After the death of Brian Ketcham, his daughter finds his documents revealing online interactions with Vasilisa, a woman from a dating site. Brian, a respected NYC transportation engineer, fell into a virtual world, engaging with someone he believed in despite her elusive identity. He meticulously documented their chats, raising questions about reality and the nature of connection. The article explores themes of loneliness, belief, and the darker aspects of online romance as Brian navigates this strange, possibly fictitious relationship.
In his 80s, retired for more than a decade, he was spending his days conversing via chat on his office desktop, blinds drawn, with the still image of a large-breasted, smoky-eyed blonde from Russia named Vasilisa - a common name, I would learn later, for striving heroines and would-be princesses in Slavic fairy tales.
My father had been a transportation engineer and urban planner of some renown in New York. Upon his death in 2024, the New York Times thought his life and work important enough to run a 1,100-word obituary, in which he was declared an "influential environmentalist."
According to Brian's notes, which I discovered not long after his death, Vasilisa... was five-foot-five-inches tall, 108 pounds. He'd written her ID number carefully on a printout of her profile page.
I thought perhaps she was a canny AI bot or perhaps some dude in his mom's basement in Moscow. There was some slight chance she was a real woman who'd signed up to meet her dream man.
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