Thomas World (42 page)

Her profile, after all, told the story of her arrival in the United States, of recent great tragedy (her mother's death), and featured a voice recording of Veronika reciting her favorite quote: “Hello, this is Veronika. Welcome to my MySpace page! Remember, in the words of Ernest Hemingway: The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places!”

So whoever Veronika really was, why had she (or he) contacted
me
?

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Veronika first approached me by commenting on my weekly blog, just as Stacey Anne had. But unlike her teen doppelganger, Veronika began to send me emails. Long emails. She told me very little about her schedule of classes at Santa Monica College, or her nights of drinking (subjects you would expect to be on the mind of a drop-dead gorgeous, twenty-one-year-old student in California), and instead wrote how the American Dream was a fantasy:

Actually, your experience in the United States of social mobiity [sic] is becoming increasingly anomalous, and is in fact an [sic] historical anomaly. The United States has never had a particularly high rate of social mobility, and its rate of social mobilization (tracked by the number of people who change social classes) has become the worst in the First World tier of nations in the past 25 years, and its income inequality one of the worst.
In fact, social mobility is an [sic] historical anomaly in general, one created in unique circumstances after the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and the worldwide economic post-World War II boom. The approach Europeans have taken to the issue of class is not to sell the Horatio Alger idea that is so popular in the United States—anybody can grow up to be President! Any poor boy can become Bill Gates!—but rather to strive to create one big middle class. People in Europe are more content because decades of socialist economic policy have redistributed income and created a huge middle class with a very tiny wealthy elite and a very small number of poor people.

And then, when I mentioned the type of novel I was working on (this novel), she wrote this:

I'm a business economics student and most of the books I read are on far less interesting topics such as the federal reserve and the international monetary exchange rates. The idea of the brain as a kind of transceiver (active, not a passive receiver) tuned in to the cosmos is one that can't be proven because we lack the instrumentation to measure what's really going on in the Universe. The picture that is emerging of reality is that what we think of as the “real world”, of course, doesn't exist at all: this is the Matrix. Plato had the right idea when he wrote of our world as the shadow of the real world, rather than reality itself. Those ancient Greeks were pretty smart!

Followed later in the same email by:

As an atheist, I just find the whole idea of a Universe that is so strange and mysterious, a place of waves and particles that doesn't really exist except as a shadow, quite fascinating. Actually, there is a God, but what God is, is what we do not know about the workings of the Universe. So every year, as our knowlege [sic] advances (as we eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge), God becomes a little bit smaller, but will not entirely disappear unless our knowledge becomes total. It's not a personal God, of course; I can testify from my own experience on the golf course that God most definitely does not answer prayers, or else really hates golf. I ask the Creator of the sum total of existence for double eagles and I get double bogeys!

Over the course of a few months I exchanged long emails with Veronika on a wide range of topics including theoretical physics, the future of computing, philosophy, the nature of reality, economics, sociology…just about everything. We enjoyed a lot of the same music. She told me about her love of golf (I am a single-handicap golfer), the many courses she had played; she discussed (at great length) about life in Sweden and how the United States could learn a thing or two from her home culture. She even recommended a film about simulated reality,
eXistenZ
, which I hadn't seen before, and which was heavily inspired by Philip K. Dick's work.

What fascinated me about my contact with Veronika was that I found myself becoming friends with her…or at least who she claimed to be. The subjects of our email conversations were captivating. She claimed to have read many of the books and watched many of the films I loved. And of course I must admit that, deep down, no matter how severe my doubts about her true identity, I wanted to believe she was real. I wanted to believe she really was a twenty-one-year-old Swedish girl who was gorgeous enough to be a Victoria's Secret model and also (apparently) knew more about the subjects of my own novels than I did. I knew this wasn't true, yet I forged a connection with the person I wanted her to be, and the experience was not unrewarding.

In fact, as long as I deluded myself into believing Veronika was a real person, our dialogue was in almost every way indistinguishable from many other online friendships I maintain. Even when I
didn't
delude myself, I still enjoyed the discourse and the sort of cat-and-mouse game we played. It was rewarding in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but which ultimately shaped the creation of this novel.

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At one point, Veronika offered me her phone number(s). In a message titled “If you are ever in the Los Angeles area,” she wrote:

And want to play a round of golf, email me or call my mobile at 310-230-[withheld] (I don't have a landline telephone in California, sorry). Don't be put off by the bilingual greeting; I have Swedish-speaking people who call me and even though they speak English, we have to keep the mother tongue alive.

Well, actually I'm living in Santa Monica to be close to university, but I find that most people don't know where this town is located, so I just say “Los Angeles”. They at least know that it's in California.

Or if you're in Sweden, you can call me :) Actually, I'm in California, now, of course, but I'm in Sweden for Yule holidays and of course every summer. In case you want a tour of the Oresund Bridge! You should take your wife to Sweden in the summer, it's very romantic because of the long hours of light and the happy, relaxed mood. You can golf at 10, 11 pm, even a bit later on some summer days. 20 hours a day of golf! Now that's heaven.

And then she provided her Swedish phone number and instructions on how to dial internationally.

Of course I never called these numbers. To me, even though I believed Veronika to be an impostor, calling her was a line I didn't want to cross. And lest you think she (or he) was after more than just good email conversation, know that Veronika never once flirted with me or even came close to making any sort of inappropriate comment. In fact I could never discern any sort of motive for this person to engage me in conversation except to make a friend. So why did she (or he) feel the need to hide her identity?

And why had she offered me phone numbers? Did she expect me to call them? What would have happened if I did?

