Conversations on a Balcony
88
Kara was in the middle of a phone conversation when Cat knocked lightly on her open door and came in to sit on the couch, setting her iPad on the coffee table with a sigh. The older woman rubbed her hands over her face and leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees and lacing her fingers together in front of her.
The Kryptonian frowned and leaned forward in her chair, sensing, just as much as seeing, her wife's upset. "Hey, Lilly? Sorry, can I call you back? Great. Thanks." She hung up and quickly moved across the office to the older woman. "What is it?" she asked softly.
Without a word, Cat got up and took her hand to draw her out onto her balcony. As they sat down again, she set her iPad on the rattan coffee table and hit play on a video. It was labelled My Night with Supergirl. As the video played, the hero's eyes widened, and she shook her head in complete and utter disbelief. What Kara assumed were the more… explicit… parts of the video were blurred out, but the face of the Supergirl in it was clearly hers and where it wasn't blurred, it was definitely her super suit. The dialog was also bleeped, but it was easy for her to see that what the Supergirl was saying had a lot of expletives as she performed certain acts on her partner.
"What the ACTUAL HELL?!" she exclaimed, looking at her wife. Cat's eyes were closed, and Kara quickly took the iPad to turn the video off. "Cat," she said gently. "Are you ok?"
"What IS this, Kara?" the older woman asked, voice choked. "How… how did they… how is this possible? How does that woman look exactly like you? Kara…" She shook her head, breath hitching with upset.
"Cat," Kara said, her tone remaining gentle as she cupped her wife's face between her hands and looked into her eyes. "Baby, you know that's not me, right?"
Cat nodded, moving into her arms and sniffling against her neck. "Of course, I know it's not you, but what the fuck is this? Another doppelganger?"
"I honestly don't know," the Kryptonian replied. Then she got her phone out of her pocket and hit a contact. She hugged Cat closer as she waited for it to be answered. "Alex, hey. Cat and I need your help please."
"Of course," Alex replied. "What do you need?"
"There's a video going around… it's porn I guess, but the actor looks EXACTLY like me and is wearing a very convincing replica of my suit. Would it be possible to track down who made it and stuff?"
"Um…" the director cleared her throat. "Kara, I'll need you to be a bit more specific. There are thousands of Supergirl porn videos in circulation."
The Kryptonian blinked. "Wh-what? Are you serious? Thousands?"
Cat couldn't help but laugh at the horrified look on her wife face as Alex chuckled softly. "Yeah, she's quite the popular fetish."
"Oh my God," Kara said, covering her eyes with her hands as her cheeks turned red. "Ok… um… well, it's called My Night with Supergirl. Cat can forward you the link."
The older woman nodded and popped open a new email to her sister-in-law. She pasted the link into it and hit send. "Just sent it now."
After a moment, Alex hummed a little. "Got it. Ok…" There was quiet for a moment and then Alex cleared her throat again. "Wow… that's… um… realistic…"
The Kryptonian groaned unhappily. "Alex… it's awful. We're really upset."
"And rightly so," the director replied gently. "This is most definitely a deep fake."
"Oh… right…." Cat spoke up. "I've heard about that. It's where someone takes a legitimate video and uses deep learning technology and pre-captured images of someone to basically replace the original actor with that someone. I mean… it's not like there aren't thousands of hours of footage and public images of Supergirl to draw from."
"Right," Alex agreed. "I'll analyze the video layers and see what I can find out."
"Thanks, Alex," Kara said gratefully. "And… um… I'd appreciate it if you could keep this on the down low."
"Honey, this video has a couple million views. I'm afraid that ship has sailed."
"Oh my God…" Kara groaned. "Can Supergirl like, put out a statement about it being a fake or something?"
Her wife chuckled softly. "If you do that, the video will just get millions more views as people go to see what all the fuss is about. My recommendation to Supergirl would be to just say nothing while we figure out who did it and then pay them a visit."
Kara nodded and then sighed. "Sometimes I REALLY wish I could throw people into space."
"I know," the director said. "I'll get as much info as I can and let you know. Hang in there, Kara."
Alex hung up and Kara groaned softly. "A deep fake porn video of me. Must be a Tuesday."
And Cat just sighed.
A/N: I was reading up on deep fakes so OF COURSE I had to put it in a chapter!
