“No offense, but how do I know I can trust you?” I asked, lowering the umbrella as a flood of memories starring Adam and Deena flashed before me. “I want to, but right now I’m afraid to believe anyone.” Closing my eyes, I tried to erase them from my mind.

“I understand. There’s probably nothing I can say to prove I have your best interests at heart, but I promise I used to be just like you, and all I want is to be your friend.”

“I don’t think friends are possible.”

The corners of her mouth turned down, and my heart ached for hurting her, but I didn’t trust my instincts anymore.

“I know it’s hard to believe, but they are.” She sighed. Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a weathered news article encased in plastic and slid it toward me. “Maybe this will help.”

At first, I was taken by the picture of her in her younger days, posing on a red carpet, flashbulbs illuminated behind her. I scanned the headline.

CRYSTAL HARRISON SHOCKER:
I’M DISCONNECTING

“It wasn’t my choice,” she said. “I was forced out. I got involved with the wrong people—there was an affair with a musician. I’m not proud of it. At the time, AI was just getting popular, people were becoming dependent upon it. My husband was a Corporate, and he was so scandalized by my infidelity he threatened to ruin my reputation. He had the power to make the world believe anything he wanted. He could change my backstory, turn me into a prostitute, a pornographer. His plan was to slowly poison people’s minds against me until they thought I was a virus. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but eventually people would start to believe. I didn’t want to go down that way—without my reputation, I was nothing—so I went out on my own terms.”

“How could he turn the world against you, though? What about your fans? Wouldn’t they find the truth?”

“Nobody has that much energy.” She shrugged. “People believe their Network feeds, everything their AI tells them. Truth is based on the collective opinion of an audience, not cold, hard facts. Majority rules. Even people who don’t blindly go along with the masses, who take time to research, can’t find correct information. Everything online has been tampered with. It’s all propaganda, legend. If you want the truth, you have to consult the original source, and that is becoming impossible to find. 3-D printers reprint artifacts so they can be in several places at once, but with each replication, the truth changes slightly. It’s the same with text. There are minute changes with every duplication until the truth is buried. No information is safe.”

“So we’re all living a lie,” I said. At least I’m not alone in that.