I work at what was once called a “computer repair shop”, though the owners changed the branding to “tech repair shop” a few years back when they started seeing more phones and tablets than actual desktops. It’s not bad work overall. About half the problems are really simple fixes—rebooting the device, getting rid of some buggy software or app, that kind of thing. The other half we give to Melissa to figure out, as she’d forgotten more than I’d learned in the two years I’d been working there.
Occasionally we get people coming in with lost and found type stuff. Computers or phones that someone left behind or lost. People come in, sign a form saying they’ve made a diligent effort to find the original owner without success, and then we wipe the device for them when we can.
What we don’t tell them beforehand is that we usually check the devices before wiping them. Not trying to be nosy or anything, but our boss also doesn’t want the reputation of laundering stolen phones or damaging property without the owner’s permission. Sometimes we’re able to find a way of reaching the owner. If we do, we return the phone to whoever brought it in and tell them the info we found. After that it’s on them to do the right thing.
Other times the device’s owner isn’t as easy to figure out, and usually those do get wiped and restored. Unless, of course, we find something else strange on it. It doesn’t happen often. Once Melissa found a computer with some bad shit on it she reported to the cops, but that was before my time. And while I’d seen odd stuff from time to time, there was nothing that had ever really bothered or freaked me out.
But three weeks ago I came into work to find a phone waiting to be cleaned. The paperwork was signed by Vince Teller. He was a regular. His cleaning company covered the rest stop and park bathrooms for fifty miles up and down the interstate, and over time I was becoming convinced he was making more money from selling second-hand smartphones than scrubbing toilets. Still, he wasn’t a thief so far as I knew, and when I tapped on the glass, the home screen came into view. No pin or nothing. Easy peasy.
I did a cursory glance through the phone, but it was either very new or it had already been partially wiped. No contacts, no email set up, no owner info. To be fair, it was in great shape other than a thin scratch on one corner of the screen. I was getting ready to do a factory reset when I saw a little icon in the app drawer I didn’t recognize. It was just a red eye, no name or anything. Frowning, I touched the eye. The screen went black and then a video began to play.
It was in a house, or what looked like a house at least, though it could have been a set or something, as the angle never changed much. The room looked like a study, with big bookshelves along the far wall filed with leather books behind a huge leather sofa that covered the back half of a thick woven rug. The image quality and lighting was very clear, and I found myself wondering if this was the pre-rendered video opening to a game or…
That’s when they dragged the woman into view.
I never saw her face—her head was covered by a black sack the entire time, and even at the end, it never came off. The rest of her was naked, and I felt myself blushing as I stared at the screen. Was this some kind of fetish porn video? But no. Nothing like that.
Her…captors…her murderers, were two men wearing masks and hooded sweatshirts. They brutalized her in just about every way imaginable for ten minutes before one of them stood up and began stomping in her head. I was on the verge of tears by then. There was no sound that I could make out, but the video was enough. This wasn’t staged or fake. I’d just watched them murder some poor girl.
Hands shaking, I carried the phone to the back where Melissa was replacing a hard drive in a laptop. When she first looked up she seemed irritated, but her expression became worried when she saw my face. “Paul, what is it?”
I handed her the phone wordlessly. It had reverted to the app drawer after the video was gone, so I pointed at the red eye and told her to hit it and watch. Tell me if she thought what I did.
Her face paled as she watched the video, and when she was done, she rewound it and played parts a couple more times. Finally she looked up at me, her expression serious. “I…I don’t know. It could be real, sure. But it could also be fake.”
I frowned. “How could someone fake that? That’s not cgi or something. That was a real person.”
Melissa shrugged, her voice soft. “Yeah, I know. But…look, you kids are so used to computer special effects and stuff that its easy to forget how much more realistic stuff looks like when its real.” She rolled her eyes slightly. “Not like real real, I mean like using practical effects. Like they used to do more in movies and stuff. I’m no expert, but the fact that her face is always covered is suspicious. And you notice by the time they…ugh, by the time they stomp on her head, she’s not moving at all. Now that could be them stomping a real person, or it could be a clever edit where they swapped out a dummy.” She replayed that part of the video. “See? They’ve zoomed in for that part. You can barely even seen her skin anymore when they start stomping. Mainly it’s the black bag and the boot coming down. That’s not hard to fake if they wanted.”
