Years later I would learn that a system admin at the university had sent a message to a guy by the name of Tsutomu Shimomura under the subject line "About our friend," describing this incident. Shimomura figures heavily in the final chapters of this story, but I was stunned when I discovered that he had been snooping into what I was up to as early as this, at a time when we had had no contact and I didn’t even know he existed.