It could fill in the blanks from one image by lifting them from another. If, for example, it saw a given man was wearing blue pants and red shoes in a full view from the front, but noted he had a bald spot in a view from the rear where his legs were obscured, it would add both data points to the full image bank of the individual. Given enough information, the integrator could present the man at any time, from any angle-or subtract him from the scene and let you see the woman behind him who had been hidden from the cameras in real life, producing a view of her built up from her image bank. The integrator could not, of course, show what she had been doing while hidden from view, but it could at least show where she had been.
Indeed, much of what the integrator showed was conjectural. Not every part of the reception had been recorded. There had been any number of times and places where there were no camera images, where a certain amount of guesswork was required of the operator. That led to guessing, of course. And guessing made you wonder. What was everyone up to when they were out of view?
And that was the question that made it all turn paranoid. Subject X was seen leaving room A and then appeared forty seconds later appearing in room B, with no video imagery of what went on in the hallway between. Had X moved in the straight-line direction, as seemed reasonable, or had X done something nefarious the moment he or she was out of camera view? Was forty seconds an unwarranted delay, or was it about as long as the trip should have taken? Was the delay caused by some fiendish part of the plot, or by a call of nature, or just a moment’s pause away from the crush of the crowd?
And was it paranoid to ask such questions? After all, someone in that swirl of visitors had killed Chanto Grieg. Several someones had been involved. Somewhere in the evening, someone had to have done something that he or she would not wish to be observed, and presumably had had the sense to do it out of sight of the cameras. Somewhere in all the delays explained by innocent stops in the refresher, and chance meetings in the hallways, the acts leading up to murder were being hidden.
But where? Where in all the background clutter of people at a party were the guilty acts? The best way to find out seemed to be eliminating all the innocent acts and examining what was left.
So here they were, erasing the innocent from the image trail, in hopes of leaving none but the guilty behind.
It was a tricky job, for the integrator images were not infallible, or even completely realistic. If there were imagery, say, from a camera in a hallway that showed a man entering a room that had no camera, the integrator had no way of knowing what the man did once he was out of camera range. Absent instruction from the operator, the simulacrum of the man in the room would just stand there, in the center of the room, a motionless wooden doll, until such time as the hall cameras picked him up reentering the hall. Then the simulacrum would move, stiff-leggedly, toward the door, melding into real-life imagery as the man came back into camera view.
Even stranger were the half people that flickered into existence here and there-half-seen arms or legs or torsos that the integrator was unable to link to any specific person. It did not exclude them until told to do so.
Half of the images Fredda was seeing were at least in part imaginary. The integrator didn’t care. Given the appropriate data, it was quite happy to present hypothetical-or quite spurious-imagery. It could be instructed to run various versions of events, running through all the possibilities of who went where during the moments they were not actually in view of a camera. Even the hypothetical images were useful in sorting out the possibilities.
By now, with more than half the guests accounted for-and thus eliminated-the images were getting more and more surreal. People were talking to other people who weren’t there anymore. What had been tight clumps of people were now isolated twos and threes.
Computers and robots should have been able to do this job, but no robot or computer had ever been good enough at pattern recognition, at being able to see the whole when looking at only a part. Even their thousands of years of development were no match for the billions of years of human evolution. That was why Fredda had drawn this duty along with Donald. She could see the bit of chin, or the fleeting, partially obscured profile, and say it was the same face she had seen twenty minutes before, allowing the integrator to connect two image sequences as one person. Better still, Fredda knew lots of people’ and was able to identify any number of blurry faces the integrator was not able to match up with its still image identity file.
