But I shouldn’t leave you hanging over what happened with Doug.

On my first day at work in California, Doug had randomly picked a Caribbean restaurant on El Camino Real, between the road that cut over from our office and where Stanford began. They served an enormous set of ribs, with steamed vegetables, which was truly amazing. We’d taken Jim there, and he also fell in love with the ribs. After that, for a long time it was our go-to place for meeting up after work.

One day, after diving into a rib plate, I looked up and started laughing as the details of my day came back to me. I’d been powerfully hungry, given that I’d been too excited to get to work to bother with breakfast, and I’d been too excited about my research to have taken a break for lunch, so 7 PM saw my first meal of the day.

“What?” asked Jim.

“Crazy day,” I said, wiping the Caribbean rib dirt from my cheeks. I have no idea what they slathered on those racks, but it was other-worldly.

“Go on.”

“Well, I skipped lunch. And breakfast.”

“You had coffee?”

“Coffee’s not breakfast for most people.”

He nodded. Most valley dudes could accept coffee as a meal substitute. We would agree to disagree. “Go on,” he said.

“So we got Packet Storm back online — the Packet Storm guys did, anyway. My boss is still pissed that he didn’t get control of that project once it became a real thing, but I figured our scanning project should probably learn from all the content they’ve got there.” I leaned forward. “It’s a land mine. I mean, a treasure mine. I mean, a treasure trove.” I shook my head. “Jesus, I need to eat more often.”

“Sounds like you were right the first time.”

“That’s probably true. It’s no wonder Harvard took it down, though. It’s not just one land mine. It’s like a minefield, with a stack of flyers every twenty feet showing you how to make different kinds of mines. You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff these tools can do.”

Jim looked up from a rib with an expression I took to say, “Try me.”

I leaned forward more. “Remember when they added microphones to Sun workstations? If a machine’s running a recent version of Solaris, I can remotely switch on the microphone without the user knowing. And listen. And they’ll have no idea.”

Jim nodded. “I remember that one. It was a little while back, wasn’t it? There’s a patch.”

“Sure, but not everyone keeps their machines up to date,” I said. Jim looked perplexed, but then he was one of the top system administrators in the entire world. Who wouldn’t care about computers and not keep up to date on their security patches?

“And doesn’t it only work across local networks?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “But there are a lot of unpatched machines out there.”

“Said the man who’s working on an Internet security scanner.”

“I don’t exploit the vulnerabilities,” I said, “I just revel in the horror of knowing what’s out there.” I laughed again.

Jim smirked. “Okay, what else?”

“Well,” I said. First principles. “There’s this guy named Doug.”

“Oh?”

I think it’d been a little over three weeks since Doug had come into the office. Earlier that day he’d called my cell phone.

“Greetings,” he said.

“Hey, good to hear from you. What’s up.”

“Oh, not much. The usual. I had a question for you.”

“Sure.”

“Are people…unhappy with me, there at work? You see, I got up this morning and found my cell phone no longer worked.”

“Your company phone?”

“Indeed.”

“Well,” I said, wondering how best to put it, “you kinda haven’t been around for…three weeks? Not answering your phone. I think people might’ve been wondering what was going on.”

“And what did he say?” asked Jim.

“He admitted as to how he didn’t have a great answer to that.”

“Huh,” Jim said. “Well, that sucks. I should probably drop him a line, see how he’s doing.”

“He’d like that.”

A few months later, when Doug’s ex-girlfriend finally moved out of the place they’d been sharing, she let him know when she was going to be out so that Doug could drop by and sort through all the him-related things she was leaving behind. There wasn’t a whole lot that he hadn’t already taken away, but he did discover a series of FedEx envelopes containing increasingly concerned questions from Tahir asking where the hell he was. The last one regrettably acknowledged their necessary parting of ways, after which I’m guessing they switched off the service to his corporate cell phone. Doug’s ex- had been signing for the letters and then shoving them under the bed without bothering to tell him that they’d been arriving.

Doug never returned to Kroll-O’Gara. Instead, he and Jim turned their full attention to building the peer-to-peer file-sharing system they’d call Mojo Nation, which would be the incubator for what we now call Bit Torrent. But that will take a while to happen. For now, back to my crash.