Page 43 of The Five Year Lie

He shakes his head. “Not until my buddy looks into the, uh, data we gave him. And not until I can spend some more time withthat tape. I fell asleep on my keyboard last night.” He pulls his coffee out from under the machine the second it beeps.

“I almost fell asleep on that printout you gave me. Did you actually think I could read that thing?”

“Not easily,” he admits. “But there are patterns.”

“That thing broke my brain. But I kept seeing one word everywhere, but I need you to explain it to me. What is LiveMatch?”

His coffee cup halts halfway to his mouth. And then he glances shiftily away from me. “You saw that, huh?”

“It’s on, like, fifty different pages. But what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Exactly what I said.” He’s irritated now. “He used that query a lot, but I don’t know any applications by that name. I googled it, too,and all I could find is some kind of app for watching cricket games.”

I’d done exactly the same thing. “I thought the whole network was your responsibility, though. How can you not know what it is?”

“Calm down. Back then, I was working on video compression. I didn’t get the cybersecurity job until after your father died and Bryan quit. But there’s nothing called LiveMatch on the network anymore.”

“You’re sure?”

“I searched the live network. If it was ever there, it’s gone now.”

I hope he’s not bullshitting me, because it’s not like I can check. “What do you think it was, though? He searched for it a lot.”

Zain’s comical eyebrows dip. “Seems like he was looking for some kind of AI program.”

“That’s... artificial intelligence? Is that something we do at Chime Co.?”

“No, it isn’t. Because feeding our customers’ videos into an AI engine would be shady as fuck.”

His tone makes it impossible for me to decide if he believes that or if he’s just spouting off the company rules. “Why is it shady?”

“Think about it—we capture millions of faces every day. If you had a neural network of linked video cameras, you could track people wherever they went, all across the network.”

“Oh.”That does sound shady. “But that’s what Drew was looking for? Why?”

His shrug is grumpy. “Maybe he was a corporate spy, hoping we had some cutting-edge AI tech he could steal.”

Aspy. I slept with a spy. “Call me if you get any updates from your friend. Day or night.”

“You know it. Let’s find out who this guy really was.”

When I head home in the afternoon, I find Buzz and my mother reading in her den. Frog and Toad, of course. My mother even has her own copy of the book.

“Mama!” Buzz shouts when I put my head into the room. Then he slides out from under my mother’s arm and scoots off the sofa. “You’re home.” He collides with my hip and squeezes me around the waist.

“Hi, baby.” I drop my hand to the soft hair at the nape of his neck and run my fingers through it. “I thought you might want to come grocery shopping with me. If Grandma doesn’t need her car for an hour.”

My mother closes the book and rises. “Of course you can have the car.” She’s dressed impeccably, as always, in pressed khaki pants and a floral top. The pearls in her earrings match the warmest silver tones in her hair. But I’m startled by how tired she looks.She’s a little pale, and her carefully applied makeup can’t conceal the circles under her eyes.

Maybe insomnia is contagious.

She goes to the kitchen for her car keys, and Buzz and I follow. I don’t own a car, because keeping my expenses low is how I perpetuate the myth that I’m an independent adult.

“Can we get fruit pops? And a chicken pot pie for dinner?” Buzz asks as my mother hands me the keys.