Girl

For some time now, I've been mistrusting people. Keep in mind—those you care about may not be who you think they are.

This story started over three weeks ago and still hasn't ended. I don't have many acquaintances, and I don't have any friends at all, except for one—we've been friends since school. After graduation, we went our separate ways, but we still meet once a month for a beer and a chat, discussing the latest news.

And then, about a month ago, we met again at a bar. Over a beer, my friend told me he'd met an amazing girl. My friend had never had problems with the opposite sex before (unlike me), but I'd never seen him so rapt.

"You see, I've never experienced anything like this before," he told me. "It's fate!"

I reassured him with a bit of skepticism—"Just wait, the crush will pass, and you'll see her differently."

Some time passed, and four days ago, my friend dropped by my house one evening, asking me to print out a couple of photos. They showed him and the girl—a blonde and truly beautiful woman—embracing somewhere in the park. He copied the images to my computer, I printed them, and he ran off to his room.

I'm a programmer and I'm currently working on a new image recognition system. The program I wrote can already identify people's faces and their characteristic features (nose shape, ears, moles, etc.) in images, then compare them with others stored in a database, finding similarities and differences. That evening, having nothing better to do, I put their photos into my program.

Thirty seconds later, I watched the results in amazement. The program successfully identified only one face in all the photos—my friend's. It failed to identify his girlfriend's face. I didn't pay any attention to this—such algorithms never guarantee 100% accuracy. Instead of worrying, I dove into troubleshooting my program.

But three days later, the situation was exactly the same. In all the other photos, the program successfully identified people's faces, but in these, it only identified my friend. In desperation, I began to "run" the program step by step.

I'd been poring over one of the photos for several hours, analyzing it pixel by pixel, when I noticed that the pixel colors in the photo didn't match what I was seeing. The colors the program was extracting from the image—80% red and black—didn't match what was actually there. After all, that girl's face was there; she's blonde with green eyes—there was simply no room for so many black and red pixels.

I copied the portion of the image corresponding to her face to another file. When I opened it, I saw what I expected—a smiling girl. But I already knew something was wrong. The hair on the back of my neck had been standing on end for two hours when I decided to isolate just a portion of her face and transfer it to a separate file, inverting the colors. I selected her eye, copied the coordinates into the program, and launched it.

When I opened the file and zoomed in, I nearly fell out of my chair. A completely black eye with a vertical, bright red pupil, surrounded by pale red skin—that's what I saw on the screen. Mustering all my willpower, I continued to reconstruct the original image piece by piece.

When I joined the second portion, with the flattened, inhuman nose, to the existing one and examined the resulting image, I saw a normal human eye and nose. I've learned through experience that only a very small portion of the image reveals the real thing when the "critical mass" of her true appearance accumulates—this creature mimics a human.

It was already three in the morning, but I nevertheless rushed to the phone. My friend answered after a dozen or so rings.

"Hello?" His voice was sleepy.

"Is she with you?" I asked him.

"Who? Are you drunk?"

"Yours. Girlfriend. With you?" I tried to keep my voice from betraying my nervousness.

"Yes, she's here, and you woke her up. What did you want?"

"She's not who she seems. Run away from there."

"Are you crazy? Go get some sleep," he replied and hung up.

I tried to call him back, but the phone was out of range—it must have been switched off.

The next day, I got some bad news. My friend was found this morning with his throat torn out on his own bed...

The people who surround us might not be people at all. Be careful—you might be interacting with one of them every day.