This is true. Hurd and Misha worked in the same office eight years ago. Misha saw Hurd—the first competent computer guy he ever knew—as someone he could call for technical help, for life. Hurd usually obliges because he is a gentleman. As Hurd described it, the situation sounded rare, like seeing a tapir in the wild, instead of at the zoo, or more likely, instead of on the plaque in front of the tapir pen where the tapir never seems to appear when you’re there, at the zoo, with the expectation of viewing a tapir or two. “Misha says his girlfriend is a super-hacker and has remotely cracked his computer and destroyed all his files. She’s controlling his computer. He needs help cleaning it up. Sounds like your sort of thing.” You mean ex-girlfriend, right? “He doesn’t seem to be very clear on that.” It did sound like a must-see. Fantastic stories like this are rare. You hope that they’re true, that you’ll be the one to lay your hands on a super-hacker and give John Markoff a run for his money, but usually, such stories come from people with so little computer knowledge you know they can’t be true. Blind men can’t look at constellations. Digital idjuts can’t troubleshoot computers. Given that Misha rarely connects to the Internet, the odds were even slimmer that someone had hacked into his toy, loaded it with spyware and screen-controlling applications, or opened up a port on his cable modem so that the machine could be controlled from afar. But I hoped: maybe, just maybe, someone had written and installed surreptitious scripts, maybe even got away with hiding a screen sharing application, and then wreaked a bit of havoc from afar, just to freak out Misha. Or annoy him. It would take a combination of knowledge, sneakery and chutzpah rare outside of bad television, but just maybe. Hurd wasn’t at his office when I arrived. Misha and I introduced ourselves to each other. He’s in his mid-thirties, thin, with what I think of as a European build: not necessarily physically fit, just lacking body fat. He looked like a creative type: non-descript but pricey clothes, a three-day salt-and-pepper stubble, expensive shoes, and a lot of electronic gadgets, like an expensive phone, his laptop and a lot of peripherals. “I broke up with my girlfriend last week. She’s very beautiful, but a crazy bitch. They had to put her in a hospital in Washington, in Washington State. She broke into all my stuff. She’s some kind of super-wizard. She got into it from her computer and put a virus all over it. She locked everything so I couldn’t get into it! I can’t get into any of the files. She’s crazy! I don’t know what she did, but it’s all fucked up. She’s controlling it. She’s like loading it from somewhere and doing shit. She got into the iDisk and partitioned it. She partitioned my drive so she could hide all my files.” He looked at his computer the whole time he spoke to me. The screen was blank. The computer was off. “Let me show you what it does.” He pushed aside his two cups of milk and half of a bagel and brought out what had once been a fine laptop, but was somewhat the worse for wear. It seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and it was covered in scratches, most notably around the recessed screw holes. Jelly was on a corner of the liquid crystal display, and a fine texture of scratches covered it. When he turned the unit on the screen showed two vertical white streaks. “See!” he said. “That wasn’t there before!” Most likely the ribbon which passed through the hinges from the base to the LCD screen was damaged. It could have been done on purpose, if the computer was thrown or dropped. The machine booted to an error message which said, “This version of the operating system can only be booted from the original installer disc.” First symptom: someone had copied the system folder from a system CD and tried to boot from that. He rebooted the machine. Same message. Once more. Same message. Why don’t I take a look at it? I said. It’s going to keep giving you that message. “Let me set this all up like we do at home.” He began fiddling with an assortment of cables and drives: a power supply for his laptop, a Firewire drive, its cables, a USB 2.0 drive without cables. He never seemed to get anything connected. He moved all the pieces around, plugged and unplugged them, and sorted, shuffled and rearranged. Hurd came in. “You really should move that milk away from the keyboards.” “Yeah,” I added, “let’s keep the liquids away from the electricity, shall we?” Misha absent-mindedly moved the cups away and continued fussing with his equipment. He kept picking up pieces and putting them down without ever leaving anything connected. He moved the computer back from the edge of the desk and rebooted it. Nothing new was connected to it; he didn’t do the keyboard command required to make it boot off of an external hard drive. Of course, it went to the same error message as before. “Look,” I said, “why don’t we skip this step? I’ll just take your word for it. There’s a lot I can look at. We’ll boot it from a CD, and then only an unwritable virgin system is loaded. If there’s any kind of mischief installed, or any kind of monkery, we’ll have it contained.” So that’s what we did. I booted it into open firmware, first, to reset the NVRAM to clean off any open firmware-based lock, just in case there was one. The computer booted from the system CD. There was nothing. There were files, of course, but nothing unusual, except that the hard drive was named “YOU FUCKING BITCH.” Misha said he did that. I looked for scripts, unusual applications, signs of tampering. “Misha, there’s a lot of crap everywhere, but there’s nothing illegitimate on this machine. Everything looks normal, except that you don’t have a bootable system on your internal hard drive.” “Ah, yes, I did that last week. I’ve been fooling with this for three months. I wiped the drive. I erased it. I’ve had all kinds of