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Future Files
- The Video Proof
Traveling Into the Future
Each month, you can find a new chapter in the ESSENTIAL science-fiction series “Trip into the Future.” In a fictional world where the goals of the Paris climate accord have become a reality, Nero, a blogger, explores the potential technological and social transformation resulting from it. The goal of the series is to play with fully different visions as creatively as possible and to take the reader along on a thought experiment: What might our future look like – and why is it important to us?
Short Science Fiction Stories: Part 9
The Video Proof
“Hi Nero,” my AI assistant Avar greeted me as she began her report. “They’ve solved the murder of soccer player Max Hadrick.” I paused. The case had caused a furor across the country a few days earlier. “There was apparently nothing extraordinary about the motive,” Avar said. “Some kind of family drama. But you might find the circumstances and resolution interesting. They’ve published the thought feed of one of the inspectors who was involved. Should I set it up for you? I nodded and pressed “play” just fractions of a second later.
The roar of the crowd made it hard to hear himself talk. Inspector Lee stood stoically amid the celebrating spectators. He didn’t care about soccer and would probably never understand it. But his German friend, Inspector Kevin Kleinholz, had invited him to a key match-up – the series champions from the past few years in a league dual. There was a gleam in his eyes as he told Lee about it. 3D-Printing Darmstadt versus Freudenberg Frankfurt. The top clubs in the country. The franchises of two of the world’s top companies. And now someone had scored a goal. Lee chewed on the anise stick hanging halfway out of his mouth and looked upward at two dozen giant screens showing the goal from every conceivable angle. There were also screens that transformed the playing field into calibrated lines and computer models. He had no idea what all this was for. He would never understand soccer.
Murder on the Soccer Field?
That’s why he at first gave little thought to the player who collapsed to the ground. There was too much going on — the many confusing holographic boxes hovering over the players’ heads, each displaying statistics of some kind; the turf, which turned into a gigantic advertising message every few minutes, selling the latest fuel cells or cryo snow skis. But then the seven referees ran up to the player, quickly followed by paramedics and paramedic robots. Then the noise around the stadium changed: Thousands of spectators suddenly began speaking aloud with their invisible AI assistants and asking them about newsfeeds. A rumor spread through the stadium like wildfire – murder on the soccer field?
Lee flicked his anise stick to the side and looked at his friend. “Time to go to work?” he asked. Kleinholz shrugged, sighed with frustration, and raised an eyebrow. Lee knew what that meant: His friend was asking for his help.
Missing the Perspective
“How is it possible to capture the game from 50 different camera perspectives, and not a single one recorded what hit him?” Lee asked and elicited another resigned look from Kleinholz. It was the morning after the game, and they had been over everything twice. “But it looks like we are missing the perspective from the 52-degree angle. No camera was positioned for it, and there was no camera drone flying by. None of the players with an ego camera was looking in exactly that direction,” Kleinholz replied with annoyance. Then he tapped on his ear and began talking with his avatar. Lee’s facial expression froze – only his jaw continued to abuse what was now his fifth anise stick of the day. He hated these AI assistants, considering them to be pure gimmickry. A constant distraction. There was a time when people weren’t distracted as easily, back before people had an AI assistant running around in their heads, in the blissful, long-gone era of the smartphone. It had still been possible to put smartphones down.
Lee turned to the holographic wall and inspected the camera installations, the autopsy files, and the first investigative report. He then folded his hands. This was tricky. Something had hit the player. Not a projectile, but rather a wave of heat or a beam. One of these new mini-lasers? But you didn’t die from that. The forensic scientists had discovered something else: The player had apparently been “doped” with an implant. A pump added onto the heart for greater endurance. Definitely a risky intervention and strictly prohibited in high-level sports. For years, the World Anti-doping Agency had called for complete body scans before every competition, but it ran into privacy concerns. Lee let out a breath. As though athletes surrounded by camera drones could expect any personal privacy.
According to the forensics team, the pump malfunctioned, blocking an artery. This was a few minutes before the time of death. A micro valve jammed because a flap had melted. This was a surprise and should not have happened. Valves of this kind were normally guaranteed to survive a million operating cycles. It was a strange error at the worst possible moment…Lee pursed his lips, enlarged the implant and considered the damaged parts. People shouldn’t bet their lives on this kind of advanced technology, he thought. And if there were a connection between his observations? Did someone target and sabotage the implant with a microscopically small laser beam? A 52-degree camera perspective is not going to help us here, Lee thought. What we need is an infrared camera.
He noticed the newsfeed that was downloading information on the upper right of the holographic screen. “Continuing protests in German soccer against the latest instant replay …” Lee turned to Kleinholz who was just tapping his ear again to end his conversation. “Kevin, what’s that all about?” Lee asked, with one eye on the news as he tried to decipher it. His friend looked up briefly and rolled his eyes.
“Oh, that’s been going on for two years. It’s not important. The league wants to introduce something it calls ‘emotional proof,’ which can be used to prove whether a handball or a foul was intended. So many bad decisions are being made and the fans are complaining that soccer isn’t fair, even though more and more replay cameras are being set up. Two dozen referees are analyzing every millisecond of play on the screen. Without the bad calls this season, Darmstadt would be six points higher!”
Lee raised his hand. “I don’t know anything about soccer, Kevin. But how are they supposed to measure this? In the news, there was something about….” He looked look back at the screen.
“High-resolution infrared images,” Kleinholz answered. “Because studies have found that the body temperature rises 0.2° for several milliseconds when someone has a guilty conscience, and one area of the brain in particular becomes active.” “And the tests with these cameras are still running?”
“People have been testing them so nothing will go wrong next season. Everyone seems very satisfied, but the images are not intended for public use. Why are you so interested?” “Get a hold of the images, Kevin. and you have your murderer. Someone who was standing on the sidelines, I am guessing, or who was sitting close to the field. Look through the heat images for a very small, very hot laser beam that scored a direct hit on the player.” Kleinholz immediately looked at Lee with astonishment and began tapping behind his ear. These finger movements used to communicate with AI assistants have long been personal quirks, Lee thought. Then he fished around for another anise stick. It was a good thing that he didn’t have any quirks of his own.
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