Into the Real

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Facial Recognition

I MET MY DESTINY in a coffee shop on the North End of Boston. It was April, the cruelest month, and it was raining hard.

I didn’t know my destiny’s name, but I saw her face. She ducked into the front of the bakery to get out of the rain, slicked back her wet hair, and looked me right in the eye. Pierced me in the heart.

Her face glowed like the full moon, pale and perfect. She smiled at me, an achingly beautiful smile.

And then she was gone.

*

Do people fall in love at first sight anymore? Since first sight has become refracted through a million virtual mirrors? The people I come from believe that a mirror will steal your soul, and when somebody dies you need to drape and hide every mirror in your house. Or else you might see your dearly departed reflected there, trapped inside a reflective illusion.

I thought I’d fallen in love at first sight that rainy spring afternoon. I didn’t realize I was entering a house of mirrors.

*

I watched her go. She smiled at me before she turned away. And time stretched down a corridor behind her.

A rude punch in the arm shook me out of my thrall. Ben, dude, you’re drooling all over the table. Gross.

I sighed, tore my gaze away from her, and glared at my closest friend, Jeff. Shut up, you asshole.

Why? ’Cause I know what you want. That girl’s number. Right? Right?

Jeff’s a formidable friend, somebody who would jump in front of a train for me. I know that. But he’s also a rarefied schmuck.

Jeff reached up and slid the eyebud away from his right eye, so I could look into his face for once. He’s not the guy who ever looks anybody right in the eye, ever.

Blink, he said. Blink. Blink.

I was about to smack him in the shoulder instead of asking him to explain himself, but got interrupted by my handheld’s chirp.

I picked it up and touched the screen. And her face came back to me, trapped inside the silver titanium casing.

Violet Stone. Link Code 3AG3497B.

Dude… I said, my voice trailing off. I put the device on the table because my fingers shook too bad to hold onto it safely.

How’d I do it? Facial recognition, my friend. Facial recognition. And dude, I got her captured, now you gotta call her for a date. Or I wipe her data clean.

Jeff had trouble understanding the difference between computer wizardry and cyberstalking. But how did you do that? Get her name? Violet.

Looked her in the face, though she was creaming for you, dude. Eyebud’s equipped to record and encode all visual data. Two taps, a blink, a blink, and pow. Your girl. Welcome to 2020. Clear vision, my friend.

I can’t just call her. She’ll think I’m a freaking ax murderer.

Show your game, Benny boy. Or I wipe her. Ten, nine, eight…

Jeff cackled with evil glee and he waved the remote click on the eyebud at me. Six, five…

He shifted the eyebud back into position, prepared to blink her out of my life forever.

I grabbed my handheld and punched the interface. The connection started purring, and my mouth got a metal taste to it. You’re a dick, you know that?

You don’t ask, you don’t get. That’s all I want you to know. Bro.

We listened to the purring and then the clickthrough to voice/text. I sighed, switched on the camera in the handheld so she could at least see who was calling. Maybe she’d remember me, too.

Um, hello, I said, trying to sound casual and offhand and totally nonchalant about the whole thing. Joe Cool of Northeastern University. Oh yeah. I was at Napoli’s Coffee about five minutes ago when you walked in the door to get out of the rain. You have the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen, and well, I wanted to ask you: You wanna meet up again at Napoli’s sometime, just to talk? Cannoli’s on me. My name is Ben Lee. My ID isn’t hidden; please call back. Thanks.

I hung up and tossed the silenced handheld back onto the table. My back was slick with sweat, all down my shoulder blades and south from there.

Jeff laughed and laughed. "Shoulda seen your face, man oh man oh man. Like a mediprobe was doing an anal scan all up in your business. Heh."

S’aright, I said, my voice gentler now. I got it—Jeff got scatological when he got scared. Given the way he jiggled his feet and tapped his fingers against the back of the chair, I could tell he was spooked.

