Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 219: The Base Layer Was Never Online

He Xiufen pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer, the edges still hot.

"Three institutions. Only one has both qualifications." She crossed out two names with her pen. "Jiangzhou Mingjian Judicial Appraisal Center. Electronic data, audiovisual materials—both are in their charter."

"How did you ask?"

"I called them one by one." He Xiufen sat down and picked up her tea mug. "The first said they only do injury assessments, no video. The second said they don't take this kind of work unless the police send it over. Mingjian answered clearly. Four conditions."

"Four conditions."

"One: the test material can't be a screen recording, and it can't be a file saved on your phone. Two: the source of the material has to be documented—preferably with notarized extraction, intact seals, and recorded checksums. Three: two thousand eight hundred per item, five thousand six hundred for two, expedited service extra. Four: the formal opinion letter takes fifteen working days. Whether a screen recording counts—I asked for you. It doesn't."

"Five thousand six hundred." She repeated the number.

"The money shouldn't come from you. Tang Guo is the party; the appraisal fee is hers. It goes through the firm's books; the invoice is issued in the firm's name." He Xiufen folded the paper. "One more thing before you go: if you commission your own appraisal, the first thing the other side says in court is 'unilateral commission.'"

"Then the five thousand six hundred is wasted."

"Not wasted. Spent on the test material, it's not wasted." He Xiufen said. "This morning at nine-thirty, did two lines of text come into your phone?"

She opened the unknown-number text message, barely a line and a half long: The appraisal institution must collect the material itself. The more hands it passes through, the weaker it becomes.

"I agree with that." He Xiufen pushed the phone back. "So the first thing today isn't the appraisal. It's the notary office. Who handled those two items last time?"

"Chengnan Notary Office. Hu Yongnian."

"Go back to him." He Xiufen said. "Call and make an appointment before noon. Don't show up empty-handed."

Shen Zhixia had drafted a one-page letter to the subdistrict office and handed it over. He Xiufen read slowly, stopping at the fifth line. It read: Our side suspects this material was used to produce a fabricated video—

"Delete that."

"Why not write it?"

"Writing the word 'suspect' tells them you don't have anything that proves it's fake." He Xiufen turned the paper over. "You want three things: a list of the filming personnel who were there that day, what each company's footage was used for, and who currently holds the original source material. Once a name lands on paper, there's one more person on that chain. And tomorrow he'll know someone is looking for him."

"What about the card?"

"Names first. The card comes later." He Xiufen said. "A man holding a card—you ask him, he'll give you a hundred answers. Put his name on the list, and he's got one answer left: yes, I was there that day."

She printed a new version, went downstairs to the post office. Registered mail, ten yuan forty at the window. She tore off the receipt, folded it in half, clipped it into her notebook, and added a line at the bottom of the page: 0707, mailed to subdistrict office. Outside the post office, she sat on the steps and called Tang Guo.

"Appraisal fee is five thousand six hundred."

"I'll transfer it."

"You're the party, so it should come from you, but I have to be clear with you—"

"Don't give me that." Keyboard sounds from the other end. "After that black video of mine got boosted, I gained twenty thousand followers. That video earned me this money. I'm spending it to fight that video."

[Thud. The material is tied to whoever's hands it passes through. The paper will say so.]

At two in the afternoon, the small office on the first floor of the Chengnan Notary Office. Hu Yongnian pushed his reading glasses up on his nose.

"What do you need?"

"Extraction of a video."

"Which platform, which account, when was it posted."

"I have the page. Posted July fourth at ten fifty-one in the morning. Account name: 'Jiangzhou Kuaikan.'"

"Purpose."

"For judicial appraisal."

"Identification."

She laid everything out on the desk one by one. He pulled a form from the drawer and filled in the time first. The camera in the corner of the room had been on since she walked in.

"You read the link, I'll click. Don't touch anything."

He turned the notary office's computer around, typed in the address. The page opened. The twenty-one-second thumbnail lay in a black box. He didn't click the comments, didn't log into any account. He moved the cursor to save. The filename was a string of platform-generated numbers, just over three megabytes. He wrote down the save time, the filename, and the play count at that moment—38,400—stroke by stroke on the paper, then opened a checksum tool and generated a string of thirty-odd characters, letters and numbers mixed.

"You don't need to memorize this." He said. "It's on the paper."

The file was written to a new USB drive. He took a bar-coded seal strip from the drawer, affixed it across the seam, stamped the notary office's seal over the joint, and handed her the pen. "Sign along the edge of the seal."

[Thud. With the seal intact, your word is solid.]

She signed her name along the seal's edge, the three characters written more slowly than usual.

One page of extraction record. He read it aloud for her to verify: equipment, time, address, account, play count, checksum, sealing method. Then stamped it and pushed a copy over to her.

"The record is yours today. The notarial certificate takes four working days." He said. "Within those four days, go submit the material. On the day you submit it, have the appraisal institution record the seal's condition upon receipt in their intake record. We'll keep photos of the seal as well."

"Six hundred." He wrote out the fee slip.

She paid at the machine on the first floor and clipped that receipt into her notebook too.

* * *

Mingjian was on the third floor of an old office building in the west of the city. One end of the hallway had a dental clinic; the other end, an accounting firm. Three nameplates hung side by side; the middle one was the smallest.

