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deepfake
A thriller about the power of technology to weaponize our darkest instincts.
A brilliant loner, Etta Baldwin, 17, has been surviving in the underground of Berlin since she fled from foster care four years ago, using her self-taught computer skills to support herself. She has a favorite café where she works, and she sleeps in abandoned buildings throughout the city.
When the charismatic Loulou walks into her life, Etta lets her guard down and goes with Loulou to meet her “family.” The V live in a derelict amusement park, where father-figure Milan provides all the guidance and care his followers need. Etta finds acceptance and love, and lends her hacking skills and deepfake manipulations to the group’s subversive activities.
But as violence and chaos spread because of the manufactured reality created by her videos, she starts to question Milan’s true intentions, and the allure of the V begins to wear off.
With the world tumbling toward war, Etta tries to stop the juggernaut she has created . . . and finds herself in the crosshairs of the people she had come to think of as family.
A brilliant loner, Etta Baldwin, 17, has been surviving in the underground of Berlin since she fled from foster care four years ago, using her self-taught computer skills to support herself. She has a favorite café where she works, and she sleeps in abandoned buildings throughout the city.
When the charismatic Loulou walks into her life, Etta lets her guard down and goes with Loulou to meet her “family.” The V live in a derelict amusement park, where father-figure Milan provides all the guidance and care his followers need. Etta finds acceptance and love, and lends her hacking skills and deepfake manipulations to the group’s subversive activities.
But as violence and chaos spread because of the manufactured reality created by her videos, she starts to question Milan’s true intentions, and the allure of the V begins to wear off.
With the world tumbling toward war, Etta tries to stop the juggernaut she has created . . . and finds herself in the crosshairs of the people she had come to think of as family.
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About the author
Alex Schuler
13 books12 followersAlex Schuler is a pseudonym for the writing team of William Roetzheim and Randy Becker. William started his career as an early pioneer in the field of AI software development. His systems have been deployed on Navy ships, submarines, and NASA space shuttles, as well as by businesses and government agencies. After launching multiple software companies, William turned his attention to the arts and became an award-winning playwright, poet, and published author. Randy is an Emmy-nominated producer who began his career as an actor starring in film, television, and on Broadway (including the Tony Award–winning play Love! Valour! Compassion!). He now expresses his creativity through writing and producing.
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February 18, 2025
Deepfake by Alex Schuler and Leigh Ritter is not only a deeply engrossing novel, but it’s also extremely well-timed given current uses of AI and issues around the world. It took me into a fascinating fictional world at the same time it gave me significant insights into current news media.
Set in Berlin in modern times, the story focuses on computer technology and human nature, the effects of modern communication systems and the values of both family and community. It combines the naiveté of young people; the way they and society in general can be manipulated by drugs, alcohol, charismatic individuals and misinformation; and the power of community, of belonging, to accomplish both good and evil.
Main character Etta Baldwin is a self-taught computer genius, the abandoned child of a woman who commits suicide, a father who abruptly stops visiting her in an orphanage, and foster parents whose only gifts are one telling her she has to learn to take care of herself and another giving her computer access.
Despite her age and her self-education, “Her touch was all over the internet, in the HTML of popular websites, on online RPGs where her code—purchased by developers—allowed digital avatars to move like real people. … She had taken pieces of society, of her observations, and translated those into code that fed into the digital realm until her invisible influence was present in every corner of it” (7).
She works in a café that’s open 24 hours a day and never spends more than three nights in the same place. “People hired her to clean up the digital stains splattered over their reputations like the black hat equivalent of a crime scene cleaner. They understood her ability to polish the tarnished names of the rich and famous, to protect them from being deplatformed and ostracized, and they understood how quickly she could turn those same skills against them.
“It occurred to her once how strange it was, as an outcast living on the fringes of society, that she was the one tasked with fixing the faults in others’ lives (31).
Other key characters are a charismatic leader, Milan, who mesmerizes a “family” of young people, two of the young people in that community, and a Turkish writer who works in the same café Etta does. The plot involves red herrings and twists, and the descriptions are vivid:
“…their encounter would be a memory she could return to at night, roll over like a heavy marble in her hand, marveling at its comfortable weight” (41).
“Terje’s code read like a melody. He layered detail over a framework already present in his system … The majesty of it drew Etta closer, like an artist seeing a Van Gogh for the first time …” (91).
“The camera —her lens and everything it demanded— in her pocket turned into a useless chunk of metal”(178).
“… she believed her mistake lay instead in assuming the sound of a bullet piercing flesh rang as loudly as its consequences. … she quickly learned the truth. It was like pulling the tab on a can of soda or the first kernel of popcorn cracking open in the microwave” (338)>
Spoiler alert. Full plot details follow.
