7:14 a.m. I opened my eyes. Something that looked like his hand glided across my chest—only it wasn’t his hand. Too loud. Too tired. I rolled over. He smiled. As if nothing had happened, without a single blink. In hindsight, that smile was flawless. Deepfake-perfect.
While my husband was away on a business trip, I opened the bedside drawer. Dust and its stale scent. My fingertips brushed against a flat, black USB, cracked along the edge. Three seconds to plug it in. A smell rose—plastic scorched to a sticky vapor. The laptop fan whirred, cool air grazing my hand. The black screen flickered. Half a second of trembling. I held my breath.
The first file name appeared: 2020-05-08_shower_001. Double-click. There was my face. Below the neck—someone else’s body entirely. Water droplets rolled. Each sway of her breasts mixed with fragments of my voice: a gasp, a sigh. And that was only the beginning. Thirty-seven folders in all, each labeled with date and clothing: 2022-11-03_swimsuit, 2023-02-14_lace, 2023-07-08_school-uniform. The newest file: 2024-03-21—my birthday. On-screen, “I” smiled in nothing but lingerie before the candles, a phantom hand stroking my hair instead of holding a match.
That night my husband asked if I’d ever seen a deepfake. I laughed inside. He asked me, but he already knew the answer.
Inside the USB lurked another hidden folder: _backup. The odor intensified—his scent, the scent of his room. Files numbered 0001.mp4 to 0420.mp4. I pressed play.
Our bed. The same bed. On it lay a woman wearing my face. His breathing was recorded, close and ragged. His hand filled the frame, each fingertip grazing the woman’s chest. Every touch made her flinch. Every half-second the image shook. He moved his hand again and again. That night he finished alone three times—12 minutes 17 seconds. Three days later, another video.
I ran to the bathroom and retched. The sound of water boiling. In the mirror my eyes were red, but not from tears. Under the fluorescent light my face overlapped with the deepfake: same eyes, same nose, but the mouth was different. He wanted my lips, not my voice.
Night fell; my husband returned. The same smell clung to his clothes. I asked, “Do you love me?”
“Of course,” he said, stroking my cheek, fingers grazing the skin behind my ear—the same hand that had roamed my digital breasts hours earlier.
That night I closed my eyes, yet behind my lids his hand kept moving. Three seconds to plug in a USB, ten years of a lie already plugged in. Lying in bed, I asked myself:
What version of me was so perfect that he never needed to touch the real one?