Someone sent a photograph and the subject of the photograph is me, or is close enough to me that if you showed it to a person who did not know me well they would say yes, that is him. I have looked at it probably forty times now and I do not know how to explain what is wrong with it. The dimensions are close. The proportions are close. But it is not my face. I know my face. Not in the way people generally say they know their face, which usually means they recognize a photograph or a mirror. I mean I know the specific way it is wrong. The specific asymmetry, the particular line on the left side that I have been looking at for years. That is not there. The person in this image is missing that line.

I want to be careful here because I do not want to say they faked a photograph of me and have that sound like something I cannot back up. What I am saying is that the photograph they sent is of a person who is meant to be read as me, and is close enough to pass that test for anyone who has not been staring at the same face for decades, but is not me. And the fact that they sent it means they have access to enough of what I look like to produce something this close. That is not a thing you get from a public profile or a social media scan. You get this from surveillance. Long-term, close-range, detail-level surveillance.

The context in which it was sent makes it worse. Not just that they sent it. The message attached said nothing. Not: is this you? Not: look what I found. Nothing. Just the image. Just the almost-me, sent in a way that made it clear whoever sent it already knew what they were doing with it. They were not asking a question. They were showing me they have this. They were showing me they can make this. That is a different thing than evidence. That is a demonstration.