Read Online Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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right at the wrong moment: when you were pushing the button.
If you hack into the image stabilization routines and crank them up, they can scrub most of that motion out, yeah. But that just leaves you with a fairly clear shot of whatever you’ve got in the frame. Which is to say that, when you’re not looking, your aim tends to be off. Big surprise, I know. It turned out we were real good at snapping pics of the floor or the ceiling or our own asses, but hardly ever got what was behind us lined up properly.
Our revolutionary solution, then, was to hook a line or two of code between the phone’s gyroscope and the camera’s shutter, so that the image would only capture when the phone was straight up and down, perfectly vertical, giving it a straight look back.
As for lateral, though, the side-to-side—well, the app was going to be free, right? The only thing that could correct for that would be . . . a Bluetooth tie-in with a near-eye device strung up like a periscope? some infrared sensor to square the phone with the room? a fisheye lens? We could fake the fish-eye trick anyway, just stretch the image, let it distort out, but that wouldn’t change the original field of view, would just suggest it had been wider than it was, and the market was already spilling over with this kind of sleight-of-hand tomfoolery.
Finally we just stole another of RJ’s dad’s garage beers, smuggled it to the bushes, toasted Cedric (the dead, headstoned dog), and started in with the field trials.
The app worked perfectly. Better than we could have dreamed. A thousand people should have thought of this already.
We took turns trying to sneak up on each other, caught ourselves on film each time, without having to look back. And it was good we ran the tests, too, or we never would have figured out to make the flash optional, and, in case there were some legacy phones out there not playing the game (ours did), we fiddled with the autorotate, to keep the image from getting flipped, because, when you’re trying to catch some slender dude ghosting up behind you, you don’t need to be worried about if you’re phone’s upside down or not.
The lateral still sucked, of course, but what we’d lucked into there was that, when the washed-out, black-and-whited image of us playing backdoor ninja was only half in the image, it was approximately eighty- five times creepier.
Score one for the good guys.
So we went back to the drawing board (RJ’s basement room, the door locked), put a fat-fingered toggle on the flash, dialed up the contrast some, and then spent the rest of our last before-school weekend trancing on how to layer in random pics from the phone’s gallery, the same way those ‘zombie yourself’ apps stenciled gore over your face.
The difference there, though, was that those apps were more participatory, always asked you to position your face in the dotted green lines, please, and, even with that kind of help, still, the final image kind of sucked.
The other problem was the random pics being sucked from the phone’s gallery. What if, instead of a snap of your mom cooking hamburgers—we’d just copy her outline over, fill the rest with textured shadow—what if what the app sucked across to pretend was sneaking up behind you, what if it was a pretty sunset, an idyllic windmill?
So we killed hours and many many braincells coming up with just five stock images to bundle in with the app: a girl crawling on the ‘wall,’ a guy just standing there, a hand starting to reach around some corner, a pair of floating eye smudges, and a simple wisp of smoke you could take to be whatever you wanted, or didn’t want. And we figured how to fade them into these ‘takeback’ shots like they’d been there all along. It was spooky as hell.
Except.
One thing you learn, coding, is that there’s always an ‘except.’
It was RJ who stumbled onto it: when you download those stupid rotating wallpaper apps or one of those ‘innocent maze
If you hack into the image stabilization routines and crank them up, they can scrub most of that motion out, yeah. But that just leaves you with a fairly clear shot of whatever you’ve got in the frame. Which is to say that, when you’re not looking, your aim tends to be off. Big surprise, I know. It turned out we were real good at snapping pics of the floor or the ceiling or our own asses, but hardly ever got what was behind us lined up properly.
Our revolutionary solution, then, was to hook a line or two of code between the phone’s gyroscope and the camera’s shutter, so that the image would only capture when the phone was straight up and down, perfectly vertical, giving it a straight look back.
As for lateral, though, the side-to-side—well, the app was going to be free, right? The only thing that could correct for that would be . . . a Bluetooth tie-in with a near-eye device strung up like a periscope? some infrared sensor to square the phone with the room? a fisheye lens? We could fake the fish-eye trick anyway, just stretch the image, let it distort out, but that wouldn’t change the original field of view, would just suggest it had been wider than it was, and the market was already spilling over with this kind of sleight-of-hand tomfoolery.
Finally we just stole another of RJ’s dad’s garage beers, smuggled it to the bushes, toasted Cedric (the dead, headstoned dog), and started in with the field trials.
The app worked perfectly. Better than we could have dreamed. A thousand people should have thought of this already.
We took turns trying to sneak up on each other, caught ourselves on film each time, without having to look back. And it was good we ran the tests, too, or we never would have figured out to make the flash optional, and, in case there were some legacy phones out there not playing the game (ours did), we fiddled with the autorotate, to keep the image from getting flipped, because, when you’re trying to catch some slender dude ghosting up behind you, you don’t need to be worried about if you’re phone’s upside down or not.
The lateral still sucked, of course, but what we’d lucked into there was that, when the washed-out, black-and-whited image of us playing backdoor ninja was only half in the image, it was approximately eighty- five times creepier.
Score one for the good guys.
So we went back to the drawing board (RJ’s basement room, the door locked), put a fat-fingered toggle on the flash, dialed up the contrast some, and then spent the rest of our last before-school weekend trancing on how to layer in random pics from the phone’s gallery, the same way those ‘zombie yourself’ apps stenciled gore over your face.
The difference there, though, was that those apps were more participatory, always asked you to position your face in the dotted green lines, please, and, even with that kind of help, still, the final image kind of sucked.
The other problem was the random pics being sucked from the phone’s gallery. What if, instead of a snap of your mom cooking hamburgers—we’d just copy her outline over, fill the rest with textured shadow—what if what the app sucked across to pretend was sneaking up behind you, what if it was a pretty sunset, an idyllic windmill?
So we killed hours and many many braincells coming up with just five stock images to bundle in with the app: a girl crawling on the ‘wall,’ a guy just standing there, a hand starting to reach around some corner, a pair of floating eye smudges, and a simple wisp of smoke you could take to be whatever you wanted, or didn’t want. And we figured how to fade them into these ‘takeback’ shots like they’d been there all along. It was spooky as hell.
Except.
One thing you learn, coding, is that there’s always an ‘except.’
It was RJ who stumbled onto it: when you download those stupid rotating wallpaper apps or one of those ‘innocent maze
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