The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard when I ran the first worm simulation. I’m no hacker, but it was easy enough: Open a Terminal shell, paste some commands from GitHub, watch characters cascade down the screen. Just like in the movies. I was scanning the passing code for recognizable words—neuron, synapse—when a friend came to pick me up for dinner. “One sec,” I yelled from my office. “I’m just running a worm on my computer.”
At the Korean restaurant, the energy was manic; the wind was bending palm trees at the waist and sending shopping carts skating across the parking lot. The atmosphere felt heightened and unreal, like
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