Heller and Shannon: Bait and coincidences

"Whatchya doin'?" Heller asked after Shannon curled up with her laptop after dinner.

"I am messing around with a photo on Photochop" Shannon said.

"I heard of Photochop but never saw anyone use it" Heller said as he stood beside Shannon.

"Pull up a chair and watch" Shannon suggested companionably, not that she thought it would be any more exciting than watching paint dry.

Shannon had been mulling over in her mind how she was going to fiddle with the photo. First of all, she wanted more of the girl in the picture and less of the background. Shannon wanted the girl to "pop" out of the busy background.

The other thing Shannon wanted to do was to modify the photo enough that a casual image search would not unearth the original.

First of all, Shannon snipped the "girl" of of the image. Then she tipped the tones slightly to the "pink" side and then bumped up the color saturation a few percent.

The young woman still seemed too plain, too pedestrian to Shannon so she tried stretching her and making her a little bit taller and more willowy.

Shannon then took the background and reduced the color saturation and added a slight blurring to it to make it look further away. Then Shannon pasted the girl's image back on the background and checked her work.

Not happy, Shannon halved the pink-tint, then turned it down to a quarter.

Heller watched with interest.

"This is where it gets a little bit trickier" Shannon told Heller. "I want it harder for people to find the original image and that means I need to change the edges more."

Gary was one of the young men in the group of business professionals and he was in IT and he had once shared some of the AI search algorithms that were used by deeper-than-Google searches. Gary claimed that it was very efficient to convert the edges into four strings-of-values based on percentage of length. Then the four edges could be compared to the four edges of the other photos and it was easy to check for flipped and resized images.

Shannon didn't know how hard her targets would research her but she had a suspicion that some of the targets were powerful people who would not appreciate being trifled with. The searching might very likely happen after the sting.

Heller scratched his head a bit. "Can you put a building in the background?" he asked.

Shannon said "That might be a bit much. I really like the plants and garden stuff. It sets the tone I am looking for."

"How about one of those wooden structures, the ones made with lattice?" Heller asked.

"I don't have any pictures like that" Shannon said. Not having internet really sucked.

"I got a truck. We both have cameras on our phones. It is still light outside. Let's go find some backgrounds" Heller said.

And that is what they did.

***

"Dear Mr Paul Andrews:

I am in my last year of University at University of Indonesia near Jakarta.

My Major Professor suggested that I contact you. He met you while on sabbatical in the United States many years ago. He was impressed by your broad knowledge and by the fact that many important people value your advice.

Please accept my request to be one of your connections.

Sincerely

Anita Santosa"

***

After uploading the image and text on the computer in the Ionia library and sending the request to Paul Andrews, Shannon logged off of "Anita's" new Pluggedin account and then logged into her own. She noticed that she had several notices on Pluggedin.

Opening up one of the messages she saw Pluggedin had a recommendation for a connection.

"Shannon, add Shelquia Washington to your connections. You have two shared connections and one shared interest"

Shannon generally ignored the requests but the name "Shelquia Washington" vaguely rang a bell.

Shannon pulled up Shelquia's profile and saw that she was the Diversity, Inclusion and Equality director in her Credit Union's HR department. The fact that they were both affiliated with the Credit Union accounted for the shared interest.

Curious about the connections she shared, Shannon skimmed through the list and saw that Shelquia knew Ce'Diff and Paul Andrews. The connection with Ce'Diff was recent. In fact, it was shared the same date as the first working day after the group had returned from river rafting.

Shannon's eyes widened as she worked out the mental math and counted out the days. Then her eyes narrowed.

Shannon didn't believe in coincidences.