Fresh-Week

“Can you do it?”

I opened the file. It was a picture of her. She was standing on a hill just as the sun was beginning to dip in the sky. It was taken at magic hour, and the entire field behind her was lit up with the golden glow that only lasts for a few minutes when the sun is right. In the picture she was looking directly at the camera, the lightly drooping lids of her eyes showing a sense of vulnerability but also with a touch of veiled desire. I never knew how she pulled that off. 

“What’s wrong with it again?” I said.

“The skin tone. It’s all wrong.”

I looked at the picture again. I dragged the cursor across the photo to widen it and immediately her face expanded on my screen until I could practically see the pores of her skin.

“Wow,” I said. “What was this taken with?”

She held up her phone. It was the latest model with the camera flush enhancement.

“Nice. Long wait?” I asked.

She smirked and then bent over my shoulder, looking at her enlarged face on the screen. “About six hours,” she said. “Worth it. No makeup you’re this close. Only for millionaires and natural skins.” She laughed.

I pulled her face across the screen a few times, zooming in here and there. Then I zoomed out again and there she was again, looking out at me with the golden field behind her.

“So,” I said. “You want the skin to match the tone in the Emerelda pic.” I narrated it to myself as I pulled up the photo of the singer, the shot captured at one of her concerts, right as she was singing at her most full-throated. Emerelda had just announced a summer tour and a lot of girls were going for her skin color. The crowd behind her was blurred and her face and body were highlighted as if there were a thousand flashbulbs bursting behind her at the moment the shot was taken.

She leaned in farther and compared to the two shots…her on the hill with Emeralda on stage. “Yes,” she said. “I want her hue. Can you?”

I leaned back and clicked out of the program. My screensaver took over and several pics of my latest work started to float back and forth across the screen. Pictures of various other no-makeup girls in school who invariably came by to ask me for my help whenever fresh-week rolled by each April.

“Yep,” I said. 

“Thanks.” She slid an envelope under my palm, gave me a quick bribe kiss and then she was gone.

__________________________

Later that night I got to work. The last person to come down through this wing of the school was the janitor. He looked in when he saw the computer lab was still open. When he saw me, he grinned and gave me a thumbs up. That was an hour ago. Since then I hadn’t seen anyone. I had the place to myself.

I pulled up her hill picture again. I zoomed in and then clicked open the photo of Emeralda on stage. I started a background program that analyzed the pixels in both shots. It quickly fed me back that the Emeralda was definitely enhanced, not just with makeup on the singer’s skin but with lots of digital stuff too. It made sense. Nothing looked that perfect except pixels these days. The program spit out a bunch of data and I directed that into my jelling program, the one I had just written last week. I tried to keep it updated because these days the imitation programs from overseas are overflowing the feeds and if the native program isn’t current then the imitation programs will often graft onto the original source code and corrupt the native programming with data blooms. My program was clean and original and I wanted to keep it that way.

Fresh-week was the one time a year when I felt popular. Lots of girls were applying to different schools during the spring and lots of other girls were hoping for a shot at virality when socials started to really go wild for the summer. Fresh-Week would have happened organically and would probably have been less sanitized if the school hadn’t decided to make it part of their push for school spirit. As it was, every April I was hit up by tons of girls who needed some extra tweaks that nature just couldn’t buy. Fresh-week pics required no makeup and they had to be authentic with no digital enhancements. At least that’s what the school administration thought. In reality, nobody submitted unenhanced pics to Fresh-Week. That meant any enhancements had to be added in post, and they required a certain finesse so that the school sensors wouldn’t pick up on them. The photos also needed to be verifiably tied to a real person, with no AI mess arounds. They needed to match with the central databank the state maintained on all high school students. Each school was issued a digital soak that checked for illegal tweaks. All student and faculty photos were treated with the soak which was programmed to fluidly recoat each shot several times a second no matter where the photo was viewed. So, whether the photo was just taken with a phone or whether it was making the rounds on the web, the soak rode with the pic, verifying its authenticity. If a pic didn’t have the soak it was flagged as false. On top of that most schools ran a proprietary second soak for safety. It was hard to fake, but, as usual, not impossible when money or status was involved. Multiple solution programs showed up on the dark side within days of any security patches. No problems that time and nerdery couldn’t solve.

Once my program was running the UI showed the data seeping through top of the screen and soon there was a thin scan-line of color suspended across the top of the two shots, the girl on the left and Emeralda on the right. I eyeballed the color line for a second, making sure everything looked right, and then I hit enter. Slowly the color line dripped its way down the screen, digitally coating across the two images, matching the girl from the shot at Emerelda’s concert. By the time the program was finished running the photo could pass at any TSA checkpoint. The line took a few more passes, each time finishing off near the bottom of the screen before restarting at the top. I clicked the program shut. The compositing would take about an hour. That was pretty fast considering how much data was actually needed to recreate authentic skin tone and real data. Thankfully I had access to the school’s mainframe; one of the perks of being a teacher’s assistant in the computer lab. My VPN made sure my programs weren’t detectable by the computer’s surface sensors and the cooking job could happen under the surface where the real power was. Since all high schools in the country started using government-mandated software any monitor connected to the mainframe was technically capable of crunching high-level numbers so long as you knew how to juice it. Worked out well for everyone. Looking back on it, the AI mania from the mid-2020s had actually served a real purpose. The government got serious about keeping artificial intelligence in its place. Lots of stuff got cleared up quickly. Online scams were significantly down. The news was trusted again. Deep fake nudes were a thing of the past and my bank account (and status account) were sky high every Spring.

