The best-known art forgers are driven by ego; the best, period, aren't known. She was possibly — who could ever tell — the most skillful one alive. She was too smart to risk her freedom out of ego but too human not to feel a stab of loneliness every time she had a moment of genius and nobody to share it with.
The Tool — not the name the FBI has chosen for its project, what she called it inside her head — had changed that. It was the most impersonal of programs, simply a way to process sensor data into an analysis of an art piece's probability of being forged, but every time she learned it had flagged as slightly suspicious one of her techniques it gave her a little thrill of intimacy: somebody, even if it was something instead, had seen and understood.
The Tool was very very good; the specter of honesty began to haunt the art world. Between the money and influence suddenly arranged against the Tool and her own role as the project's lead art expert, it was easy for her to shut it down once she decided it was improving too fast and would sooner or later catch up with her.
She still ran a private copy in her workshop for a while as an amusing game and useful tool. But as her own skill kept improving and the Tool remained the same victory felt bittersweet at first and then unbearably sad, so she shut down the Tool and went back to her life before or a copy so precise you could look at it in hundred ways without finding a difference.
(Originally posted on my blog.)