Page 69 of You Had Me at Hello World
Around ten a.m., both of our laptops chime with an email notification. The subject line ischeck this out!!and the sender is some throwaway account. The cc’d recipients are a good fraction of the Alpha Fellows.
Confused, I click on the attached video.
It’s Stella. Or not exactly Stella, but some uncanny valley, plastic robot imitation of her. Her naked body is contorted like she’s a circus performer, and she thrusts her hips mechanically against some faceless guy. Her mouth emits a high-pitched, unnatural noise.
For two seconds, I’m more confused than anything else. Then things click.
A deepfake. Somebody must’ve slapped her face onto a porn actress’s body.
A sharp wave of nausea overwhelms me.
“Don’t click on the email you just got,” I tell Obi.
“Why?” He glances over my shoulder and glimpses the screen. “What is that?”
I slam my laptop shut. “Nothing worth looking at.”
He tilts his head, clearly unsatisfied. If I don’t spill, he’s going to open the email anyway.
“It’s deepfake porn of a girl at camp,” I say.
“Yikes, that’s disgusting,” he says. “People need to touchgrass.” He navigates to his inbox and deletes the email without opening it.
“Why would anyone do that?”
“Thirsty? Bored? Insecure about their own pathetic, lonely NPC lives spent trapped in their mom’s basement?” Obi shrugs. “Why does any internet troll do anything?”
He turns his attention back to his own screen.
I force myself to forget about the email. There isn’t anything I can do for Stella, and I have to debug. Now that we have a multimedia integration, the Hello World data pipeline needs to be retooled to handle larger files and mixed formats. It’s a spaghetti nightmare. I miss Khoi. His skills are God-tier compared to mine.
An hour later my laptop battery is dwindling. And because I’m a genius, of course I left my charger in my dorm room. So I head back to Simmons to grab it.
When I stroll through the girls’ section, quiet sobs drift from Stella’s room.
Yeah, I feel awful for her. I only viewed the video for like, zero-point-two seconds, but that was long enough to traumatize me, and I’m not even the one who got deepfaked. But this isn’t my problem. I have a hackathon to win.
Still, it feels too heartless to walk away. Khoi would never do that. Khoi would be hacking into the MIT servers to track down this asshole, even for a girl he barely knows.
And shedidreturn the Adderall. So maybe I owe her one.
I knock on her door. “Are you okay?”
“Go away,” Stella moans.
“What happened is really horrible,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
There’s a pause, and then the door opens. Her face is tear streaked and puffy. Her usually glossy hair hangs in limp strands.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
A laugh-sob escapes her throat. “How do you think?”
We sit on the floor of her room as she quietly weeps. I don’t know what the move is here. I can’t even come through with Kleenex. If we were friends, I’d hug her, but we don’t really know each other like that. We haven’t spoken since that night on the yacht.
“You could go to the police,” I say. “There are laws against this stuff. And you’re a minor.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want my parents to find out. Besides, I already know who did it.”
