Thomas World (43 page)

But before Veronika disappeared from my life, I found one last bit of evidence. Since she almost always wrote emails to me at night, and claimed to go to school and work during the day, I sent her another picture during one of our afternoon Google Talk sessions. I wondered if, during the day, she might connect to the Internet with a different IP address than the one she used at night. I was right.

The IP address revealed the name of her employer and was not located in Hayward, California.

It was in Berkeley.

The same Berkeley where Philip K. Dick lived much of his life.

POST SCRIPT

W
hile writing the previous section, I consulted old emails and notes and searched the Internet for the sites and pages where Veronika appeared in the past. By then (I wrote this part more than a year after our dialogue ended), a few new returns had appeared on Google when I searched for her email address.

One of them turned up a name I hadn't encountered before. An actual first and last name.

So I searched the Internet for that name and combined it with the name of the employer that hosts the Berkeley IP address.

I think I found her.

I may never know if I'm correct, and even if it is her real name, I don't know many more details about her.

I think she's a woman. I think she encounters a lot of girls Veronika's age in her daily life, and that probably influences the types of aliases she chooses.

I also found another young woman with the same first and last name, a college student who recently graduated from high school in Berkeley and is now either attending the University of California at Berkeley or Northern Colorado University, depending on whether you believe her LinkedIn profile or her Facebook and LiveJournal pages. I have no idea if the owner of those pages is real or if they are more aliases, but I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Whoever is behind all these fake profiles commands a brilliant understanding of many subjects, primarily economics and Swedish culture, but for whatever reason she doesn't want to interact with the world as herself.

I'm not at all comfortable with her deceptions, the way she steals photos of innocent young women from the Internet, and particularly not with her pretending to be a teenage girl.

But I can't deny she helped write this novel. Partly because of the content of our conversations, but more because of the very nature of our online friendship. The elaborate realities Veronika constructed for herself—as a way to play the role of a young woman she clearly isn't—shaped the idea of Thomas, a failed screenwriter who immersed himself in a fictional world of his own creation in order to escape the reality of his actual life.

It's probably nothing more than coincidence that Veronika approached me in the way she did, at the time she did, or that she works in the same town where a master of simulated worlds forged his writing career. Still, I can't help but wonder if somewhere Philip K. Dick is laughing.

Whatever the truth is, this novel owes a huge debt to you, sir.

Thank you.

Richard Cox

Tulsa, OK

July 1, 2010

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RICHARD COX is also the author of
The God Particle
and
Rift
, and is an Associate Arts and Culture editor at TheNervousBreakdown.com. Richard can be found at facebook.com/coxric or at his personal web site, www.richardcox.net.