Face Value: The Deepfake Gambit
Summary
When a traumatized PR strategist uncovers a deepfake syndicate’s recruitment game, she and her unlikely allies must race through hacks, betrayals, and cryptic puzzles to save Detroit’s digital soul from obliteration.
In the near-future shadows of Detroit, where every voice and face can be counterfeited, Nicole Yelland is haunted by the digital scam that nearly destroyed her life. Now a hyper-vigilant PR strategist, Nicole’s obsession with verification rituals and digital safety has made her both an outcast and an unlikely hero. When she stumbles onto a cryptic alternate reality game run by the infamous Maskframe Collective—a syndicate weaponizing deepfakes to destabilize corporations and identities—Nicole is thrust into a high-stakes hunt where nothing is as it seems.
Teaming up with Daniel Goldman, a blockchain engineer whose family was nearly wiped out by a voice-cloned imposter, and Jessica Eise, a dryly witty academic-turned-digital-forensics expert whose work is under siege by bot-driven deception, Nicole must navigate a labyrinth of hacks, betrayals, and cryptographic puzzles. As the trio races to decode the Maskframe Collective’s shifting illusions, they’re forced to question not only their digital realities but the very nature of trust itself. With Detroit’s digital core on the brink of being weaponized against its own citizens, Nicole must outwit the enemy—and her own spiraling paranoia—before the city’s identity, and her own, are erased in a tide of manufactured lies.
Inspired by: Deepfakes, Scams, and the Age of Paranoia - https://www.wired.com/story/paranoia-social-engineering-real-fake/