Etta is a loner, innocent in many ways and unconnected, although she entertains herself by tracking a man who also uses the café as an office. After a year of hacking into his computer and learning enough to know the basics about his life, she sees Yusuf Ayden as a companion and fantasizes about him until a woman she’s seen at a rave—Etta was there by chance to collect a new computer—seeks her out at the café and talks her into going to Milan’s collective. He’s a tall man with a commanding presence who she also saw at the rave selling drugs, but in a brief moment, watching him, “She felt equal parts awed and intimidated by this man who was both elevated and unattainable” (5).
Gradually drawn to a group that welcomes her, Etta joins the family and begins doing IT work for Milan along with Terje, also tall and very good looking. They develop a relationship although Etta is very much under the spell of the woman who recruited her, LouLou. When she learns from Milan that she was sought out because of her skills and her development of a particularly amazing program, Wechselkind, not by a connection with LouLou, she is angry, but he encourages her to join their cause which is to fight the “sinners” that rule their world and the “criminals” the sinners invite. Telling her the “criminals murdered your mother” he says, We’ll start the war that destroys them both, pit the foreign criminals against the rich liars. … Help me and I will help you burn everyone of them until our clothes are blackened with their ash” (135).
Etta works hard, even using her saved money to buy food for the family when they need it, and she stays focused on earning Milan’s approval. When he says they need to predict an event and give the public a face, his face, as the prophet and savior, “Etta went back to what she did best: she spun a story, one even she could believe despite her suppressed concern” (172).
She publishes enough complaints about working conditions that disadvantage Turks, to provoke them to riot, causing Germans to see Milan as the seer who knows that the Turks and other immigrants are ruining their country, totally ungrateful for the opportunities being there gives them. Etta uses her program to turn a small crowd and a confrontation between a cop and a boy into a video of a mob scene which goes viral. As violence in the area of the coffee shop escalates, Etta thinks of Yusef and finds him cleaning a seriously damaged store. He recognizes her which increases her agitation and after exchanging names, she turns to leave. He stops her long enough to give her an apple, saying, “This world is hard enough. The least we can do is make it a bit easier for each other” (221).
This helps Etta realize, “Wechselkind had been Milan’s sword in the stone, pulled free to grant him kingship. Now, only Wechselkind was sharp enough to cut off his head and only Etta could wield it” (230). LouLou is failing physically at this point, and she agrees that they should leave. At the last Terje doesn’t come, and the girls are chased by guards through water, but get away. They hide in an abandoned building while Etta cleans her up IT gear and LouLou calls news outlets to sell her story but is rejected. When Etta takes them to Yusef’s and LouLou realizes they are with Turks, she sneaks back to Milan. Terje warns Etta that she isn’t safe, and she goes to him, finding him fatally wounded and watching a video of LouLou and a guard holding Yusef while another woman from the family kills Yusef’s pregnant wife, beating and then stabbing her.
The video of that goes viral, Milan using it to blame the Turks for the righteous anger of the Germans which creates behavior like killing Yusef’s wife and the rationale for driving the immigrants out of Germany. Etta’s response is to wipe the records of Yusef off all sites and to build a video of him reviving his wife, bringing her back to life, being the savior who cares about others. This video also goes viral and Yusef becomes a rival to Milan, one seeking violence, the other peace, community and care. People begin to support Yusef’s ideas and to be helpful to others. Milan pushes on with his message of fighting, but agrees to meet with Yusef privately. Knowing that he will die, Yusef goes carefully wired for Etta to film what happens with sound. Milan shoots Yusef, and tells crowds it was self defense at about the same time Etta releases the video throughout Europe via the network of a man she’s worked for. She also releases data that shows Milan’s lies and criminal past. He, LouLou, the guard, and Monika go to jail. Etta, alone again, attends Yusef’s funeral, thinks she sees his wife in the crowd, and finds that she feels connected to the world around her rather than estranged as before. She has no plan, but she envisions a future where she will need to step up again, to fight evil and promote good.
Set in Berlin in modern times, the story focuses on computer technology and human nature, the effects of modern communication systems and the values of both family and community. It combines the naiveté of young people; the way they and society in general can be manipulated by drugs, alcohol, charismatic individuals and misinformation; and the power of community, of belonging, to accomplish both good and evil.
Main character Etta Baldwin is a self-taught computer genius, the abandoned child of a woman who commits suicide, a father who abruptly stops visiting her in an orphanage, and foster parents whose only gifts are one telling her she has to learn to take care of herself and another giving her computer access.
Despite her age and her self-education, “Her touch was all over the internet, in the HTML of popular websites, on online RPGs where her code—purchased by developers—allowed digital avatars to move like real people. … She had taken pieces of society, of her observations, and translated those into code that fed into the digital realm until her invisible influence was present in every corner of it” (7).
She works in a café that’s open 24 hours a day and never spends more than three nights in the same place. “People hired her to clean up the digital stains splattered over their reputations like the black hat equivalent of a crime scene cleaner. They understood her ability to polish the tarnished names of the rich and famous, to protect them from being deplatformed and ostracized, and they understood how quickly she could turn those same skills against them.
