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For Marc
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The internet is a weird place, full of unexpected rabbit holes. Follow them at your own risk—you might discover something new and interesting, or you might find yourself reaching for the eye bleach.
One day I stumbled upon the latter while idly browsing the Legal Advice subreddit. It’s one of my favorite places to kill time online: as a non-practicing lawyer, I enjoy the discussion surrounding the more mundane queries (landlord-tenant disputes, arguments with neighbors over property lines), and as a practicing writer, I can’t get enough of the more outrageous tales (discovering gold in the walls of an inherited home, learning a spouse thought long dead is in fact alive). That afternoon, I came across a poster concerned that his boss was accessing employees’ home security cameras.
How outlandish, I thought. This post must be fake. But no one else appeared to have the same reaction and instead casually rendered advice as though it were no more exotic than a speeding ticket. I saw references to another subreddit dedicated to “controllable webcams,” and, intrigued, visited it. There I found post after post sharing links to what appeared to be live footage of restaurants, bars, doggy day cares, and more. I turned to the internet at large, attempting to discern what exactly a “controllable webcam” was, where they were located, and how these internet denizens were discovering them. Could anyone find them? Could I, for instance, find more puppy cams?
But my research took a hard left turn as I stumbled across an article with the chilling headline “Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams.”I
I read in horrified fascination how someone, using only minimal technological skill, could secretly install a remote administration tool, or RAT, on another person’s computer. With the RAT installed, the “ratter” then has almost complete access to the victim’s computer, including their files, screen, and webcam. From that point on, whenever the victim uses their computer, a stranger might be monitoring their activity—both digital and physical.
I read about how some ratters toy with their victims, playing pranks like opening porn on their screens; some steal website credentials; and some are more invasive, scouring hard drives for compromising photographs or other blackmail material. I was far more disturbed, however, by the ratters who collect “slaves”—their name for the women they’ve spied on via webcam. In addition to watching their “slaves” in secret, these ratters gather in forums to share what they’ve observed their oblivious “slaves” doing and posting screenshots of the women. When they’re bored with a “slave,” they might sell or trade her to someone else on the forum, further perpetuating the violation of privacy.
My skin crawled at the idea of a stranger electronically invading my home, riffling through my personal files, and watching me while I thought I was alone. And then for that stranger to be sharing my secrets on a forum filled with like-minded creeps? Petrifying. When I read that many victims involuntarily downloaded the RAT software while torrenting, I relaxed—I never use torrent sites—but I relaxed only slightly. After all, I had recently listened to an episode of the podcast Reply All titled “What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished?”—which made it abundantly clear that idiots are not the only ones getting phished. As that podcast proved, a minimally proficient phisher can quickly and easily gain access to your email—even with two-factor identification enabled—so who knows what else they could do?
I was so deeply unsettled by the thought of an anonymous ratter lurking around my computer that I did two things: first I covered my laptop’s built-in webcam with a sticker, as Mark Zuckerberg and James Comey both reportedly do, and then I began writing this story.
I. Ars Technica, March 10, 2013, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet-the-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams.
PROLOGUE
HIM
Everyone on the internet is a liar. Every last one of us. The difference is the magnitude of our lies. On one end of the spectrum are the scammers, the phishers, the lowlifes trying to convince your grandmother to bail you out of a fictional Thai prison. On the other end are those whose untruths are the smallest, the most inconsequential: those who click a box affirming they’ve read terms and conditions, who click “like” on a cousin’s photograph of her pug-nosed child. In the middle are the rest of us: those who tell slightly bolder lies designed to make ourselves look better. We embellish our job descriptions. We smile in pictures even when our hearts feel shriveled and black. Because what’s the harm in making our mediocre lives look and feel just a little less mediocre?
But the internet can reveal just as much as it can obfuscate.
Take Sabrina, for example. When I was sixteen, she was my whole world, my pocket-sized, red-haired princess. Every thump of my beating heart was an echo of her name. With her small hand in mine, I could do anything. But seven months into our relationship, her family moved across the country to California. Part of me wanted to drink bleach and die, and another part of me was certain Sabrina and I were simply enduring a test to prove our everlasting love and that fifty years later we would laugh about those years apart. The day she left, I found two strands of her strawberry-blonde hair on my pillow, and I placed them in an envelope beside my bed for safekeeping.
At first, we talked for hours on the phone each night. I twisted those hairs around my finger and listened to Sabrina say how much she hated California and how much she missed me. She promised she still loved me. She promised nothing would change. She promised. But her calls gradually became less and less frequent. She started taking an hour, and then two or three, to respond to text messages. I assumed she felt as gutted as I did, so I mailed her gifts and flowers to cheer her up, sent her poems all but written in blood squeezed from my aching heart.
