The cold night wind slipped in through the cracks in the window, bringing with it the faint worldly scent from the streets—a distinctive smell of a great metropolis, perhaps composed mainly of wastewater, exhaust fumes, and the mingled stench of biological and social decay.
The curtains printed with little pink flowers trembled slightly. The only glowing appliance in the room was the laptop screen, its fluctuating light making the two people before it alternately visible and obscured in the darkness.
Before long, Harley began to find it boring.
She had originally wanted to analyze the psychological states of each murderer and victim for Deathstroke, as well as the different symbols they represented in the various schools of psychology exemplified by Floyd, Descartes, Fechner, and others.
But Deathstroke had opened dozens of playback windows at once, clicked on an entire compilation, and set everything to sixty-four times speed.
At that speed, everyone in the footage was practically reduced to afterimages. Even the different sounds blending together became like the howls of demons in a Nightmare.
Harley could no longer find the joke in it. Like a cat whose catnip high had worn off, she entered a period of lethargy and started dozing beside Su Ming.
That was inevitable. Su Ming had no time to watch these videos with her one by one. What he needed was to review the selected random samples as quickly as possible, summarize the common patterns, and find the meaning Poison Ivy wanted to convey.
Sixty-four times speed was not his limit. It was simply the fastest setting available in Harley's ordinary playback software.
If he had professional computers and software at the Hall of Justice, why would he need to watch any of this? He could just have the mainframe analyze it directly.
But no one