No one at the front desk. A man around fifty came out from the back room—gray shirt, glasses hanging on a cord at his chest, a red pen still in his hand.

"Submitting material for appraisal."

"Two items." She placed the USB drive, the extraction record, and the notary office's intake receipt on the desk together. "One is a twenty-one-second video extracted from the public page of 'Jiangzhou Kuaikan' on the morning of July fourth. The other is nine seconds, sent to my phone on the evening of July third from an unlisted number. I kept the original file as received."

Gong Shusheng didn't look at the video first. He held the seal strip up to the light, read the serial number against the record, verified the checksum on his machine. Only then did he accept it. Before cutting the seal, he took three photos with his phone.

"The nine-second item, I'll take it." He said. "But its source is your own saved copy. I'll write it that way in the opinion letter. You write it clearly too: when you received it, from what number, whether you altered it."

"Writing it clearly is enough?"

"Writing it clearly is enough." He said. "I only speak for what's in the test material."

One page of intake and material receipt, two items. The seal condition was written plainly: seal intact, bar code matched, checksum matched. One receipt, invoice made out to Jiangzhou Zhengping Law Firm, plus a separate itemized statement: two items, five thousand six hundred.

She folded the statement and asked anyway: "What about expedited?"

"An extra twelve hundred per item, seven-day turnaround." He put the cap on his pen. "Which date are you trying to make?"

She called He Xiufen. The other end answered quickly.

"Expedited is twelve hundred extra per item, opinion letter in seven days."

"Don't." He Xiufen said. "That paper is meant to stand in a courtroom, not at their little meeting. For the meeting, you walk in with the intake record."

"Got it." She hung up and said to Gong Shusheng, "No expediting."

Then he dragged the twenty-one-second clip into the player, played it halfway, hit the spacebar, and began stepping through it frame by frame. On one screen was the image; on the other, lines of data crawled upward.

"The audio first." He stopped at the ninth second. "The audio track lags behind the video by about a third of a second. Then around here it suddenly lines up again. That tells me the sound was added later, and after it was added, someone synced it again."

"The face."

"The face—let me zoom in." He circled the jaw and the ear with the mouse. "There's a fusion edge along this ring. The grain is one level finer than the back of the hand. The hand area—look—coarse grain, uniform size. Those two areas didn't come from one machine in one pass."

"The hands?"

"The hands are real. When the fingertips press the red envelope, there's deformation. The tendon on the back of the hand moves first, then the face catches up—two frames behind." He backed up to the start and stopped on a particular frame. "And here. This frame was used twice. Platform transcoding strips device info; the timestamps won't show their original state. But the seam at these two frames doesn't wash out."

"Then I've got a piece of paper."

"What you have right now is an intake record." He pressed the spacebar. "That was a technical description, not a conclusion. The conclusion goes in the opinion letter, fifteen working days. Get the notarial certificate to me within four days. Don't make me miss my deadline."

She nodded. Before he closed the player, his hand paused on the mouse.

"One more thing, not for the paper." He said. "The base layer of this clip has never been online."

"Which layer?"

"The face layer was compressed twice—it's scraped from the internet. The hands and clothing layer was compressed only once. The grain came from a single machine in one pass. That layer is original footage." He looked at the screen, not at her. "And you can't scrape this angle online. Light comes from the upper left. The camera is slightly higher than your chest, about a meter and a half away. In the frame, both your hands are empty. You're standing and waiting."

She turned that sentence over in her mind.

"Whoever holds that original footage," Gong Shusheng said, "knows how the white-walled room was pasted onto it. That part I can't put on paper."

* * *

The hallway smelled of disinfectant. She stood at the stairwell and called He Xiufen, reading line by line. When she reached the part about the seal condition in the intake record, paper rustled on the other end.

"Remember to write." He Xiufen said. "'Upon preliminary review by the institution, the test material contains the following technical characteristics: audio track offset, fusion traces in the facial region, repeated frames at the seam. The above constitutes a technical description, with the formal appraisal opinion letter as the final authority.'"

"Don't write 'fabricated.'"

"Don't write 'fabricated,' don't write 'Xingyao.'" He Xiufen said. "That paper is still just paper. It only bites once the opinion letter stands behind it."

"What if their meeting comes first."

"Then you walk in with these four things: the intake record, the extraction record, the seal photos, and that technical description. That's enough." He Xiufen said. "The Bar Association still hasn't set a date. What you need now isn't a video. It's a card. The appraiser practically told you where he set the camera—a meter and a half. Think about it yourself. Who was standing within a meter and a half of you that day?"

She got home close to eight. Tang Guo sat cross-legged on the floor, frame-splitting. Her notebook lay open; the screen still showed that smiling face.

"Did you get the paper?"

"Got it." She spread the intake record and the receipt on the coffee table. "Five thousand six hundred. Invoice made out to the firm."

"Money spent is money spent." Tang Guo stared at the paper for a while. "Where's the base footage?"

"I don't know."

She opened her notebook and clipped in the corner cut from the seal strip, the intake record, the fee slip, one by one. Then she turned to the last page and added three lines:

July 7th, submitted two items for appraisal, one page of intake record, three seam points found in preliminary review;

Test material extracted and sealed at Chengnan Notary Office, notarial certificate to be submitted within four working days;

Appraiser's note: the base layer has never been online.

When she finished writing, she left a blank line at the bottom. That line was reserved for a card.