“It occurred to her once how strange it was, as an outcast living on the fringes of society, that she was the one tasked with fixing the faults in others’ lives (31).
Other key characters are a charismatic leader, Milan, who mesmerizes a “family” of young people, two of the young people in that community, and a Turkish writer who works in the same café Etta does. The plot involves red herrings and twists, and the descriptions are vivid:
“…their encounter would be a memory she could return to at night, roll over like a heavy marble in her hand, marveling at its comfortable weight” (41).
“Terje’s code read like a melody. He layered detail over a framework already present in his system … The majesty of it drew Etta closer, like an artist seeing a Van Gogh for the first time …” (91).
“The camera —her lens and everything it demanded— in her pocket turned into a useless chunk of metal”(178).
“… she believed her mistake lay instead in assuming the sound of a bullet piercing flesh rang as loudly as its consequences. … she quickly learned the truth. It was like pulling the tab on a can of soda or the first kernel of popcorn cracking open in the microwave” (338)>
Spoiler alert. Full plot details follow.
Etta is a loner, innocent in many ways and unconnected, although she entertains herself by tracking a man who also uses the café as an office. After a year of hacking into his computer and learning enough to know the basics about his life, she sees Yusuf Ayden as a companion and fantasizes about him until a woman she’s seen at a rave—Etta was there by chance to collect a new computer—seeks her out at the café and talks her into going to Milan’s collective. He’s a tall man with a commanding presence who she also saw at the rave selling drugs, but in a brief moment, watching him, “She felt equal parts awed and intimidated by this man who was both elevated and unattainable” (5).
Gradually drawn to a group that welcomes her, Etta joins the family and begins doing IT work for Milan along with Terje, also tall and very good looking. They develop a relationship although Etta is very much under the spell of the woman who recruited her, LouLou. When she learns from Milan that she was sought out because of her skills and her development of a particularly amazing program, Wechselkind, not by a connection with LouLou, she is angry, but he encourages her to join their cause which is to fight the “sinners” that rule their world and the “criminals” the sinners invite. Telling her the “criminals murdered your mother” he says, We’ll start the war that destroys them both, pit the foreign criminals against the rich liars. … Help me and I will help you burn everyone of them until our clothes are blackened with their ash” (135).
Etta works hard, even using her saved money to buy food for the family when they need it, and she stays focused on earning Milan’s approval. When he says they need to predict an event and give the public a face, his face, as the prophet and savior, “Etta went back to what she did best: she spun a story, one even she could believe despite her suppressed concern” (172).
She publishes enough complaints about working conditions that disadvantage Turks, to provoke them to riot, causing Germans to see Milan as the seer who knows that the Turks and other immigrants are ruining their country, totally ungrateful for the opportunities being there gives them. Etta uses her program to turn a small crowd and a confrontation between a cop and a boy into a video of a mob scene which goes viral. As violence in the area of the coffee shop escalates, Etta thinks of Yusef and finds him cleaning a seriously damaged store. He recognizes her which increases her agitation and after exchanging names, she turns to leave. He stops her long enough to give her an apple, saying, “This world is hard enough. The least we can do is make it a bit easier for each other” (221).
This helps Etta realize, “Wechselkind had been Milan’s sword in the stone, pulled free to grant him kingship. Now, only Wechselkind was sharp enough to cut off his head and only Etta could wield it” (230). LouLou is failing physically at this point, and she agrees that they should leave. At the last Terje doesn’t come, and the girls are chased by guards through water, but get away. They hide in an abandoned building while Etta cleans her up IT gear and LouLou calls news outlets to sell her story but is rejected. When Etta takes them to Yusef’s and LouLou realizes they are with Turks, she sneaks back to Milan. Terje warns Etta that she isn’t safe, and she goes to him, finding him fatally wounded and watching a video of LouLou and a guard holding Yusef while another woman from the family kills Yusef’s pregnant wife, beating and then stabbing her.
The video of that goes viral, Milan using it to blame the Turks for the righteous anger of the Germans which creates behavior like killing Yusef’s wife and the rationale for driving the immigrants out of Germany. Etta’s response is to wipe the records of Yusef off all sites and to build a video of him reviving his wife, bringing her back to life, being the savior who cares about others. This video also goes viral and Yusef becomes a rival to Milan, one seeking violence, the other peace, community and care. People begin to support Yusef’s ideas and to be helpful to others. Milan pushes on with his message of fighting, but agrees to meet with Yusef privately. Knowing that he will die, Yusef goes carefully wired for Etta to film what happens with sound. Milan shoots Yusef, and tells crowds it was self defense at about the same time Etta releases the video throughout Europe via the network of a man she’s worked for. She also releases data that shows Milan’s lies and criminal past. He, LouLou, the guard, and Monika go to jail. Etta, alone again, attends Yusef’s funeral, thinks she sees his wife in the crowd, and finds that she feels connected to the world around her rather than estranged as before. She has no plan, but she envisions a future where she will need to step up again, to fight evil and promote good.
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