I clicked off the monitor but allowed the computer below the desk to keep chugging through its routines. I leaned back in the chair. My eyes started to droop just as my screensaver clicked back on. Blurry pics of perfect girls floated just under my consciousness.

__________________________

I jerked. Somewhere in the building a door must have slammed shut. I glanced at my phone and then shook my head and rubbed my face. I leaned forward and nudged the monitor back on.

I moved the mouse and the main screen flickered back into place. My eyes widened. Frantically I grabbed the mouse and swished it around, looking for the girl’s pic. My throat constricted. I was looking at her pic. But something was wrong. It was just the photo of the hill. No girl. Where was she? I frowned. I pulled up the log and scanned through the code. I was about halfway through the scan when I froze. There was an entry I didn’t recognize. I highlighted it and copied it into a redundancy search bar. The search bar winked an hourglass at me for a couple of seconds and then returned an empty search bar with the text “unknown” under the highlighted code. But by then I knew what it was. My boat had a crack.

I pulled back the image of the hill. It was definitely the same shot. But she was gone. I felt a drop of sweat at my temple.

__________________________

“What did you do?” She stood in front of me with her phone in her outstretched hand. 

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. All I did was run the program. The same program as last time.”

“Well, this didn’t happen last time.”

I scratched my head and leaned toward the monitor again as I gestured. “It’s a risk. The program updates constantly. It’s open-sourced. People are constantly tweaking it. But I have my own proprietary source bundle and that only accesses what has been approved by me. I only allow it to access surface fixes. Nothing below the pigment. Nothing that could permanently change the source code.”

She stared at me with barely slicked-back disgust. “Big talk. Something changed! Look at this, dumbass.” She flicked her finger across her phone screen and, as she did, several base shots slid across the screen. A street in autumn. A classroom. A bedroom. A hillside. Beautiful backgrounds. All empty.

“When did you take those?” I said.

She kept flicking. “Today. Yesterday. Last night. All week. What do you mean, idiot? I take them all the time. This is my income. This one…” she stopped and pointed at a shot of a parking lot with a fancy car. “I took this one…what, an hour ago? That’s not the point. The question is, where am I? These are all my shots and I’m missing. Ever since you ran your idiot program.”

My mind was racing, trying to buy itself more time. I opened my proprietary program and frantically scanned it again.

She grimaced. “Where am?! Where did I go!? And why would you messing with one pic affect all of my pics?!”

The office door burst open and another girl stormed in, phone in hand. “Hey, something’s wrong with my shots,” she said. “I’m gone.”

“I know. I know,” I said. “I’m working on it.” I looked back down at my monitor. My screensaver had kicked on again.

“Wait a sec…” my mouth froze. I leaned forward. The two girls gathered behind me, enveloping me in a cloud of perfume. The three of us stared at the monitor. The digital shots of all the fresh-week pics from my screensaver. All of them. The backgrounds were there. The girls were gone.

__________________________

“I’ll need that, too,” the principal gestured at my keycard. I handed it over. He nodded to the janitor who fished out a key and locked the computer lab.

“Well, Mr. Anderson,” the principal said. “Anything else you want to add?”

I glanced down the hall toward the gym. I could hear the compressed noise of the student bodies all gathered in the bleachers. It was an angry sound. I shook my head.

“Digital theft,” he said. “No small matter. Lots of upset women down there. Some parents too.”

“I didn’t steal…” My voice drooped and I dropped my head.

He nodded. “Right. I heard you. But facts are what matter, Mr. Anderson. And those upset girls down there in the gym who are going to want an explanation.” He leaned forward and his voice dropped to a whisper. “And this scandal is probably going to cost our school the shot at the top three in the State. We were this close,” he said, holding his fingers an inch apart. 

I nodded.

“Think quickly, son” he said. “Then join us in the gym. We’re all expecting an answer.” 

I pulled out my phone again and checked again through the dark side photo edit chat rooms. The only thing that made me feel better was that our school hadn’t been the only one hit. It was all across the subject lines. “Whered my shots go?” and “Who took the babes?” and so on. I scrolled out of the feeds. Then I dialed up my email account and looked again at the message I had received earlier that morning. The sender was anonymous (of course):

YOU’VE BEEN HACKED. CUTE GIRLZ BRO. WIRE FUNDS FROM SCHOOLZ ACCOUNT TO CRYPTO #23451-55325. IF WE GET THE CASH WE’LL FADE THE FEMALES BACK IN. OTHERWISE ENJOY AN EMPTY FRESH-WEEK:)