I nodded. “Okay, I can see that maybe.” Despite myself, I felt the first flutters of hopeful relief. I didn’t want it to be real, and I was willing to take any other halfway reasonable explanation. “Anything else that stands out to you?”
“Well, the finger coming out of the sofa I guess.”
I felt my eyes widen. “The what?”
Melissa raised an eyebrow at me. “You didn’t notice? It was pretty obvious in the middle of the video.” She scrubbed backward and then hit play. “See? To the right of where they’ve got the girl. Coming out of the back of the sofa.”
She was right. It was small but very clear once I saw it. A long, thin finger poking out of the back of the sofa. As I watched, it stretched and scratched at the back of the seat cushion below it as though trying to find enough purchase to pull its owner free from whatever held them inside the furniture. I could even make out the tip of the finger and nail—swollen and black like the finger had been caught in something or hammered. I looked back up at her.
“How does that mean its fake?”
She shrugged. “I mean it doesn’t necessarily, but doesn’t it seem a bit staged? Like the cameraman wants to get the finger in the shot?” Frowning, she didn’t look entirely convinced herself. “Look, who brought this in?”
“It was here this morning. Got dropped off by the toilet king.”
Melissa grimaced. “Fucking skeeze.” She sat the phone back down with a distasteful look. “But maybe it’s like a little horror video. Got left in a rest stop for someone to find. Did it have a lock on it?”
I shook my head. “No, it opened right up.”
She looked a little relieved. “Well there you go. Probably someone trying to make a video go viral or become an urban legend or some dumb shit.” When I didn’t respond, she let out a sigh and nodded. “But I get why it bothers you. It does me too. Tell you what. Give me some time to fiddle with it and see what I can figure out. If we aren’t satisfied its fake after that, we’ll go to the cops. Sound fair?”
I nodded. “Yeah, fair.”
I was going to check on it later that day, but I didn’t want to bug Melissa when I knew she was working on other stuff. The next day I was off, and I’d resolved to check with her that following morning, but that’s when Kiera came into the store.
We hit it off immediately. She’d just moved to town and was looking for a good used laptop. We didn’t sell many computers, used or otherwise, but I tried to keep the conversation going while technically telling her we didn’t have what she was looking for. I kept expecting her to bail, but after half an hour of chatting we’d made a date for the next night.
I was grinning when she left the store, but my smile faltered when I turned around to find Melissa smirking at me. “Okay, Romeo. If you’re done making your social plans for the week, come look at what I found on our mystery phone.”
My face grew hot as I followed her back, partially because she’d caught me flirting at work and part because I really had forgotten about the phone as soon as Kiera had walked in. Stomach tightening, I sat down at the work table with Melissa. The phone was there, but instead of opening it, she pointed at her laptop.
“Okay, so I pulled some stuff off of it. First, I looked for any kind of information about the video itself or the app. It’s pretty blank. Oddly blank. Whoever set it up knew what they were doing, and I can’t find a version of the app anywhere on the internet. But either intentionally or not (though I’d guess it was intentional) they did leave the video file exposed enough for me to get information on it.” She clicked on a folder and pulled up a long string of code I didn’t understand. Gesturing at the screen, she went on. “So this is part of a digital watermark associated with the file. And there’s a few things interesting about it. First, this format of digital watermark is designed primarily for streaming videos, and its pretty advanced stuff.”
I leaned in. “So like, this video was streaming when we watched it? Like it was live?”
She shook her head. “No, not live or actively streaming. It’s saved in the phone’s memory. But I think it’s a cache, and the first time the video was played on the phone, it probably was streamed. Doesn’t mean it was live then either, but I definitely think it was streamed the first time.”
“Okay. So does that matter?”
Melissa pursed her lips. “Maybe, maybe not. But it stood out to me when I looked at the watermark more. Some of this information…its got spots to tag an owner, a location, that kind of thing. It’s meant to help prevent copyright infringement after all. But all of that’s blank. The only field that is being used is the timestamp, which far as I can tell, is showing when it was first streamed. And that’s where it gets weird.”
She was dragging this out on purpose, and I had to try and hide my irritation as I played along. “Weird how?”
“Well, the stamp shows a date and time that’s three weeks from now. Like the video was streamed for the first time on this phone three weeks in the future at…uh, 8:49pm.”
