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.