And then Astrid Marshall, one of Sabrina’s bitchier friends, sent me a link to a YouTube video called “HOTTEST GUYS AT NEWMAN HIGH RATED!” I felt sick as I watched Sabrina, her gorgeous hair hacked to her chin and streaked through with brassy blonde, sitting in some unfamiliar room in a circle of strange girls. The ringleader—a bleached blonde who was wearing so much makeup that her face was a different shade than her neck—screeched a greeting into the camera and then led the others in discussing which of the boys at Sabrina’s new school were the “hottest.” My stomach churned as Sabrina giggled and nodded in agreement, but the bile started to really climb my throat when someone asked her, “But you have a long-distance boyfriend, don’t you, Sabrina?” She shook her head quickly, her alien hair swishing around her small face. “No, no. There’s this guy who’s, like, obsessed with me, but we’re not going out. I just keep him around for the gifts.” The entire circle cackled with cruel laughter, and I slammed shut the computer before that treacherous whore could take another bite out of my heart.
That night, I stole a lighter from one of my older brothers and watched those glimmering strands blacken and break.
When I confronted Sabrina about the video, she cried that she was sorry. But that was just another lie. She was only sorry that she was caught, that her duplicity had been exposed. After all, a quick search had shown me that there were more videos, and in them Sabrina didn’t look sorry at all. That stone-cold bitch had moved on, leaving me completely and utterly destroyed. For years, I thought my heart had been broken beyo
nd repair. I thought I would never love again.
But then there was Audrey.
Ironically, Sabrina is the one who brought me to Audrey. If it weren’t for Sabrina and her lies, I never would have ended up on the Overexposed forums. That was where I took shelter, commiserating with other men who had discovered disheartening truths online about the women they thought they loved. The other commenters helped me gain perspective, helped me see that this was less a reflection of me and more a reflection of Sabrina and the grasping, unhappy women like her.
But the forums didn’t just contain grievances and complaints about ex-girlfriends. They were also home to lively discussion about online women. You know the type: the bloggers, the vloggers, the Tumblrinas, the Instagram models. The women who peddle their bodies online like fruit at the supermarket. The consensus on those threads was that admiring these virtual women was better, easier than finding one in real life because all women lie, and at least these liars were up-front about it. It was no secret that their perfect bodies were Photoshopped, that their sultry eyelashes were glued on. Online women could never humiliate you. They couldn’t carve a gaping wound in your soul because they didn’t have souls themselves.
The thing that I would never admit to in those threads was that I missed the pulsating heart of a real woman. I missed burying my face in silky hair, inhaling the scent of perfumed skin. I missed the softness of feminine lips beneath mine. If only that bitch Sabrina hadn’t broken me.
And then one night, I was lying in my extra-long twin bed, listening to my roommate snore and battling insomnia by browsing Overexposed. I was on a thread where users were posting screengrabs of their ideal woman when one of them caught my eye. I rocketed to a seated position, my chest clenched so tightly I could barely breathe. The thumbnail image was small, only an inch or two at most, but I would recognize that mane of shimmering, red-tinged hair anywhere.
Sabrina.
With trembling fingers, I tapped open the picture. Relief and disappointment coalesced as I realized it wasn’t her. It was another flame-haired beauty smiling at the camera, her name discernible in the screenshot from her social media post: Audrey.
Her resemblance to Sabrina had initially taken my breath away, but the more I studied her, the more I saw the differences. Both were small and red-haired, but Audrey was sharper, more femme fatale. Aquamarine eyes flashed beneath thick lashes, heart-shaped face came to a point, pale breasts swelled beneath a plunging neckline. My mouth filled with saliva; heat surged through my body.
Audrey.
I found the rest of her online presence, from her Tumblr to her WordPress blog, and followed her wherever I could. For days, I binged on her. I went through her blog archives, committing every image to memory, parsing every chatty post for its deeper meaning. She was more adventurous than Sabrina ever had been, and funnier, too. I learned what she was listening to, what she was watching, what she was reading; I devoured every morsel she shared of herself.
Lucky for me, that was pretty much everything.
My favorite image was of her standing on a beach, her milky-white skin glowing against her black crochet bikini. She was partially turned away from the camera, her body angled toward the ocean behind her, her eyes looking straight through the screen into mine. One hand restrained her flowing hair, the other was extended to the camera, beckoning, as if to say, Follow me.
CHAPTER ONE
AUDREY
What doesn’t kill you makes you more interesting. At least, that’s always been my personal motto, and it was echoing through my mind as I tried to stave off a panic attack on a southbound train to Washington, DC. In this instance, though, it wasn’t helping—largely because I wasn’t sure that the logic held. What if this move actually made me less interesting?
I shuddered and once again considered petting the emotional support Chihuahua currently occupying a quarter of my seat. When I’d extended a hand to scratch behind his ears earlier, his owner—a ferocious woman with a French-tip manicure and wearing a lemon-yellow velour tracksuit—had practically screamed, “He’s working!” The little dog looked to me like he was snoozing, but I was in no hurry to set his owner off again.