I cannot emphasize enough the enormous effort required to maintain such a sophisticated ruse. In addition to the hours and hours she consumed to build her profile, Veronika spent more hours writing to me, and even more constructing her story. She told me about her mother's untimely death (there were pictures of said mother on her profile), about other tragedies in her family, details of her life in Sweden, her roommate, parties she threw or attended—anything and everything to create the illusion of a real person's life—and as far as I could tell she never once contradicted herself. I imagine she must have built a cast of friends and relatives the same way I do when I write a novel, must have somehow kept track of all the lies she told me…or perhaps everyone she wrote about was real, the experiences were real, but their names had been changed?

But she (he) did make mistakes, and with those errors I was finally able to verify my suspicions about Veronika's identity. I tracked her all the way to her employer, which was in California but nowhere near Santa Monica. In fact, when I tell you the name of the town you aren't going to believe me.

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My first real clue that Veronika was lying was the problem with her IP address. To obtain that address, I sent emails to her that contained images hosted on my personal web site, and then I matched the times she opened those emails with the times those image files had been accessed from my Web server. When I traced that IP address, it wasn't anywhere near Santa Monica but rather in Hayward, California (south of Oakland.) Because of how the Internet works, this knowledge by itself didn't necessarily prove Veronika wasn't in Santa Monica…until one day when she claimed to be writing to me while on a trip on the Pacific Coast Highway, from a location other than her normal one, yet the IP address never changed.

But while that sort of detective work was gratifying, it was pretty basic and didn't put me any closer to the real Veronika. What did put me closer was her first significant mistake: the Swedish phone number. On a whim, I searched Google for similar numbers and somehow found a web site (tollfreeforwarding.com) that allows you to purchase phone numbers that appear to ring in countries all over the world but in fact are forwarded to whatever real number you choose. The phone number Veronika gave me was virtually identical to several other numbers offered on the site for Malmö, Sweden, where Veronika claimed to had lived.

These were nine-digit phone numbers, and the only difference between hers and those on the site was the very last digit. In fact, the phone number she sent me was the missing number in a sequence…like, if the last four digits of her number were 1234, the site was selling 1232, 1233, and 1235. It seemed obvious she had purchased her number from tollfreeforwarding.com, which meant that not only was she spending an enormous of amount of time to create this artificial identity, it was also costing her money every month.

You could make the argument that Veronika had purchased this number as a way to allow her friends in Sweden to call her locally, that it simply rang on her California cell number, but when I researched that phone number, I learned it wasn't a cell number at all.

The next mistake she made—and this really was a colossal error—was when she emailed a song she wanted me to hear. I think she meant to send me an MP3 file but in fact attached one with the extension .mp4, which as you may know is the type of file used by iTunes. Though I was hesitant to open the file I eventually did, and that's when I was presented with an amazing bit of information: an email address I'd never seen before.

See, if you want to play one of your iTunes-protected songs on someone else's computer, you must first enter your email address and password to authorize that machine for your library. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for Veronika), iTunes pre-populates the email field, and when I searched Google for that email address, I found an amazing thing.

On flickr.com, there was a picture of Veronika's “mom.”

And she wasn't dead.

The woman in the photo was and is married to a guy who posts many of his personal pictures on Flickr. The owner of this newly acquired email address had posted a comment asking the photographer about a bracelet his wife was wearing in this particular photo. The commenter also praised the woman's beauty and the husband's photography skills. Later, when I looked through the photographer's album, I found many pictures of his wife, and in one of those images I saw Veronika's supposed grandmother.

As I suspected, “Veronika” had found pictures on the Internet and spent hours compiling them, uploading them to MySpace, assigning identities to the various people that appeared in these photos. She (he?) had created a virtual human with whom I shared a (sort of) friendship online—an insane amount of effort, all to befriend someone using a different identity than their real one.

Then I remembered A Girl Worth Knowing. seventeen-year-old Stacey Anne. Was she as fake as Veronika was? How much more effort would it require to maintain
two
profiles like this instead of one?

On a whim, I sent Stacey Anne a friendly “How are things?” email through MySpace and once again embedded a photo hosted on my web site. When she opened the email I checked the IP address.

It was exactly the same as Veronika's.

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I wasn't alone in my curiosity about all of this. One of my real MySpace friends was just as skeptical and did Internet searches as well. Using Veronika's Gmail address, the two of us found posts by her on various liberal political blog sites, and we also ran across accusations by other users who, like us, suspected Veronika was fake. Some of these users had made connections between Veronika and a number of aliases that had appeared on these sites over time. Someone even posted a list of them, so we began to search those names on Google as well.

And finally, amazingly, I found a comment by one of those aliases where she (he?) mentioned me by name.

While deriding Jenna Bush for landing a rich publishing contract, the alias claimed to be my friend, posted the names of my first two novels, a link to my web site, and made a recommendation on which of my books to read.

And she (he?) bragged about how she (he?) was helping me with research on my next novel. This novel.

What do you call a relationship like this? Was Veronika a friend? A stalker? As I said before, she was never inappropriate with me, never threatened me; in fact if I had known this person as their true identity I might have enjoyed a friendship with her (him?). But when I considered the effort this person used to conceal their identity, to pretend to be not just a twenty-one-year-old Swedish girl but a teenage girl as well, I found it somewhat disturbing.

Finally, one day, I confronted her via Google Talk. She denied the truth, of course. I didn't share with her all the information I had gathered, but for the bits I did reveal, she offered quick explanations. Not long afterwards we stopped chatting completely, and I never heard from her again.