I shrugged. “I mean, can’t that stuff be faked pretty easy?”
Frowning, she closed that window. “Faked, yes. Easily? Not with this kind of stuff. It’s all encrypted. It took me a couple of hours to get what I got, and even then I just managed to extract some surface metadata that isn’t even really protected. I wouldn’t begin to know how to change that data though.” She let out a laugh. “Not that there aren’t some that could. Anything can be hacked, after all.” She shot me a sidelong glance, pausing for a moment before going on. “Besides, I also found this.” Clicking on another file, she pulled up what looked like a screenshot of…what was this?
“It’s a cast list!” Melissa burst out laughing. “See? It’s just some weird torture porn bullshit. Girl Victim, Killer #1, Killer #2, they even have a Man in Couch. Played by Stuart Greenfield if you wanted to check out what else he’s in.”
I puffed out a breath and glared at her. “Shit. You could have just told me that. All the dramatic build-up.”
Melissa chuckled. “I could have, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, and I spent most of yesterday messing with it to find that out. I thought about calling you, but I decided this was funnier.”
Shaking my head, I stood up. “So all the rest of that was made up?”
She met my gaze, her smile faltering. “No, everything I said was true. And whoever cracked that watermark to make it say three weeks from now, they know what they’re doing. They should be working be making bank as a computing consultant, not dropping off weird videos at a rest stop.”
“Could say the same thing about you. Why’re you still here after all this time?”
She shrugged. “Low pressure, low stakes, and I don’t need much money.” She broke into another grin. “Plus, I get to torture newbs from time to time.”
Grimacing, I headed for the door. “Yeah, yeah. Congratulations, you got me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go daydream about my hot date.”
I went out with Kiera that next night, and a few nights after. Over the last few days, we’ve been spending more and more time together, and we’ve been talking about taking a trip this weekend. So when she called me tonight as I was closing up the store, at first I was happy and excited.
Then I heard her crying.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“I…I got a new phone today, right? But I got it at lunch, so I waited to take it out and set it up when I got home t-tonight. And right away, soon as I get it out of the box, I drop it. It only has a little scratch on the screen, so no big deal, right? But I…I’m worried now. I turn it on, want to make sure it’s working okay. It doesn’t go through the normal new phone start up stuff, which I thought was weird, but my main thing is I’m trying to make sure it’s not jacked up, so I try a couple of different apps.”
I froze halfway across the parking lot to my car. “Um, yeah? Did it mess up?”
“No. I just…I clicked on this one app. It was just like an eye. I thought maybe it was a camera or something. Instead it played a video. It was this video of a girl being tortured and…fuck, Paul, I think they killed her.”
I started walking again. “Um…it’s…it’s a fake. I had that on a phone at work a few…” My tongue started growing fat in my mouth. “Did you say you scratched your screen?”
“Yeah. It’s a fake, really? Because it looked…”
“Where? Where on your screen was it scratched?”
“Um, I guess it’s like the lower right side? It’s not a big deal. Paul are you sure it…”
Her voice became distant as I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at the time. 9:04pm. Hands shaking, I tried to unlock my car door as I brought my phone back up. “Kiera, listen to me. Lock your doors. Go into your bedroom and lock that too. I’ll be over in just a few minutes, and I’ll call before I knock, but if you hear anyone else, you call 911, okay?”
“Paul, if it’s just a fake, then why…”
“Please, I’ll explain when I get there. Just stay safe until I do, okay?”
“Okay. Just…see you in a minute.”
Hanging up, I put my phone away and used my other hand to steady the key enough to get it in and unlock my car. As I started to open the door, I fumbled the keys again, this time enough to drop them into the dark below. Cursing, I braced myself against the car with my right hand as I leaned down to get my keys with my left.
It was as I bent down that I bumped the door with the top of my head. I heard a short, metallic squeal as the door began to close again, and then my head exploded with the pain as the door closed on my hand. Grunting, I yanked the door open and pulled my hand free. The door had scraped the tips of my other fingers, but my index finger had been caught up the first joint and mashed hard enough that hot and cold waves of pain pulsed down my arm with the beating of my heart.
Trembling, I held my hand up so I could see my finger better in the dim sodium light of the parking lot. I let out a small sob at what I saw.
My long, thin finger.
The tip and nail already darkening as they filled with blood.
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