Harry zoomed in. Fearing that the cops would return and bust him, he’d snapped rapidly. Luckily the shot on his screen was perfect: Deion’s football helmet, dented and bloody, in front of a buckled locker door sprayed with his name.

He cropped the image, used a filter to up the contrast and give the shot more kick, then saved the result. Next he watched the video. The audio was poor and the picture full of long shadows cast by harsh light through the torn roof, but you could tell what was going on, including a clear view of Deion tilting off the trolley.

When the clip ended, Harry opened a video-editing app. He’d played around with making videos for years so his fingers dabbed and swiped artfully. Harry brought up the brightness, and applied an anti-shake algorithm to his footage.

Sound was more of a battle, but he managed to damp the hallway echo and tinker with the frequency balance, so that voices were clearer and you could hear the eerie drips of water close to the microphone. To avoid getting ripped off, he added a semi-opaque graphic in the top right corner of the footage that read © Harry Smirnov.

Harry popped his head above the desks when he heard footsteps out in the hall, but nobody stepped in. Back at the screen, he watched his three minutes of enhanced, shake-free, footage. It was good, but few folks had the patience to watch three minutes of anything, so he cut two edited versions.

The first was a thirty-second highlight reel, showing Deion screaming as he got lifted off the ground, him being dropped and then ending on his threat to sue. The second was a zoomed eight-second clip of Deion being tipped off the stretcher, then kicking the medic with his giant leg. Zooming meant the footage was blurry, but the light glistening off Deion’s burnt body gave it serious impact.

Harry rendered the videos before pushing the two shorter clips to YouTube. The local phone masts were swamped and the upload bar crept, even though he had a solid 5G signal. Once they were online, he made a short entry on his Rock Spring Neighbourhood News website: Amazing footage of the aftermath. More later! Then he posted the video clips to Reddit, Facebook and a few other spots where he thought they’d get attention.

The clips instantly clocked a dozen views and Harry trembled less and smiled more as he surfed websites, grabbing email addresses for the news desks of Las Vegas’s three local TV stations, plus a couple of prominent Vegas news and tourist websites. He opened voice and quietly dictated an email.