been made slightly smaller and rounder. He wasn't quite sure why the creators of the video had done this. His best guess was that his enemies, almost definitely from Concerned Parents for School Integrity, had wanted the girl to be unidentifiable. Yet the fact of her non-existence, he knew, would be his greatest asset in his legal case. If indeed this girl was the victim of harassment, where was she? Why had no journalist bothered to find her and interview her? It surely would be proven eventually that the girl didn’t exist, that the video was a fake.

Then he received his lawyer's first invoice. It was for nearly twelve thousand dollars. This was merely the bill for background research into the facts of the case and the relevant legal precedent and the drafting of the statement of claim. Many more invoices were to come.

Our hero concluded that justice was a luxury that only a richer version of himself could have afforded. He abandoned his lawsuit.

His editor suffered a second heart attack mere days after being released from hospital. He died immediately. Given that it was only the editor's private money that had permitted the payment of the various expenses of the magazine, of writer’s contracts and office rental and supplies and website hosting, the magazine had to fold. A few months later, our hero’s articles disappeared from the internet. Whenever anyone searched his name, the top hundred results were all about his withdrawn candidacy for school trustee and the scandal involving the girl on the bus. 

He saw his landlord in the hallway one afternoon, installing new smoke detectors. The landlord spat on the floor from his step ladder and said: you are a disgrace.

His sister sent him an email from her new home of Singapore, where she had moved with her new fiance. How glad I am to no longer live in Quebec, she wrote. In Quebec, I would be forced by the government to keep our family name, which you have now tarnished forever. Thank God I will be getting married next month and will finally have a new name. Please don’t reply to this email with your version of events. I don’t want to hear it. 

Our hero deleted this email immediately. It was not something he ever wanted to find himself reading again.

My last duty now, before I go, is to tell you about what happened the next day, Sunday. Our hero walked to the top of Mont Royal, where he had a view of his alma mater, McGill, and all of downtown and the neighbourhoods beyond, stretching down to the St. Lawrence River, and even further, where the hazy mountains made faint shadows on the other side of the border. After gazing into the far distance for a while, hoping his thoughts would dissolve like clouds dispersing in the morning sun, he did what he had only ever done once before. He walked to the foot of the huge cross. He kneeled down and touched his head to the ground. His dramatic weight loss of recent months, ever since the scandal, had given him the side benefit of more supple limbs, and it was easy to bend in submission. He muttered his prayer in a whisper. He kneeled in prayer for a very long time. 

When finally he stood up again, he noticed a small bird was sitting on the branch of the nearest tree—an ash—twittering happily, as if to try and cheer him up and to persuade him to give the world a second chance. For the Creator of the bird, there was no deepfake. There was only the mortal man standing in the shadow of the cross under the midday sun. The Creator believed in the good heart of our hero even while everyone else had been deceived by the deepfake.

Notes

This was pure fiction so there are no references for this one. It was written shortly after reading Romans, Chapter 5, and after imbibing some of the general discourse of contemporary dread about AI.

I’ve decided that from here on in, whenever I’ve got a work of fiction to share—this was the first one I’ve posted on Substack—I’ll always do so on a Sunday. As a day, Sunday should have a different vibe from all the rest, hopefully a vibe fitting for fiction, which has a role that is so different from any other kind of writing. I hope to strike a more contemplative note and find my reader receptive to going on a journey that takes us away from the quotidian trials and chores of the work week.

Since we’re on the topic of fiction, I cannot let this opportunity go by to recommend Brandon Taylor’s Substack post about “moral worldbuilding”— “a moral fiction is a fiction that does not bend in favor of external value systems and does not waver in order to curry favor with existing orthodoxies.” I think this might have been on my mind too when I wrote my story. Check out Taylor’s post for yourself. He is one of the finest thinkers on fiction writing today.

Images

“How filming 1962's Lolita destroyed actress Sue Lyon's life.” Creator: Les Lee 

https://www.grunge.com/485149/how-filming-1962s-lolita-destroyed-actress-sue-lyons-life/ 

"Shopping For A New Printer... Retro Thing Style"

https://www.retrothing.com/2009/09/dot-matrix-printers.html 

“STM To Spend $3,000,000 To Install Cameras On All Night Buses”

https://www.mtlblog.com/stm-to-spend-3000000-to-install-cameras-on-all-night-buses