The night Desmond disposed of Dale Epply’s body outside Slaughterville, Oklahoma, he thought hard about where he would go. He considered three places: Seattle, New York, and Silicon Valley. Thanks to countless IRC chat sessions, he had met people like himself from around the country and the world, but they were mostly concentrated in Silicon Valley, in cities like Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. He couldn’t wait to get there and start over.

He drove all day and camped every night. He obeyed the speed limit and avoided hotels—he didn’t want to leave a paper trail in case anyone from Oklahoma came looking for him. Thanks to the bounty he’d found in Orville’s safe, money wasn’t a problem.

It was morning when he drove past Fremont and Newark, onto the Dumbarton Bridge and over the San Francisco Bay, arriving in East Palo Alto.

He found a small RV park off Bayshore Freeway, where he asked around to see if there was anything for sale. A few hours later, he was haggling over a well-used Airstream trailer with a bearded old man who was chewing tobacco and listening to talk radio. The man claimed he was in poor health and was headed, in his words, to the glue factory pretty soon.

“You’d rob a man on his deathbed?”

When Desmond finally got the price down to the high side of fair, he placed the hundred-dollar bills into the man’s hand—slowly, one at a time, at the man’s request, so he could count them out loud. The old man wished him luck and told him to take good care of the trailer. Then he walked across the street and moved in with another resident—a woman who Desmond later learned the old man was romantically involved with.

Desmond hitched the Airstream trailer to his truck and towed it to the tiny site he had rented. Then he shaved, cleaned himself up, and stocked up at a local grocery store.

As soon as his computer was set up on the trailer’s dining table, he connected to the internet and began chatting. Luckily the RV park offered telephone service as part of its base services, and there were a number of local AOL dial-in numbers available. Within the hour, he had three job interviews at promising web startups.

The next morning, he worried a bit about his appearance. He was about to turn nineteen and had worked outdoors most of his life. The wind and sun on his face had aged him some, but not enough: he still looked like a teenager. He was also built like an NFL linebacker, not a computer hacker. He expected to look totally out of place, and to possibly get rejected on sight.