Instead, I fished a Xanax from my purse and took another surreptitious photo of the dog. I added “Hour 2” in purple text and a GIF of a small, yapping dog before uploading it to my Instagram Story. Almost immediately, comments from my million-plus followers appeared:
Safe travels!
That dog looks like he has it in for you!
Hang in there, Audrey!
The tension that had ratcheted my shoulders up by my ears began to melt, and I finally relaxed into my seat. Comments from my followers were hands down my favorite part of living my life on the internet. My former roommate (and former best friend) Izzy used to say that was because I was a narcissist, but Izzy was the one who couldn’t pass a reflective surface without checking herself out, so, you know, glass houses and all that. Anyway, it wasn’t a love of myself that kept me sharing my world with my followers—it was my love of connection. With a million friends at your fingertips, how could anyone ever feel truly alone?
I started responding to comments about my clothing, nail color, and music in my headphones, but not the one query that kept reappearing: Why are you leaving New York?
Good fucking question.
It was the question that was raising my cortisol levels, the one that had me chewing benzos. I mean, I loved New York. It was the most vibrant city in the world, the most exciting and unquestionably best place to live. For almost as long as I could remember, I’d dreamed about living there. I’d even collaged my childhood bedroom walls with images of the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and dozens of other landmarks.
But now, seven years after I thought I’d found my home, I was speeding away from it on the Amtrak while my belongings simultaneously made their way south on a moving truck. I used to imagine that if I ever left New York, it would be for someplace almost as glamorous: Paris, London, Tokyo.
Washington, DC, had never made that list.
I fingered another Xanax and wondered whether I was making an enormous mistake.
You’re doing the right thing, I told myself. How could taking your dream job be anything other than the right move?
Because the truth was that I had aspired to work in a museum even longer than I had wanted to live in New York. I’d graduated from college with a degree in art history and planned to take a year to work in galleries in New York before applying to graduate school for a museum studies degree—but one year turned into two, and then I kept finding reasons not to apply. I put it off even as I watched the plum museum jobs I coveted all go to candidates with master’s degrees, and so I was stuck working part-time in a couple of privately owned art galleries and volunteering at museums like MoMA and the Whitney.
Last month, though, I had been browsing the job boards and spotted the advertisement for the Hirshhorn Museum’s Social Media Manager position. I could do that, I thought as I read the description. I could totally do that. I excelled at social media. Seriously, how else did a random midwestern transplant construct a minor cult of personality out of thin air? I submitted an application before I could second-guess myself.
When Ayala Martin-Nesbitt, Director of Public Engagement, called to offer me the job, I had momentary cold feet. I’d fallen in love with the world-class museum—part of the Smithsonian system—during my interview, but I’d been less taken with the location. How could I move away from New York? Ayala gave me a day to think it over, and I’d decided to celebrate the offer and talk it out with Izzy. Izzy had been my best friend since grade school and had talked me through decisions ranging from whether to cut bangs to how to confront a former boss who made inappropriate jokes. She’d always steered me straight; I knew she wouldn’t let me down.
But when I’d flung open the door of our East Village apartment, clutching a bottle of Prosecco and bursting with enthusiasm, I found Izzy sitting stiffly on
the couch.
Frowning, I set down the bubbles and asked, “What’s up?”
Izzy lifted a few strands of her long, dark hair and examined them for split ends. To her hair, she said, “Russell’s lease is up at the end of the month.”
“Oh, bummer,” I said, hoping this meant that Izzy’s terrible boyfriend and his annoyingly trendy beard would be leaving the city.
“Yeah, well.” She dropped her hair and finally met my eyes. “He’s moving in.”
“What?” I gaped at her. “No way, Iz. You can’t just announce that your boyfriend and his collection of fake Gucci sneakers are moving in.”
Her hazel eyes darkened and she pursed her mouth. “Actually, I can. My name is the only one on the lease, because you were too busy working below-minimum-wage jobs and chasing Instagram fame to qualify as a renter. This is my apartment, and I decide who lives here.”
Her words hit me like a fist in the chest. Over the course of our decades-long friendship, Izzy and I had fought infrequently, and never about money. I had no idea she was harboring resentment for covering a few rent payments years ago. I’d long ago paid her back, and it wasn’t like I didn’t fork out my share these days. Besides, she never objected to accepting the sheet masks, adaptogens, and slow fashion items I got from brands courting me to promote them on Instagram.
“Whatever,” I sniffed, picking up the Prosecco. “I’m moving to DC anyway.”
Izzy blinked, surprised. “You got the job?”
“Yep,” I said, unwrapping the foil around the bottle’s top.
Not too long ago, Izzy would have demanded to know all the details, would not have relented until she’d heard my conversation with Ayala recounted in excruciating detail. She would have stayed up all night with me, discussing the pros and cons of taking the job, thoughtfully helping me reach the right decision. Now, she merely nodded.
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