Story code: ST-001306
Part 2: The Glare in the Archive
I slipped into the digital archive suite on the third floor, my heart hammering against my ribs. My keycard still worked, a brief administrative delay in the HR system that gave me a narrow window of opportunity before security was alerted. The archive room was dark and cold, lit only by the blinking blue lights of two dozen rack-mounted servers humming behind a secure mesh gate. I sat down at terminal four and logged in, my fingers cold against the keys.
Earlier that evening, I had visited my father at the Collins family home. The house was quiet, the curtains drawn to keep out the reporters who had begun gathering at the end of the driveway. He sat in his favorite armchair in the living room, his hands shaking slightly as he held a mug of tea. The stress of the viral video had already taken a visible physical toll on him; his skin was pale, and his breathing was shallow. ‘Let it go, Sarah,’ he had whispered, his voice weary and defeated. ‘The court of public opinion has already made its decision. A retired judge accused of corruption is exactly the kind of story people want to believe, regardless of the truth.’
But I could not let it go. Staring at the monitor in the archive suite, I located the raw video file submitted by the anonymous uploader. I dragged the file into our forensic editing software and zoomed in on the upper-right quadrant of the frame, focusing on the tiny window of the parking garage guard booth. On the small screen inside the booth, the baseball game was playing.
I opened a second window on the terminal and pulled up the official sports broadcast logs from Tuesday night. The game had been delayed by a sudden rainstorm, pushing the first pitch back to 7:35 PM. I cross-referenced the play-by-play data with the visual feed. The specific home run shown on the guard booth’s TV in the deepfake had occurred at exactly 9:42 PM. The uploader had burned a fake timestamp of 7:15 PM into the top corner of the video to create the illusion of my father taking a bribe during his usual evening walk, neglecting to edit out the television screen in the background.
But why 7:15 PM? I pulled out my phone and looked at my father’s medical records. By 9:42 PM on Tuesday, my father had been admitted to the cardiac care unit at Mercy General after complaining of severe chest pains. He was surrounded by doctors and nurses who could swear he was miles away from that parking garage, hooked up to an EKG machine. The official sequence of events was physically impossible.
The evidence was clear: the video was a deepfake, manufactured to place my father at a scene he could not have visited. I prepared to copy the logs to a thumb drive, but as I glanced at the raw file’s system properties, a new detail caught my attention. The upload had not come from an external network. The metadata showed the file had been uploaded directly to our server from a local terminal.
I opened the network traffic logs, my fingers flying across the keyboard as I tried to trace the source IP address before the system flagged my unauthorized access. The upload session had been initiated from a computer on the second floor-inside the newsroom itself. Someone within KBL-TV had bypassed the external firewalls to plant the video. Before I could download the terminal ID to prove who was at the desk, the screen flashed red, and the terminal logged me out. The network administrator had finally deactivated my badge, leaving me in the dark with the proof trapped on the server.