Toby scratched his chin, then stood and moved to the computer workstation. He put on a headset mic. Maggie tried not to smirk. He started typing, then said something into the mic. He laughed, pecked at the keys some more. Then: “Thanks, bro.”
Unlike when she’d see him in the hallway at school—stoop-shouldered, fast-walking, eyes on the floor—here Toby was the most confident man alive.
He yanked off the headset. “Well, that was easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got two hundred bucks?”
Maggie narrowed her eyes. “What for?”
“You want the location of the phone or not?”
“You want me to send someone two hundred bucks? Is he a Nigerian prince?”
“You want to track the phone? Then yeah. Two hundred and they can give you the coordinates for any phone for the past month. My friend said it’s legit. Bounty hunters use this service all the time.”
“It doesn’t sound legit.”
Toby threw up his hands.
Maggie thought about her options. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money. She’d been tutoring and babysitting like crazy to earn enough for a new laptop for college. But she didn’t want to disappoint her father. “You sure?”
“He sent me a brochure. It’s, like, a real company.”
Toby pulled up the link and Maggie read over his shoulder. It was called location aggregation. The cell phone companies sold massive amounts of cellular location data to other companies that resold it to still other companies, which packaged the service to banks and others who used the data to verify what people put down on forms. The brochure said that banks could quickly cross-check an applicant’s address by looking at the cellular records.
“What’s to stop a stalker or abusive spouse from tracking their victims?” Maggie said.
Toby let out a sigh. “You wanna change the world, or you wanna track the phone?”
“They’ll take Venmo?”
Toby nodded. “I need the phone number.”
Maggie gave it to him.
Toby made the transaction. Just a few keystrokes. “They’ll email the results within the next twenty-four hours,” Toby said. “Now, you wanna tell me what this is about?”
“No.”
“Okay, then you wanna tell me what happened last night?”
“No,” Maggie said. “But I could use your help with something else.” She batted her eyelashes. Toby let out a groan. He nodded for her to continue.
“Is it possible to call someone using FaceTime or Skype but doctor it so it looks like someone else?”
“You mean, like, I’d call you but could make it look like I was a different person?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, you’re going to MIT,” Toby said. “You tell me.”
Maggie swatted him. “Don’t be a dick.”
Toby thought about it. “Sounds like a deepfake.”
Maggie shook her head. She’d heard of deepfakes, but didn’t know much about them.
“The Russians developed it to fuck around with our elections,” Toby said, tapping on his keyboard, his eyes trained on the giant monitor in front of him. “It’s software that can make images come to life. They use it to make politicians appear drunk or say or do things that make them look bad. They basically just put one person’s face on another’s body and can make it look super realistic.” Toby held up his iPhone and started videoing her. “I’ll show you.”
Maggie suddenly felt self-conscious. Her face reddened. “I don’t want to be filmed. I haven’t—”
“Shut up, and say something outrageous.” He continued to point the phone at her. “Say, ‘Toby is a super-sexy stud.’”
“I’m not saying that.”
He looked at her over the phone. “All right, just say anything.”
“Okay,” Maggie said, “Eric Hutchinson is an asshole. A total asshole!”
Toby lowered the phone. He nodded as if he agreed with that. How much he knew from the online rumor mill was hard to tell, and he mercifully didn’t probe.
“There’s open-source code these porn freaks developed based on the Russian technology,” Toby said as he uploaded the video from his phone.
Maggie made a face like he was messing with her.
“Really. They developed it so they could put the faces of A-list actresses on existing porn clips. I can show you if—”
“I’ll take your word for it.”