Chapter Text
“Look at this adorable bat!” Martin shoved his phone in Sasha’s face and she raised an eyebrow.
“That thing is definitely AI - look at the wing-claws.”
Martin frowned. “No… I doubt it - Jon sent the photo to me and I don’t even think he knows what AI is, let alone how to use it.”
“Well maybe he got it on the internet.” Sasha shrugged. “People are posting a lot of AI photos these days.”
“Like what, facebook?” Tim sauntered over to Martin’s desk and swiped up the phone in one hand, looking down at it. “I bet if we asked if he had one he’d assume we were talking about some contagious disease.”
“Ahem.” They all turned at the sound of a clearing throat in the doorway. “Aren’t you all supposed to be working?” Jon crossed his arms and furrowed his brow, trying to look as intimidating as possible as the shortest in the Archive by far at 5’ 3’’ compared to the others (Martin at 6’ 3’’, Sasha at 5’ 7’’, Tim at 6’ 0’’, and Elias at 5’ 10’’). He tapped his foot. “It wasn’t rhetorical.”
“Uhm, I was, see, I was…” Martin stammered, his cheeks flushing bright pink.
“Martin was just showing us the picture of the bat you sent him.” Tim finished for him. “And we were trying to figure out where you got it from.”
Jon sighed. “Yes, yes. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown Martin that photo but I thought it was kind of… kind of cute, you know? But anyway it’s from a statement giver who came in earlier this week. They took it on their camera.”
Sasha let out a bark of a laugh. “Jon, I’m sorry to say it but you’ve been tricked. That image is clearly AI.”
Jon frowned. “AI?”
“Artificial Intelligence,” Tim quipped. “She means that the picture is a fake, made of a conglomeration of photos and turned into what the computer ‘thinks’ a bat looks like.”
Jon’s frown deepened. “But they seemed…” he trailed off, agitated and distracted, then turned on his heel and disappeared into the hall. Thirty seconds later he was back with a photograph and he thumped it down onto Martin’s desk with the air of a presenter. “Look. This is a polaroid - I highly doubt your ‘AI’ could have done this.”
It was Sasha’s turn to frown. As the techie of the friend group, she was usually the one to fix broken equipment, be the unofficial IT department of the archives, and hack into the police department or state records if background research on a statement required it and Tim wasn’t able to seduce the answers out of the humans working at those places… And sometimes she’d even hack while he actively seduced people and their backs were turned. All this to say, even Sasha had never heard of AI working on a polaroid. “Hand me that.” She wordlessly picked up the photo and examined it, front and back. It seemed legitimate enough other than the obviously AI generated bat image. Because bats didn’t look like that. She shuddered at the thought. Thank goodness - bats were cute but this… this demonic thing in the image? With the wing claws and the too-big eyes? Not so.
“Maybe it’s a good fake?” Martin was looking over her shoulder and visibly sweating. “Like, maybe they took it to a print shop and asked for polaroid paper or something?”
Sasha held the photo between her forefinger and thumb and scrutinized it carefully, squinting at the ink. “It seems to be a legit polaroid…” she began to mutter, “but maybe they found a way to print onto it?”
Jon tapped his foot impatiently. “Well… I’m going to get back to work as I’ve got a statement to read by the end of the week. You all look into this, I suppose, and make sure it’s legitimate.” He muttered as he stalked back to his office. “If I wasted all that time getting a tape recorder for that darn thing and it turns out it’s a hoax… I’m going to be upset.”