No first dates for Jeff, not now, not ever. Not with his virtual trail.

*

Facial recognition’s a funhouse mirror that reveals the truth against your will. The metacomputing system connecting the societal consciousness records your entire life history, from the minute your dad records you popping out of your mom’s womb. You can’t hide from that unblinking stare.

But you can distort your image, and hide your true face.

*

Jeff shuffled off to class, his eyebud in place, recording every step and sight and event in his supremely uneventful life. He had a LifeBlog called Master Jeff, and followers, but not many, and zero reciprocators, not even me. Nobody was ready to reveal their personal codes to Jeff, no matter how open source he lived his own life.

I watched him slouching away, and then I got busy. Pulled Violet’s image up again, allowed myself the luxury of a single sigh.

And then I got to work.

Violet didn’t live her life like an open book, like Jeff. Few did. But unlike anybody else I’d ever met in the meatworld, Violet kept her life offline.

A modern form of modesty. I wanted to see behind that virtual veil more than ever.

I called up school records. Nothing.

Image tracking for the North End, for the city of Boston, then the United States.

Nothing.

It made no sense, no earthly possible sense. Like Violet had stepped into Napoli’s Coffee from another dimension.

I had to find her. My fingers flew over the airscreens I’d opened across the tabletop, looking for clues, anything, about her identity, her location, her passions her hatreds her secret terrors.

You could find all that on meta, for just about anybody.

Not her.

I sat back and stared at Napoli’s tin ceiling. I heard a clink near my elbow and looked down.

A cannoli, on a chipped white plate. I glanced up and saw it was Napoli himself. Onna house, he said, his face contorted in what I realized to my horror was pity. You find her, Benny.

Not so easy.

*

Facial recognition only works when there’s a face.

*

I finally cracked the code by doing something totally old school, the way I used to search for stuff when I was a little kid in fifth grade.

I didn’t search by image. But by name.

Violet’s an old-fashioned name. Only eight hundred and forty-two Violets in all of New England.

By ratcheting the search down to the Boston University district, I got four.

Searched those four images. One was a toddler, one a lady with no front teeth and an eyepatch, another lady swathed up in a burka, and the last one a guy in crude, hostile drag.

Not my Violet.

As if she’d never existed.

A cold dread snaked down the length of both my arms, and I ached in my bones.

I searched by name again. But this time, the names of the deceased.

Violet Stone. Died October 10, 1989.

Too long ago for an image from any eyebud, from security cameras, or even from ancient databanks like the old Facebook.

I found only one image. From the day she died, a scanned obituary page that ran in the Boston Globe:

COED FROM BOSTON UNIVERSITY DEAD IN NORTH END: SUSPICIOUS

That face. No mistaking it, those luminous eyes, the generous lips.

I had fallen head over heels in love with a ghost.

*

By the time I tracked Jeff down, two days had gone by, days that dragged on like a prison sentence.

Finally he relented to my unceasing pings and met me on the Charles River walkway on the Boston side. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since the last time I’d seen him.

We tromped along the river, and the wind rose up from the Charles and kicked me in the face. Jeff hunched his shoulders and jammed his fingers into the front pocket of his jeans. His eyebud glowed yellow in the fading light of the dying day.

It’s simple, really, he said when I’d explained what I had found. Some people don’t want to be known.

They use the facial recognition to hide? I asked, feeling pretty stupid.

A gigantic duck waddled into Jeff’s path and I grabbed his arm to keep him from colliding with its fat, round body.

Yeah. You can mess with the program, you know. Game the software. It’s like the old identity theft, you know, before we got chipped? That girl musta stole the dead babe’s identity, her face.

But I don’t get it, I said. My brain pulsated and throbbed with the effort of decoding this mystery, the mystery of Violet.

I had to figure her out. Or I’d never find her. She looked like the dead girl. She was the dead girl, Jeff. She was.

Jeff stopped walking, stared way out over the Charles. A pair